MATS ÖBERG

Mats Öberg biography
Mats Öberg is a Swedish keyboard player and composer from Umeå who's arguably best known for being one half of the progressive rock and jazz fusion duo Mats/Morgan, although he has been performing and recording music as part of numerous bands and ensembles since he was 10 years of age despite being fully blind in both eyes from his birth in 1971.
Starting in the early 1980s, he played in several Frank Zappa cover bands with drummer and fellow Umeå resident Morgan Ågren, rising to prominence from 1988 onward after performing with Zappa's band during a concert in Stockholm and subsequently appearing on several Zappa tribute concerts and albums (as well as Zappa's own posthumously released Dance Me This album). Öberg and Ågren's stars continued to rise throughout the mid-1990s when they began recording their own highly complex and virtuosic Zappa-inspired compositions under the Mats/Morgan moniker, and in 1998 Öberg released his first solo album Välling & Fotogen, recorded with the Gävleborgs Ungdoms Big Band, which again sparked comparisons to Zappa's orchestral and big band works.
In addition to his continuing collaborations with Ågren and other fellow Swedish jazz and prog musicians (including Meshuggah, Bengt Berger, Ale Möller & Jonas Knutsson) he released several solo piano and jazz albums throughout the following decades before recording another full-length prog release in 2023 with the help of Green Asphalt leader and multi-instrumentalist Dan Bornemark; this album revealed more noticeable folk and Canterbury Scene influences while retaining his by now recognizable quirky composing and playing style.