Massimo De Mattia is a flutist and composer born in 1959 in Pordenone, in Italy's Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, where he has been based for the whole of a recording career now in its fourth decade. He came to free improvisation by way of classical flute training and a listening diet that ran from Ian Anderson's rock flute and Roland Kirk's showmanship to the harder-edged jazz vocabulary of Eric Dolphy and Sam Most, later absorbing the extended techniques of contemporary new-music flutist Robert Dick. That mix of backgrounds shaped an approach built on overblowing, register leaps and glissandi in the service of free improvisation rather than any single idiom.

He made his recording debut as a leader in 1993 with Poésie Pour Pasolini (Splasc(H) Records), a homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini that earned him a mention among the best new Italian musicians in that year's Musica Jazz Top Jazz critics' referendum. Two more releases on Splasc(H) followed in the same vein: The Silent Drama (1995), setting texts by Charles Baudelaire, and Metonymic (2000), an early duo with pianist Giorgio Pacorig that oscillated between Dolphy-inflected jazz and contemporary composition. Bassist and cellist Giovanni Maier became his most enduring musical partner starting with that same debut album, appearing on roughly a third of his catalog across more than thirty years, from Poésie Pour Pasolini (1993) through the duo albums Double Layer (2014), Naonis Live (2020) and Passaggi Paralleli (2024) to Maier's own conducted chamber work Tilt (2021), on which De Mattia is the featured soloist.

His 2003 jazz oratorio Schiele, built around the life of painter Egon Schiele with dramaturgy by Ferruccio Merisi, brought together a large ensemble including Pacorig, Maier, clarinetist Daniele D'Agaro and soprano saxophonist Luciano Caruso. The following years produced two long-running working groups: Duel, a flute-and-guitar duo with Denis Biason that made Duel (2008) and Duel 2 (2010), and MiKiRi, a quartet with Biason, pianist Bruno Cesselli and Slovenian percussionist Zlatko Kaučič, heard on MiKiRi (2008) and the expanded Mikiri+3 (2011). Vibraphonist Luigi Vitale joined his regular circle from 2012, appearing on Black Novel (2012), Teatro Arrigoni (2013, a big-band date), Hypermodern (2014), Skin (2015, at the track level), Jazz Loft (2015), Hypocenter (2017) and, later, the two Massimo De Mattia Suonomadre albums Ethnoshock! (2018) and Riot (2019); the pair also appear together as guests on Abraq Ad Habra (2014). Suonomadre, De Mattia's electronics-tinged quartet with Vitale, Pacorig and Kaučič, released a third album, Domicide (2024), its first recorded as a fully acoustic, studio-produced session; Vitale returned the favor by featuring De Mattia as a guest, alongside D'Agaro and tenor saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti, on his own Kalimbata (2024).

De Mattia has also worked repeatedly across the nearby Slovenian border. He is a member of Kaučič's Cerkno Jubileum Orchestra (Zvočni Sejalec, 2016) and of the cross-border Orkester Brez Meja / Orchestra Senza Confini (Live In Nova Gorica, 2020), and recorded the double album Arkosberg (2020, Klopotec) in a quartet with British free-improvisation saxophonist Evan Parker, Kaučič and Boštjan Simon. Away from these circles, he was a guest on four consecutive albums by guitarist Lanfranco Malaguti's quartet between 2011 and 2014 (Panorami, Galaxies, Chrysalis, Papillon), on pianist Claudio Cojaniz's Il Grande Drago (2015), and on a co-billed quartet album with Argentine-Italian saxophonist Javier Girotto, Il Sogno Di Una Cosa (2016). His most recent work includes Beneath The Forge (2024) and Visitation (2025), both on the Slovenian label Klopotec, the solo album Resonance (2025, Aut Records), and Tatzlwurm (2026), a trio session with Antonio Bertoni and Stefano Leonardi recorded live in a single take.

De Mattia's playing sits at the intersection of jazz, free improvisation and contemporary composed music, built on a technical vocabulary of overblowing, register leaps and glissandi that treats the flute as a full instrument for noise and texture rather than a purely melodic voice. His catalog runs on two overlapping strands: text- and theme-driven long-form works with a literary or narrative frame, from the Pasolini and Baudelaire homages of the 1990s through the Schiele jazz oratorio (2003) to the acrostic conception of Tatzlwurm (2026), and freely improvised duo and small-group recordings built around a handful of steady partners, chief among them Giovanni Maier, Giorgio Pacorig and, in the 2010s and 2020s, Luigi Vitale. His deep, decades-long ties to Slovenian free improvisers Zlatko Kaučič and the Cerkno Jubileum Orchestra, and his 2020 quartet recording with the British saxophonist Evan Parker, place him within a wider European free-improvisation network that extends past Italy's own jazz scene, even as his home base has stayed fixed in Friuli-Venezia Giulia throughout.