Email this article | Printer friendly page BackTalk with Cosimo MatassaBy Todd Mouton |
Some of the best-known records made at Cosimo Matassa's studio used their own language to express the simple pleasures of living.
Song's like Huey "Piano" Smith & The Clowns' "Don't You Just Know It," Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti," Jessie Hill's "Ooh Poo Pah Doo" and Sugar Boy Crawford's "Jock-A-Mo" featured phonetic vocalizations some might call nonsense lyrics.
"Those are celebration songs," Matassa explained, speaking from the cluttered office of his family's French Quarter grocery store.
"You can imagine children or adults dancing and skipping, finger popping. All of 'em move -- that's the central thing with all of those songs. Some of 'em are totally child-like, but they were expressions of joy. These were expressions of emotion, you can't reject those. They get too analytical about the records. And most stuff isn't that cerebral -- it's visceral."
Like those recordings, 70-year-old Matassa is focused on the here and now. He's chipper, filled with energy, and he speaks about his life in New Orleans music matter-of-factly and without fanfare.
Which is surprising, considering the fact that he's arguably the greatest live sound recorder in history.
He describes himself as a former studio owner and sound engineer, not a record producer. To begin with, the "producer" label didn't exist when Matassa opened his doors at the corner of Rampart and Dumaine streets, the intersection Professor Longhair sings of in the second-line anthem "Mardi Gras In New Orleans."
Matassa was the man behind the knobs for landmark New Orleans rhythm and blues sessions from 1945 to 1969, and, like a studio photographer, the young owner/engineer was contracted to capture the best sides of his numerous clients. In the process, he created a string of one and two-hit wonders, and his studio, the first in Louisiana, became a launching pad for the lengthy careers of artists like Fats Domino, Aaron Neville, Irma Thomas and Earl King.
At various locations over the years, Cosimo's studio was the place where musicians like Allen Toussaint, Dave Bartholomew and Dr. John matched soulful bass and horn lines with emotive vocals and distinctive snippets of piano and percussion.
Over the course of a late morning interview, Matassa's affection for certain songs and performers emerged as he answered questions on a wide range of topics.
When did music first become important to you?
I came up in an Italian family here in New Orleans, downtown in the French Quarter. Because of the economics of the times, people did not, could not, afford to go out and sit down and pay money and tell somebody "entertain me." They entertained themselves.
So what you had were house parties, all of the family celebrations you can imagine. The fact that people in New Orleans danced -- that's one way you entertain yourself, you dance. So bands were oriented to people dancing.
There was a lot of music in New Orleans. There were parties to raise rent, parties to get somebody out of jail, parties to pay the light bill. I didn't find music to be a unique part of life, separate from life. It was part of everyday living.
Your father owned a neighborhood grocery store and bar, the latter of which was segregated.
My father's arrangement was kind of unique. He made an arch in the wall between the two (bars) and put the phone booth there with two doors on it. So there was much more interaction than there would be ordinarily.
There was a jukebox on either side, so on the one side, I heard the popular tunes of the day, I heard some hillbilly, some Dixieland jazz. On the other side I heard blues, the things the black audience liked and played. And I also heard things like Ellington.
Your studio didn't recognize a color barrier.
There were a lot of fine uptown folks that always referred to my studio as the "nigger" studio, which it wasn't. I did a lot of white guys. But some people focused on that, which was how they focused on it in their lives.
But I never let them bother me, and my relatives and friends never did, and all my black friends obviously didn't. In fact, in the really early days, my studio was one of the few places that a black musician could meet his white girlfriend and not worry about the police coming in. But nobody said anything about that, it just happened.
You've said you tried to make yourself invisible in the recording process. How so?
What I did was I walked out in the studio and listened, came back in the control room and tried to make what I heard in there sound like what I heard in the studio. Frozen performances is what we're doin', and you want to be accurate.
But you weren't a producer?
I would lay claim to some contribution, but it was varied and it went from everything from nothing to a whole lot. We were there to present what was being done in the studio. We were there to do what the record company and the A&R (artist & repertoire) guy and the bandleader and the singer and the arranger felt they were trying to do. We were facilitators, not producers. And I always tried to have that happen.
What's most important in a record?
Transmission. Of emotions. If it can transmit enough emotion that you enjoy it, you have this pleasurable experience, this vicarious thrill. Then you'll spend your money for it. It could be a hat or a record. It doesn't really make a whole lot of difference.
So what's the secret?
If you transmit an emotion to the listener, it's a good record. It's gonna be a successful record. Now, having said that, how you measure it, I don't know. How you predict it, I have not a clue. Because it happens, and everybody's aware of it, you know, it's fundamental. And yet totally evasive.
I don't think there are any standards. I don't think there's a person that exists that has the magic touch. I just happened to be around at the right time in the right place. I hung in there through the good times and the bad, 'cause I loved it. It was a great way to make a living, let me tell ya. Just to be around then was a great time. (But) there was no sense of history. Nobody ever felt like we were producing great art.
Maybe that was your secret.
You can go out and buy a $100 recorder (today) and get quality that we would have killed for. And the facility of it, everything just works. Back then everything had to be played with and screwed with one way or another.
If you talk to (songwriter/bandleader/producer) Dave Bartholomew, he'd tell you that it was "O.J.T.," on-the-job training. We learned as we went. New Orleans was not exactly a pillar of technology. There wasn't any place I could go to somebody else's studio and learn something.
Is there anyone you would have liked to work with but never had the chance?
Somebody I would liked to have recorded and never did was Mahalia Jackson. I admired her voice and her work tremendously.
You mentioned Allen Toussaint as someone who was really creative in the studio.
Probably more than any other person that I've ever known or worked with, he would use fairly ordinary people, not necessarily the very best of anybody, but it was like a challenge to him to create something.
I used to kid him, I used to say he could make a chicken out of a feather and a wishbone. And really he did. And he did it over and over and over again, just amazingly so. He could match a song to a singer, he could match an arrangement to a song and a singer, and he could work it out. He would simplify it and drop things and change things and make it work.
Sometimes, with artists like Fats Domino, changing a single note in the bass line would create a new song.
If you change something that's fundamental, you get a fundamental result.
You worked with some of the most talented artists in the history of recorded music. When asked to name a "most valuable player," you nominated drummer Earl Palmer.
Early on, jukebox operators were a major source of phonograph record sales. And one of the things they liked was short records. So it got to be that you aimed at doing a record two minutes and ten seconds, not three minutes and twenty seconds.
We were doing a session once and the thing was just a few seconds too long. And the guy says, "Can we do it a little shorter?" And Earl Palmer figuratively wound a clock key on his foot and said "How much shorter you want it?" He said "three seconds." Let me tell you, three seconds he took off. It was like 2:23, it came to 2:20. This was a phenomenal percussionist, I mean this guy was great.
Any impressions of the music industry today?
I'm for being free and unfettered, but I'm appalled, really, at the attitude of some musicians. It's almost like they're there to entertain themselves and that's unfortunate, because that lack of discipline, I think, hurts 'em more than it helps 'em.
Are you ever nostalgic for the old days?
I'm enthusiastic about life. It was a marvelous life. To get paid to listen to all that great music, and over so long a time. I enjoyed it thoroughly, I don't have any complaints. If you had to put something on my tombstone it'd be "no regrets." Good times, bad times, but hell, it was all fun.
(Todd Mouton is a freelance writer based in Lafayette, La.)
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