Matteo Bortone is a double bassist and composer born on October 15, 1982, in Otranto, on the Puglia coast. He started on classical piano at eight, moved to guitar at twelve and electric bass at thirteen, then took up double bass. He earned a degree in Economics and Tourism in Milan in 2005 before moving to Paris, where he studied at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse under bassist Riccardo Del Fra, drummer Dre Pallemaerts and saxophonist Francois Theberge, completing a Master's degree in Jazz and Improvised Music in 2011. Earlier, Siena Jazz scholarships in 2007 and 2008 led to him representing Italy at the 2009 conference of the International Association of Schools of Jazz, led that year by Dave Liebman. He won first prize at the Rezzo competition (Jazz in Vienne, 2008) and the Trophees du Sunside in Paris, and in 2015 Musica Jazz's critics' poll named him Top Jazz Best New Italian Talent.

Since 2008 he has led Travelers, an Italian-French quartet with alto saxophonist and clarinetist Antonin-Tri Hoang, guitarist Francesco Diodati and, in different periods, drummers Guilhem Flouzat and Ariel Tessier. The band's self-titled debut, Travelers (ZoneDiMusica, 2013), was followed by Time Images (Auand, 2015), both tagged Jazz and Contemporary Jazz on Discogs. His third leader album, ClarOscuro (C.A.M. Jazz, 2018), moved to a trio with pianist Enrico Zanisi and drummer Stefano Tamborrino; Brian Morton wrote the liner notes. No Land's (Auand, 2020) expanded the Travelers lineup again, with Hoang, Diodati, Tessier and keyboardist Yannick Lestra, and is the first record on which Bortone is credited singing lead vocals alongside double bass, electric bass, glockenspiel and electronics; its cover photograph, by Bartolomeo Barenghi, shows a child in a bare landscape rather than the artist himself.

Alongside his own band he is a founding member of two French collectives led by saxophonist Julien Pontvianne: Abhra, built around the writings of Henry David Thoreau, whose Abhra (Onze Heures Onze, 2016) and Seven Poems on Water (2022) pair Diodati's guitar and Alexandre Herer's keyboards with singers Lauren Kinsella and, on the second record, Isabel Sorling. He has also co-led two piano-trio-format records under shared billing: For Your Own Good! (Label OH!, 2018), with pianist Christophe Imbs and drummer Anne Paceo, built around Imbs' and Mal Waldron's compositions; and Uneven (Alfa Music, 2020), with Italian pianist Stefania Tallini and American drummer Gregory Hutchinson, mixing Tallini originals with Jobim and Hoagy Carmichael standards.

His sideman discography, all Jazz-tagged on Discogs, runs to more than twenty further credits split between Italy and France. In Italy he is the regular bassist in drummer Roberto Gatto's working quartet, on NOW! (Abeat Records, 2017) and My Secret Place (Millesuoni, 2021), both alongside pianist Alessandro Lanzoni and trumpeter Alessandro Presti. He completes Lanzoni's longest-running trio with drummer Enrico Morello on Dark Flavour (2013), Seldom (2014, with trumpeter Ralph Alessi featured) and Reverse Motion (2024, with alto saxophonist Francesco Cafiso), all for C.A.M. Jazz or Jam/UnJam. He is the bassist on both of guitarist Manlio Maresca's leader albums for Auand, Hardcore Chamber Music (2016) and Noisy Games (2020), and on Morello's own leader debut, Cyclic Signs (Auand, 2021). Other Italian sideman credits include trumpeter Giacomo Tantillo's Water Trumpet (2018), pianist Enrico Intra's Gregoriani & Spirituals (Alfa Music, 2018), saxophonist Maurizio Giammarco's Halfplugged Syncotribe album Only Human (2020), and singer Maria Pia De Vito's This Woman's Work (Parco della Musica Records, 2023), on which he also contributed original material alongside drummer Evita Polidoro.

His French credits, mostly from his Paris years, include vocalist Ada Montellanico and trumpeter Giovanni Falzone's Abbey's Road (2017), American pianist Greg Burk's The Detroit Songbook (2018, SteepleChase), Flouzat's own leader debut One Way... Or Another (2010, Onze Heures Onze), and earlier sideman dates with the Nicola Andrioli Paris 4tet, the Nicola Sergio Trio, .Oxyd* and the Bartolomeo Barenghi 7tet. His own biography describes touring internationally with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, vocalist Cyrille Aimee and pianist Tigran Hamasyan since 2013; no independently verifiable recording credit with any of the three was found on Discogs, so those relationships are recorded here as bio-stated rather than confirmed.

Bortone's catalog, 33 Discogs-documented release credits, carries a Jazz genre tag on every single one, an unusually clean scope for a working bassist, with Discogs styles clustering around Contemporary Jazz on his own records and the more exploratory pairing of Free Jazz, Free Improvisation and Avant-garde Jazz on the Onze Heures Onze-label dates with Guilhem Flouzat and Julien Pontvianne's projects. His own writing sits between those two poles: the Travelers records and No Land's build on song-like themes and electric textures, while ClarOscuro's working trio with Enrico Zanisi leans toward an intimate, harmonically open chamber-jazz sound that All About Jazz's Vincenzo Roggero described in terms of contrast, light and shadow, the album's Italian title. As a sideman he moves comfortably into more mainstream, repertoire-based settings, notably the standards-and-originals programs of the Lanzoni trio and Uneven, and into Enrico Intra's choral and liturgical crossover project Gregoriani & Spirituals.