Codebreakers: How a group of fans and scholars discovered Cosimo Matassa's numerical secretFats Domino listens to a recording with co-writer, musician and arranger Dave Bartholomew, right, at Cosimo Matassa's recording studio in New Orleans, about 1956. By Alison Fensterstock, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune on April 01, 2013
This one’s for the record geeks.
Over the course of thirty-odd years and four different studios (one of which, the original J&M Studios on Rampart and Dumaine streets, has twice been honored with historic landmark status) engineer Cosimo Matassa set the mics and turned the knobs for countless New Orleans recordings. It was with Cosimo that Dave Bartholomew oversaw the making of Fats Domino’s classic cuts; Little Richard recorded his career-making Specialty Records sides at J&M; Dr. John played his first sessions there, as a teenage sideman. Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-in-Law,” Lee Dorsey’s “Ya Ya,” Irma Thomas’ “It’s Raining,” Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is” – all those, and many more, were recorded with Cosimo.
Not everything recorded in a busy studio, of course, turned out to be a stone classic, and the sheer volume of what came out of J&M and later, Jazz City Studios, was rather staggering. In addition, most of what Matassa engineered was released by a legion of small independent labels – Ace, Vin, Ric, Ron, Instant, Minit and so on – that are largely defunct. The full breadth of Cosimo’s output, though exhaustively studied, has never been fully indexed in detail – until recently, when a group of record collectors and fans cracked what they call “the Cosimo Code.”
It was a Scottish collector named Davie Gordon, apparently, who noticed that most original 45 releases emerging from Cosimo’s studios were marked, on the right-hand side of the label, with an unexplained number split by a hyphen. The first half of the number, Gordon figured out, identified the artist; the second half tracked the recordings made in chronological sequence. (For example, Ronnie and the Delinquents, in which a young Mac Rebennack played guitar, are number 94; 94-345 refers to the “Bad Neighborhood” single recorded in 1961 and released on the JC label, with 94-346, “Keeps Dragging Me On,” as the B-Side.)
"A lot of good musicians," Matassa said, "made me look good."Gordon reached out with his discovery to renowned music scholar John Broven who, along with a group of other collectors, scanned his collection for the numbers. Over the course of months, the team built an index of coded releases organized chronologically – from 1960, the first known appearance of the code, through the late 70’s – and built a website to house it. Cosimocode.com went live over the last weekend of March 2013; its forums are already packed with posts by eager fans.
The Cosimo Code from red kelly on Vimeo:
The Cosimo Code, and its development, is explained in a video on the cosimocode.com website; it details how Gordon ascertained the significance of the mysterious number sequences, and how writers and bloggers like the Soul Detective’s Red Kelly, Home of the Groove’s Dan Phillips, Sir Shambling’s Deep Soul Heaven, the Ninth Ward Jukebox, the Singing Bones blog and others worked together to create the precise index (complete with streaming mp3s and scans of the original 45 labels) currently up on the site – which is still being added to.
The code is an extraordinary tool for collectors and biographers but perhaps even more so – it’s a wonderful jumping-off point for fantasy. Who might have had studio time booked back-to-back? What conversations, friendships, collaborations and escapades might have resulted from meetings there?
“The Cosimo Code is not only a tribute to the great musicians of New Orleans, it’s also a tribute to the man himself, Cosimo Matassa, who in a sense developed the sound of rock n’roll through his great engineering abilities,” explains Broven, at the end of the video.
“The Cosimo Code is a tribute to him, and very well deserved.”
The video concludes with a short comment from Matassa himself, with his typical tone of humility. (The Rock n’Roll Hall of Fame inductee has often said publicly that his technique was to simply place the microphones, and stand back.)
“A lot of good musicians,” Matassa said, “made me look good.”
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