News & Updates — Cosimo Matassa

Cosimo Matassa's J&M Recording studio in New Orleans was the home of some of the biggest hits of the early rock & roll era and he helped shape the NOLA sound. A Sicilian-American who was born and raised in NOLA, he was a funky grocer, record & appliance shop owner and a jukebox servicer before he opened the studio in '45, a time when there were few studios in that musical city. Teenaged Allen Toussaint used to hang out there and practice piano, later on often working directly with Matassa. In the '60s he started his label Dover Records to...