The audio artisan who engineered most of New Orleans’ great blues and R&B hits from the late 1940s through the 1960s was Cosimo Matassa. Crescent City legends Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Roy Brown, Guitar Slim, Lloyd Price, Aaron Neville, Robert Parker, Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry, and Ernie K-Doe all recorded at Cosimo’s studios, as did Little Richard, Ray Charles and Big Joe Turner.
Matassa, the son of Italian immigrants, was born in New Orleans on April 13, 1926. In his late teens, he and Joseph Mancuso started a jukebox business, J&M Amusement Service, which expanded to become J&M Music Shop at 838-840 Rampart Street. Matassa, seeing that New Orleans musicians needed a facility for recording, turned the small back room into his first hit factory–a studio with three microphones feeding into a monophonic disc-cutting machine, when tape technology and stereo were still some years away. After some early success recording artists for DeLuxe Records, Matassa found other labels, including Atlantic, Specialty, Imperial and Ace calling for his services. During one four-week stretch of 1954, four of the ten best-selling records on Billboard‘s national rhythm & blues charts (by Guitar Slim, Joe Turner, Fats Domino and the Spiders) were products of Matassa’s J&M Recording Studios. (By then J&M Music Shop was under different management.) Matassa modestly declined to take much credit. ‘It worked because the performers were good. It wasn’t me or the room,’ he once said. In 1956, Matassa moved to new a new studio, named simply Cosimo’s, at 523 Governor Nicholls, and soon thereafter to a larger space next door at 525. There he launched Dover Records, a distribution firm, and operated the Dover, Rex and White Cliffs labels. The distribution venture ran into financial troubles, however, and Matassa lost his studio in 1968 and went into the dry cleaning business for several years before he renewed his recording activities with a final studio, Jazz City, at 748 Camp Street. In recent years, he has worked with his family in a grocery business. The old J&M space, later occupied by a laundromat, has become a historic site for tourists tracing the classic sounds of New Orleans R&B.
