First Recording Studio of Cosimo Matassa

Matassa was 18 when he opened J&M Recording Studio in 1945, at the back of his family's shop on Rampart Street. He recorded Fats Domino's The Fat Man, a contender for the first rock and roll record, and Little Richard's Tutti Frutti, often working with the producer Dave Bartholomew. In 1955 he moved to a larger studio on Governor Nicholls Street, and by 1967 to Camp Street, where he also ran a vinyl-pressing plant. After leaving music he managed the family food store, Matassa's Market, in the French Quarter. He died on September 11, 2014.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — steps away
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.3 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• The Cabildo — 0.4 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong — steps away
• Sidney Joseph Bechet — steps away
• Allison "Big Chief Tootie" Montana — steps away
• Congo Square — steps away