Cosimo Matassa was not a performer, but no single individual did more to shape the sound of New Orleans music in the postwar era. As the engineer and owner of J&M Recording Studio — and later Cosimo's Studio and Sea-Saint — he recorded virtually every major New Orleans artist from the late 1940s through the 1970s, creating a body of work that helped define American popular music.
Biography
Born in New Orleans in 1926 to an Italian-American family, Matassa opened J&M Recording Studio on the corner of Rampart and Dumaine in 1945, at the age of nineteen. The room he built became the most important recording studio in the history of New Orleans music. Between 1949 and the late 1960s, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, Ray Charles, Professor Longhair, Clarence 'Frogman' Henry, Smiley Lewis, Shirley & Lee, Lee Dorsey, Irma Thomas, and hundreds of others recorded there. The warm, spacious sound of that room — and Matassa's instinct for capturing it honestly — became the sonic signature of New Orleans R&B. He moved his operation to Governor Nicholls Street in the late 1950s and later to Rampart Street, then worked at Allen Toussaint and Marshall Sehorn's Sea-Saint Studios in the 1970s. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012 as an early influence. He died in 2014.
Discography
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