On Friday September 12^th at 6:45 am I walked into a Starbucks in Huntington Beach, California. As joggers, dog walkers, surfers and cyclists shook off the morning fog and walked inside to get their caffeine fix they were met by the sounds of an old record that everyone had heard a thousand times. It was a Fats Domino song that greeted my ears which are always thirsty for the sounds of music made the old fashioned way; live, in the moment, organic, pure and true.

I thought, 'ain’t that a shame that too few well-heeled souls in this caffeinated country knew that the man who was largely responsible for that record and countless others had passed away in his hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana, just the day before.' His name was Cosimo Vincent Matassa. Cosimo (pronounced Cosmo) Matassa was one of the most important recording engineers and studio owners in American history. He was 88 years old. He had a hand in the making of records that has enriched the lives of hundreds of millions of people all over the world for parts of the last eight decades.  

On a day of national remembrance, mourning and observance it seemed entirely appropriate that Matassa would leave our mortal confines. His legacy helped to shape the notion of American culture. The modest and often self effacing Matassa became the person whose recordings became our country’s most beloved and enduring export. It was a music that at the time had a handful of sobriquets, but was generally referred to as race music. It would soon be called rock and roll.

Jeff Hannusch wrote in his 1985 book, I Hear You Knockin’: The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues, “Virtually every R&B record made in New Orleans between the late ’40s and the early ’70s was engineered by Cosimo Matassa, and recorded in one of his four studios.”

Matassa opened the tiny J&M Studios on North Rampart Street on the edge of New Orleans’ French Quarter in 1947. He was just shy of his twentieth birthday. Prior to that Matassa worked in his father’s corner grocery store. He studied chemistry briefly at Tulane University in New Orleans. He then went to work for a jukebox business called J&M Services. It didn’t take too long for Matassa to recognize that New Orleans had a lot of great musicians, but there was nowhere in the Crescent City for them to make a record.

He went about purchasing recording equipment. The equipment he bought allowed him to record directly onto the acetate disc. This meant he couldn’t splice in changes. Each of those two to three minute recordings was an exact reproduction of the performance. Matassa often told his musicians to imagine that they were performing in front of a live audience. The musicians gave those great records the same energy and enthusiasm that they gave to the big crowds who would hear them play at the Dew Drop Inn and other New Orleans night spots.

In John Broven’s 1988 book “Rhythm & Blues in New Orleans” Matassa was quoted as saying that, “...this approach often worked wonderfully.” The reason, Matassa went on to say was that, “they were really performances as opposed to the synthesized records made today.”

The first record to gain any notoriety was Roy Brown’s infectious 1947 single Good Rockin' Tonight. The song has been cited as the first time the word “rockin” had been heard on a recording. This record pre-dated Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 by four years and many would contend that it could be called the first rock and roll record. The tune would later be covered by Wynonie Harris and then more famously by Elvis Presley.

So the city that is the undisputed birth place of jazz could also make a very good case that it is likewise the birthplace of rock and roll. That claim would soon be bolstered by a local piano player.

Two years later Fats Domino, who at the time was an unknown twenty one year old rhythm and blues pianist, walked into Cosimo’s studio. Matassa introduced the young pianist to Dave Bartholomew who was already an established trumpet player, band leader, composer, arranger and producer. On December 10, 1949, in that tiny studio on Rampart, Domino and Bartholomew collaborated on eight songs including Domino’s first hit single, The Fat Man released on the Los Angeles based Imperial Records label. This began one of the most successful collaborations in the history of rhythm and blues. The Domino/Bartholomew/Cosimo connection produced a series of hits that crossed over to mainstream audiences.  

The New Orleans Times Picayune quotes Bartholomew as saying "We felt good about it. Cosimo had gotten a pretty good sound out of what he had."

What he had were some of the greatest ensemble players in the history of recorded music. They included not only Bartholomew, but sax men Lee Allen, Herbert Hardesty (who also played trumpet) and Red Tyler, bassist Frank “Dude” Fields, guitarist Buddy Charles and Earnest McLean. It also included the man who is the most recorded drummer of all time, Earl Palmer. They anchored a backup band that predates, by a couple of decades, Motown’s Funk Brothers, Stax’s Booker T. and M.G.s and Muscle Shoals’ Swampers.

Cosimo’s gang was simply known as “The Clique.” 

Los Angeles based Specialty Records also put out hit singles by a unique talent who recorded in Matassa’s studio. His name was Richard Peniman and he would soon become the world famous Little Richard.  These recordings would further cement New Orleans claim to be home of the birth of rock and roll. Starting with Tutti Frutti, Matassa would record one big hit for Richard after another, including such staples of the proto rock and roll canon like Long Tall Sally, Rip it Up, I’m Ready, Jenny Jenny, Good Golly Miss Molly, The Girl Can’t Help It and others.

On that first Little Richard record cut at J&M, Tutti Frutti, Earl Palmer employed a different style beat that would come to define rock and roll drumming. He took the beat off of the one and three and put it on the offbeat, the two and the four. It was a rhythm that rarely saw the light of day in secular music, yet was a feature of gospel music. It was the first time a backbeat with that type of metronome timing had been recorded. Blues shuffles with elements of swing had been the norm in rhythm and blues records of the day. Palmer’s “straight eight” backbeat changed drumming forever.

