There is a particular kind of loneliness that only piano music can reach — not the melodramatic kind, but the quiet, sitting-at-a-kitchen-table-at-2am kind — and Matthew Tavares found it on his debut at nineteen years old.
Careless arrived in 2006 on the Toronto independent label Wayfaring Stranger Records, recorded mostly live-to-tape in the way that young pianists with something to prove tend to insist upon. Tavares was already orbiting the scene that would eventually coalesce around BADBADNOTGOOD, though that was still years away. This record is the thing before the thing — the document of a musician who hadn’t yet learned to be self-conscious.
The Room It Lives In
The album is solo piano, essentially. Tavares plays with a touch that sits somewhere between classical restraint and jazz’s appetite for breath and space. He studied at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto, and you can hear it — not as stiffness, but as the kind of technical fluency that lets you forget technique entirely. The notes land where they land. Phrases don’t rush to resolve.
What’s striking is how little he overplays. The temptation at nineteen, especially with chops, is to fill every silence. Tavares does the opposite.
The recording quality is modest in the way that suits the music — close-miked, a little warm around the low register, the kind of piano sound where you can hear the room breathe. It doesn’t sound like a major label production because it isn’t one. That’s not a criticism. That’s the whole point.
What He Was After
There’s a lineage here that runs through Keith Jarrett’s solo concerts, through Bill Evans’s more introspective moments on Waltz for Debby, and maybe through Satie if you’re feeling generous. But Tavares isn’t imitating any of them. He’s absorbed those influences deeply enough that they’ve become something else.
“Careless” as a title is either ironic or perfectly accurate, depending on the track. Some moments feel genuinely spontaneous, almost like transcribed thought. Others have the architecture of something worked out carefully and then played as if it wasn’t.
There are pieces here that clock in under two minutes and feel complete. That’s hard to do. Most musicians pad. Tavares stops when the thing is done.
The album never had a wide release. It circulated the way music used to circulate — through people who knew people, through the specific Toronto jazz and experimental community that was building something quietly throughout that decade. If you find it, you feel a little like you found something.
He went on to co-found BADBADNOTGOOD with Chester Hansen and Alexander Sowinski in 2010, and that project became the thing most people know him for. Rightly so — those records are extraordinary in their own way. But Careless is where you hear what Tavares sounds like when it’s just him and a piano and nobody’s watching.
Put this on after the dishes. Don’t do anything else while it plays.