Atticus Berger

Matthew Atticus Berger started piano lessons when he was nine years old. He hated them. Within a year he was begging to take guitar lessons, but his parents wouldn’t hear of it until he had “at least two years of piano under his belt.” So, in the privacy of his room, after school, he would sit down with his older brother Ray’s folk guitar (an item rarely touched by said older brother) and worked-out Dave Matthews songs by ear, assembling chords without training. A teacher at school turned Matt on to the Lehigh Valley Blues Network and he and his parents started to attend the weekly Sunday evening jam sessions. He soon perfected the style and technique of greats such as Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Eric Clapton, much to the amazement of guitarists many years his senior and delighting his classmates by playing behind his back and with his teeth. At the age of 14, he played lead guitar on a Blues CD with his father’s band, Highpoint. Being heavily influenced by jam-bands such as Phish however, he left Blues and gravitated towards jazz. At 15, a freshman in high school, Matt wrote and produced a CD of 10 original songs with three senior schoolmates. The CD, Rivka, stands a memorial to his too soon departed sister, Rebecca. When the seniors graduated and moved on, rather than stagnate in the same genre, Matt concentrated on his jazz skills under the tutelage of Tom Kozic, Professor of Music at Muhlenberg College and Berklee alum, Skip Wilkens, Professor of Music at Lafayette College. It was Wilkens who suggested Berklee for Matt. While in high school, Matt would attend jazz jams at Ortlieb’s Tavern in Philadelphia, a club frequented by numerous Philly jazz greats, well known for its hot jams and Cajun cuisine. Now, only in his first year at Berklee, Matt has tackled new projects of original material with fellow students (Dylan Coleman, Joey Lefitz, and Johnny Nicholson among many others). Atticus is also recording and producing original material written by his father, Big Al.