One of the great ironies in all of this is that Palmer, like the other session players making up the Clique, was steeped in the jazz traditions of New Orleans. With jazz as a foundation these cats had no problem stepping into any musical situation and could handle whatever charts and arrangements were given to them on a moment’s notice. These were the same guys cutting heads into the wee hours at places like The Monkey Bar, The Texas Lounge and The Brass Rail all situated on nearby Canal Street.   

Los Angeles' Imperial and Specialty weren’t the only labels putting out material recorded by Matassa. The iconic Chess Records out of Chicago released a whole host of material recorded at J&M including such artists as Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Paul Gayten and one of Art Neville’s earliest bands the Hawkettes, as well as Bobby Charles. 

One artist after another walked into Cosimo’s studio and left with a hit record. It is where Lloyd Price cut Lawdy Miss Clawdy in 1952. It is where Smiley Lewis made, I Hear You Knockin’ in 1955. He did the same with Johnny Adams and Release Me, Barbara Lynn and You’ll Lose a Good Thing, the raw emotionally charged, Ooh Poo Pah Doo (parts one and two) by Jesse Hill and so many others.

As a teenager Alan Toussaint, along with Snooks Eglin, walked into the J&M Studio for the first time. The grand piano that Matassa had squeezed into the small recording space was the first one that Toussaint ever played. The two came to audition a song for Bartholomew. They weren’t given the chance to record that day, but Matassa let the young pianist play that grand piano when it wasn’t in use.

It wasn’t long before Matassa expanded his operations and opened a studio on Governor Nichols Street in 1956. That recording space was simply called Cosimo’s Studio. It was there that Toussaint went on to become one of the most prolific and important musicians in New Orleans. He was writer, arranger, producer as well as pianist and was responsible for countless recordings that were made with Matassa.  

By this time other musicians were hanging around the studio. Young Mac Rebennack and Earl King for instance started getting studio work as sidemen before they would begin recording under their own names or in Rebennack’s case the moniker, Dr. John the Night Tripper.

In his later years, while holding court at his family’s grocery store, Matassa would often remind people that at the time, he had no idea that people would still be interested in the records they made in that tiny little studio all these years later.

People are in fact still interested as two beautiful re-issue compilations from the Properbox series have surfaced in recent years. The Cosimo Matassa Story Volumes One and Two are packages which put that Cosimo sound in the context it deserves. These sets consist of four discs each and somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 tracks per box. From the obscure musicians to the well known artists you can hear every song, every famous, and not so famous, singer get the Cosimo treatment.

That treatment is described by Mac Rebennack in John Broven's book, Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans, when Mac said, "He would set the knobs for the session and rarely moved anything. There wasn’t a musician who didn’t like working with Cosimo.”

Much of Matassa’s recording success was simply a function of necessity, as Matassa was a master of placing microphones in just the right spot in the tiny 15’ X 16’ space he had available to record. Matassa himself often insisted that, “a lot of good musicians made me sound good.”  A lot of musicians thought it might be the other way around, Domino’s main sax man, Herbert Hardesty a regular member of Cosimo’s Clique said, “Cosimo was able to get things to sound the way they were supposed to sound.”  

That sound became known as the Cosimo sound. It was a natural, organic sound that was also known as the sound of New Orleans. It became known as the sound of America and ultimately a sound heard ‘round the world. Matassa always remained relentlessly modest about all of this.  He would explain to anyone who asked that it wasn’t about himself. He would say that he just wanted to capture what the guys were doing.

"I always tried to capture the dynamics of a live performance," Matassa said in an interview to mark his 2012 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "These guys were doing these songs on their gigs and that was the sound that I was trying to get. We didn't have any gimmicks, no overdubbing, no reverb, nothing. Those guys played with a lot of excitement; and I felt if I couldn't put it in the groove, people weren't going to move."

He never made it about himself and he never made it about the money, at least as far as he was concerned. He often admitted that he was a bad business man, but the musicians liked working with him because he paid well. Earl Palmer said in his biography, Back Beat, “I could make more money in six hours working with Cosimo than a week’s worth of gigs.”

Maybe it was just Cosimo being Cosimo as it relates to his own assessment of his business acumen, as Alan Toussaint has maintained that, “He (Matassa) knew more about how to make a record than anybody. He knew more about the business than any of us. We all came through Cosimo and he gave us to the world.”

As Matassa’s health declined in recent months he was visited in the hospital by his old friend and musical collaborator Dave Bartholomew. As recently as September 10^th, Bartholomew was at his bedside.

On Thursday, September 11^th, Bartholomew told the New Orleans Times Picayune "He was one of the greatest friends I had, and one of the best in the music industry in New Orleans. He was always there for me. I always had him in my corner. You always could depend on him, and not just music. He was one of the greatest people to recognize the talent in New Orleans, and make the world know it."

The world knew the songs and, in most cases, the artists, but many didn’t know the exceedingly modest Cosimo Matassa. Even Matassa’s hometown paper the New Orleans Times Picayune wrote in his obituary, ”J&M became the New Orleans equivalent of the historic Sun Studios in Memphis.” I would argue it is the other way around.

- David Mac

Recommended reading:

I Hear You Knocking: The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm and Blues by Jeff Hannush

Rhythm and Blues In New Orleans by John Broven

Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story by Tony Scherman 

Under a Hoodo Moon by Dr. John (Mac Rebenack) with Jack Rummel