"They were just neighbors": Cosimo Mastassa and The New Orleans Sound
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This is an excerpted version of the presentation I gave at the 2013 conference of the Italian American Studies Association in New Orleans, on the legendary studio owner and recording engineer Cosimo Matassa. He and a stellar cast of musicians, singers and arrangers (Little Richard, Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino, Earl Palmer, Professor Longhair, etc) made records that changed the course of American popular music and also influenced the '60s British Invasion.
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"They were just neighbors": Cosimo Mastassa and The New Orleans Sound
- 1. “They Were Just Neighbors” Cosimo Matassa and the New Orleans Sound GEORGE DE STEFANO “ITALIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY POLITICS”/ IASA OCTOBER 3-5, 2013
- 2. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Cosimo Matassa was inducted in 2012 at 86 and presented with the Award for Musical Excellence
- 3. Dave Bartholomew The trumpeter, bandleader and arranger was Matassa’s closest collaborator and best friend
- 4. Allen Toussaint “We all came through Cosimo”
- 5. Earl Palmer The Tremé-born drummer, who invented rock’s straight-eighth backbeat, said, “I think Cosimo was a genius”
- 6. “We were integrated – we just didn’t know it” Cosimo Matassa on growing up in the French Quarter
- 7. St. Joseph’s Day African Americans and Italian Americans lived “cheek by jowl” in Matassa’s neighborhood and shared cultural traditions
- 8. Louis Prima Like New Orleans’ native son Prima, Cosimo Matassa was born in the French Quarter to immigrants from Sicily
- 9. French Quarter, 1930s “I came up as a small child during the Depression…” -- Cosimo Matassa
- 10. Louis Armstrong When Cosimo Matassa was a boy, he heard Armstrong and other great jazz and blues artists on the jukebox in his father’s saloon
- 11. Cosimo at the Controls A small backroom at the J&M Music Shop became Matassa’s first studio
- 12. Joseph “Sharkey” Bonano Bonano’s “Pizza Pie Boogie” was one of Matassa’s first recordings
- 13. Making History In December 1949, Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew recorded “The Fat Man” in Matassa’s studio
- 14. “A Wop Bop a Loo Bop A Wop Bam Boom!” Little Richard recorded “Tutti Frutti” and other hits at Matassa’s studio
- 15. “I’m a lonely boy…I ain’t got a home” Clarence “Frogman” Henry
- 16. The Cosimo Matassa Story, Vol. 1 In 2007, Proper Records released a 4-disk boxed set comprising 120 recordings made at Matassa’s studios
- 17. Matassa’s Market Today Cosimo’s sons run the family grocery store in the French Quarter
- 18. “The New Orleans Sound” Matassa’s first studio was designated a historic landmark in 1999
- 19. Cosimo Matassa: American pop music wouldn’t be the same without him
Editor's Notes
- CosimoMatassa, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, may be one of the least famous members of that august institution. But the 87 year-old New Orleans native surely is one of the most important. Matassa, a Sicilian-American recording engineer and studio owner, is a pivotal figure in American vernacular music because he helped create “the New Orleans sound” in his French Quarter recording studios.
- Matassa collaborated with some of New Orleans’ best musical minds, including the bandleader and arranger Dave Bartholomew
- “Cosimo built the institution where we musicians all had to go through. It was our university. We all came through Cosimo.”
- In his biography, Backbeat, Earl Palmer, recalling the early days of his work with Matassa, said, “As unsophisticated as he was, I think Cosimo was a genius. I’ve seen engineers use two dozen mikes to get the sound he got with three. He knew how to position mikes and he knew each mike like it was a person.”
- But Matassa wasn’t only a recording engineer, studio owner and producer. He also was a cultural broker who introduced African American artists, marginalized by music industry and societal racism, to a broader audience. Matassa didn’t consciously aim to challenge racial barriers. “We didn’t intentionally seek out black artists in those days,” he has said. “I grew up in the French Quarter where blacks and whites lived side by side. We didn’t have black neighbors or white neighbors; they were just neighbors. We were integrated -- we just didn't know it.”
- In other American cities where African Americans and Italian Americans were in close proximity, there have been conflicts, sometimes violent, between the two communities. But CosimoMatassa remembers the French Quarter as a neighborhood where blacks and Italians (the latter predominantly Sicilians) lived “cheek by jowl” and even shared traditions, such as St. Joseph’s Day celebrations
- CosimoMatassa’s career represents an aspect of New Orleans history that hasn’t received its full due: the role of Sicilian immigrants and their descendants in shaping the Crescent City’s unique and celebrated culture. Like the popular entertainer Louis Prima, CosimoMatassa was born in New Orleans to a Sicilian immigrant family and grew up in the French Quarter. Matassa’s father, Giovanni CosimoMatassa, emigrated from Cefalu, Sicily in 1910; his mother, DomenicaLeto, had arrived earlier, in 1904 or 1905, from Palermo.
