Music and Recording Features

Sasha Matson

Capt. Trips, Matson's tribute to Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, represents a return to his roots. He grew up in Berkeley, CA, playing keyboards in a psychedelic band and listening to groups like the Grateful Dead.

"We viewed those kinds of groups as our big brothers. They were a slight generation older than we were, and we were just young teenagers absorbing all everything they had absorbed. Jerry, I think, could have been a really fine, straight-ahead jazz player. His background was mainly bluegrass and folk, but the way that he phrases stuff, the melodic lines could be quite jazzy. Then, in the psychedelic period, because of the programming creativity of Bill Graham at the Fillmore and Chet Helms at the Avalon, they were booking major jazz players on the same bill as the Grateful Dead. Jerry would have been absorbing that, as a younger player. I find his stuff soulful and jazzy at times.

"Some of that ringing, soloistic element was guitarist Steve Cardenas's own take on that. I didn't have Steve Cardenas in mind when I wrote the piece, but he was recommended to me by Ted Nash, with whom he has an ongoing trio right now. They just covered an album of music by Carla Bley that's really excellent. Steve is a heavy hitter in those circles and he's a guy who's open to doing different kinds of things so he agreed to do this one.

Molto Molto also represents a return to when Sasha Matson got a start in the music business.

"Having recently gotten off the bus in the latter 1980s, (actually via i-5 in a used Subaru from the Bay Area), it was my good fortune to visit a film-scoring session at Group IV Studio in Hollywood. There I first met Terry Woodson, whose music preparation service was located in a small bungalow on Gower Street, just north of Sunset Boulevard—the true heart of Hollywood. Like medieval monks, copyists still using pen and ink would write out the parts and scores used for recording sessions and performances. Terry asked me over my first lunch at Musso & Frank, whether I would like to do some music proofreading—looking through freshly copied sheet music for errors.

"The Terry Woodson Music Service at that time "kept the books" for some of the leading artists who still toured and performed with big bands and orchestras; Frank Sinatra (Sr. & Jr.), Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Liza—the list went on. All of Sinatra's master scores and parts were kept in fireproof file cabinets in a back room. Many of the leading arrangers and composers came through the shop—to drop scores off, pick them up, and just to hang out. There I met Billy May, Nelson Riddle, Pat Williams, Nick Perito, and so many others. Hank Mancini was on the phone. As a result, I 'got my hands in the clay,' soaking all that great music up, directly from the handwritten scores I was looking at. One day I gathered up all the rubber stamps used for labeling the finished sheet music, and printed them on a single manuscript page—reproduced above."

In Hollywood Matson turned his hand to composing scores for low-budget movies.

"Job one of any media/film composing is you have to be versatile and flexible. You can't just write one style of music unless it's going to be a one-off that somebody wanted to use, almost like they would buy a record in a particular style. But to work for a variety of people and projects, you have to be flexible. That taught me some flexibility. And when I was around in the mid 1980s, I was physically around these great veteran jazz composers and arrangers who were working for great pop artists who were doing that kind of thing, crossover or not, from Sinatra on down."

As a writer and a publisher, Matson has been a long-time member of BMI (footnote 1) and BMI, like ASCAP, does various things for its members. It was one those things that got him writing for a larger jazz group, a jazz orchestra, a big band (footnote 2).

"Because New York is and always will be the world capital of jazz, one of the things BMI does in New York is to fund and run a biweekly workshop on big-band writing run by Andy Farber and Ted Nash. I'd seen the flyers for years. This was a few years ago, pre-COVID, when I decided I was going to do this.

"The cool thing was that BMI, using BMI budgets, would hire a big band once a month down at the musician union hall to read for reading sessions, to read what anyone was writing. And so there I was, like the rest of the participants of this workshop, just getting to hear whatever the heck I wanted to write to try things out. Some of the sketches that I did back then, later got turned into parts of the Symphony No.3 on Molto Molto.

"I actually started in the workshop working with Andy Farber (above) and Ted Nash, who pitched in and played on the dates for this recording. Most of the group were brought to me by Andy. He told me that so many players hadn't been working a lot because of COVID. 'I've got you a great group,' he said, 'people wanted to play, they wanted to work'—And he did, they were there for a couple of days with me at the sessions and they were great.

"I've said it, and this, they'll say one more time: for me, the biggest kick for me as a composer is what I get with great players and they play my stuff. That's the payoff. Everything before and afterwards pales by comparison!"

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Footnote 1: BMI—Broadcast Music Inc.— represents the public performance rights in over 20.6 million musical works created and owned by more than 1.3 million songwriters, composers, and music publishers.

Footnote 2: Readers should know that big band and jazz orchestra really mean the same thing. Jazz orchestra is the uptown name for big band. There's no real significant difference. The standard big band averages around 16 pieces.—Sasha Matson