Matan Chapnizki grew up in Rosh Pinna, in Israel's Upper Galilee, before studying jazz performance at Berklee College of Music in Boston. As an eighth-semester student in October 2007, he played tenor saxophone in the Nadav Remez Quartet, a four-piece of Berklee students sent to France as musical ambassadors for the Nancy Jazz Pulsations festival, alongside guitarist Nadav Remez, bassist Jeremy McDonald, and drummer Hamir Atwal. The quartet played multiple shows a day over a week-long stay, working with Nancy's Music Academy International, and Chapnizki later described the reception as "so positive and supportive," with standing ovations at some shows.

From Berklee, Chapnizki moved to New York, where between 2008 and 2012 he became a regular presence at Smalls Jazz Club, the small, all-night Greenwich Village room that anchored a whole generation of New York jazz musicians in the 1990s and 2000s. According to Smalls' own performance archive, he played saxophone in bassist Omer Avital's Quartet, his Group, and his Band of the East, as well as drummer Dan Ori's quintet, and performed alongside musicians including Mark Guiliana, Aaron Goldberg, Jason Lindner, Ari Hoenig, and Jonathan Blake. That period produced two Discogs-verified studio credits: a saxophone chair on Yemen Blues' Live. (2013), the Yemenite-funk-and-jazz band Omer Avital co-founded with vocalist Ravid Kahalani, and a tenor-and-soprano-saxophone credit on bassist Haggai Cohen Milo's debut leader album, Penguin (2014), released on composer John Zorn's Tzadik label.

Chapnizki eventually returned to Israel and built two ongoing projects of his own, both with Tel Aviv drummer Adam Cohen. The trio Beats and Pieces, filled out by bassist Ran Levi, released a self-titled debut album on September 6, 2016 (recorded that December at Luna Studios, Tel Aviv), followed by two further singles, "Alter Ego" (2018) and "No Subject" (2020). On the festival circuit, Chapnizki has described the group's sound as drawing on the "minimalist simplicity and clear division of roles" of British rock and on West African rhythm as much as on trumpeter Avishai Cohen, Yemen Blues, and Radiohead. Alongside the trio, he also leads Chaco-04, a saxophone-and-drums duo with Adam Cohen that adds live electronics; the Mizmorim Kammermusik Festival in Basel, Switzerland, where the duo has performed, describes their sound as "contemporary jazz, electronic beats, and progressive rock."

Chapnizki's most consequential current role sits off the bandstand: he is Program Head of the Post High-School Jazz Program at the Israeli Conservatory of Music's Center for Jazz Studies in Tel Aviv, a four-year track run jointly with The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music that lets outstanding young Israeli jazz musicians study for two years at home before completing a BFA in Jazz Performance in New York, the same city where Chapnizki himself once played sideman to Omer Avital's Smalls-era bands. He also teaches saxophone at the Rimon School of Music, at New School University's Tel Aviv satellite campus, at Mizmor School of Music, and at Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts.

Chapnizki's own catalogue splits into two clearly jazz-rooted but genre-crossing halves. His sideman years put him squarely inside a specific New York lineage, the piano-less, saxophone-forward small-group jazz that grew out of Smalls Jazz Club's 1990s and 2000s scene, playing alongside bassist Omer Avital's various working bands. His own leader projects since returning to Israel move further afield: Beats and Pieces mixes jazz improvisation with the stripped-down interplay of British rock and West African groove, citing Radiohead alongside trumpeter Avishai Cohen and Yemen Blues as reference points, while the duo Chaco-04 adds live electronics to a saxophone-and-drums format, described by one festival as sitting between "contemporary jazz, electronic beats, and progressive rock." That range, straight-ahead sideman work on one hand, electronics-and-rock-inflected leader projects on the other, is also what he now teaches: as Program Head of a jazz-performance pipeline built jointly between Tel Aviv and New York.