- In 1924, Matassa’s father bought a grocery store at the corner of Dauphine and St. Phillip streets. “I came up as a small child during the Depression,” Matassa recalls. “I was fortunate enough my folks owned a grocery store so I was spared the problems other people had.”
- Matassa’s father also owned a saloon. There Cosimo, as a boy, first heard commercial music on his father’s jukeboxes. He also was exposed to racial segregation, since his father’s saloon actually was two establishments, one for whites, one for blacks. “His arrangement was unique,” Cosimo says. “The wall between them had an arch big enough for a wide door and they built a phone booth in that. So the telephone was accessible to either one. There was a door on each side of the phone booth. Imagine a phone booth with a door on each side. That’s the way it was. And it was a jukebox in the white bar and it was a jukebox in the black bar. So I got to hear country tunes, blues tunes, the whole thing. I was hearing what black people listened to and what working class white people listened to at the same time.” Matassa heard African American blues singers like Lil Green and Ma Rainey, jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan.
- A small backroom in the J&M Music Shop became Cosimo’s first recording studio. The studio’s control room, which Matassa has said was the size of four telephone booths, couldn’t accommodate more than three people at one time. Earl Palmer recalled that the studio “was hardly bigger than a bedroom. Everyone faced Cos, who was in the little bitty booth. Cos never had an assistant; he came in and out and set them mikes himself.”
- One of Matassa’s first recordings was “Pizza Pie Boogie,” a novelty tune by New Orleans jazz trumpeter Joseph “Sharkey” Bonano and his Kings of Dixieland
- An epochal moment in New Orleans music history occurred in December 1949, when the trumpeter, songwriter and arranger Dave Bartholomew and the pianist and singer Fats Domino recorded “The Fat Man” in CosimoMatassa’s studio. The record reached number one on the Rhythm and Blues charts, launching both Domino’s career and what has come to be called “the golden age” of New Orleans R&B.
- During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the hits just kept rolling out of Matassa’s studio – “TuttiFrutti,” “Lucille,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’” by Little Richard; “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” by Lloyd Price; “Ain’t Got No Home” and “I’m a Country Boy” by Clarence “Frogman” Henry; “I Hear You Knocking” by Smiley Lewis; “My Blue Heaven” and “I’m in Love Again” by Fats Domino; “The Things That I Used to Do” by Guitar Slim; “Tipitina” by Professor Longhair; “It’s Raining’ by Irma Thomas; “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” by Huey “Piano” Smith; “YaYa” and “Working in the Coal Mine” by Lee Dorsey; “Sea Cruise” by Frankie Ford; “Tell it Like it Is” by Aaron Neville, and many, many more
- Henry was one of many R&B and rock ‘n roll pioneers who recorded in CosimoMatassa’s studio
- British label Proper Records has released two, four-disk boxed sets of Matassa’s recordings, “The CosimoMatassa Story,” (2007), and “The CosimoMatassa Story Vol. 2” (2012). The two compilations total 229 recordings, and although not every track is first-rate, even the lesser ones are full of the exuberant spirit and rhythmic excitement that characterized “classic” New Orleans rhythm and blues and rock ‘n roll. Not only that – The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other British rock groups covered songs recorded in Matassa’s studios, so his work also was an influence on the 60s British Invasion.
- Matassa continued to work as a recording engineer at Sea Saint Studio, owned by Allen Toussaint and Marshall Sehorn. He retired from music and, in the 1980s, returned to the grocery business. Today, Matassa’s Market in the French Quarter is run by his sons
- In 1999, fifty years after Fats Domino recorded “The Fat Man,” Matassa’s studio at North Rampart and Dumaine streets was declared a historic landmark. Today, it is a laundromat, but photographs lining the walls commemorate the building’s storied history as the foundry from which emerged so many hits that would change the course of American popular music.
- In recent years, Matassa has received more of the recognition his accomplishments merit. In 2007, he was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame and received a Grammy Trustees Award from The Recording Academy. The following year, the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award, in a ceremony held in New Orlean’s Piazza d’Italia . In 2012, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was presented with its Award for Musical Excellence. Matassa, now 87, lives in Metairie; he has suffered several strokes in recent years and is very frail. He is unable to give interviews, but fortunately he was a voluble person who has spoken extensively about his life and career for the historical record. Bruce Boyd Raeburn agrees with Matassa’s description of himself as a “facilitator.” “He wasn’t musical himself,” says Raeburn. “But he loved to fiddle with gadgets and he was attracted to black music. He ‘produced’ by creating a place where black musicians like Professor Longhair and Earl Palmer and Little Richard could do their thing, and he was willing to put in the time, money and ingenuity to experiment until they found the sound they were all looking for. Without him, the history of American popular music would look very different.”