matt perko full interview
Date of birth, age, and where you were born.
My name is Matt Perko, born June 4, 1976, which I think makes me 47 years old. You stopped doing the math accurately after like 35. Maybe? Born in Painesville, Ohio.
Painesville?
Yes, P-A-I-N-E-S-V-I-L-L-E. The founder of Painesville was some guy with the last name Paine. But it was somewhat painful to live there as well, you know. Small town in Ohio. But about 35 miles east of Cleveland, so close to a major city. And my town was the capital city of the county. So all of the court systems were there and everything. And, you know, I had a good high school, and everything and good, good education. So I can't really complain.
Did you spend a lot of time in Cleveland growing up?
Yeah, I mean, probably a handful of times a year. The school field trips. All the major museums are in Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Natural History, Museum of Modern Art, like you'd have these were frequent trips when you're a kid, and then my parents would take me on on the weekend, sometimes if there were special events. We'd go to Cleveland, Indians, games, things like that. So yeah, I was pretty familiar with Cleveland growing up, but you know, it was always like something special.
Did you get introduced to music during your childhood in Painesville?
Yeah, early on. I mean, I've been listening to music for as long as I can remember. And I know that, well, my dad played accordion. My last name is Slovenian, my dad, his parents were for either first or second generation from Slovenia. And so he played a lot of the traditional Slovenian music, which is called polka. It's very similar to Mexican polka, Polish or Italian Polka Oompah music.
Usually in 3, right?
Not always. No, there's lots of like (demonstrates typical polka beat) stuff. There's lots of waltzes, too. But I mean, in that sense, it was kind of actually a good precursor for jazz, because it's a lot of 2 and 4 emphasis. But yeah, my dad played accordion, he played a lot of that music, but he also played all kinds of pop music. He used to play solo gigs at wineries, where he would just take requests. And so he could play all kinds of jazz standards, any pop tune from the 40s on to the maybe 70s or so, he knew.
And we had a big record player, I grew up listening to records, I have photos of me when I was like two or three, with headphones on just laying on the couch. And we had one of those big, you've never seen this before a console stereo system, which was like a piece of furniture, the size of my desk.
Is it made out of wood?
Yeah, totally wood. And when it's closed, it just looks like furniture. Then you open it up, there's a real reel to reel tape deck, an AM radio, and a record player. And we just had a stack of records. And all I did was listen. And I had a long headphone extension cable and would just lay on the couch and listen to music all day long. And, you know, from the time I was able to sit up, I was banging on pots and pans with wooden spoons.
So it seems you had a natural inclination towards the drums, then. Who introduced you to the instrument?
I don't know how it started. Maybe I already had a proclivity towards it. But I know that my mom, like I said, was letting me bang on the pots and pans. Until when I was three, they got me a drum set, which was a little kid's drum set, but at least something to save all of the kitchen equipment from being destroyed.
Haha, I can imagine.
I wish I could still find this—for the longest time we had an old eight-millimeter video of me playing the drums when I was three, and playing along to the record. And it was interesting because I wasn't I wasn't playing a drum part; I was just playing the rhythm of the melody of the song. Some polka (sings and taps the melody of a polka) and that's what I heard. And that's what I played. It's interesting, I've always, and we'll probably get into this later, but I've always considered myself like a frustrated piano player trapped in a drummer's body; that I have like this strong inclination for melody. And it's fine, I make it work on drums. I think from an early age even though I had access to drums and that's what I was doing, there was something melodic that I was really hearing and latching on to.
But yeah, I grew up listening to music like crazy, as much as I could. And then the first opportunity I had in public school
to study an instrument, I chose drums because it was natural. We all had to learn recorder in third grade. And then in fourth grade, you could choose an instrument. I chose snare drum and had a really good music teacher actually. At that time you rented a snare drum from the local music store. So I had the old school Ludwig, it came in a hardcase and it has the snare drum stand and the snare in it. And so I would bring that home from school and practice that. But the music teacher also gave me a small two and a half octave xylophone to take home. And he said, ‘Well, you have to learn to read notes as well.’ So I remember, I have this vivid memory of that, sitting on my parents bed and I was practicing from a book, just really simple songs, you know, simple melodies and just learning how to play those. We also had a piano in the house, so it made sense. I was really into both of those things.
And what about jazz? You mentioned your father used to play a lot of standards.
Yeah, he would play a lot of the old school stuff from musicals and all the famous movies, the show tunes and stuff like that. Cole Porter, George Gershwin, all that stuff. He was playing all those standards. I didn't know it was jazz. I didn't recognize it as jazz. It was just music, everything was music. My mom was really into jazz as well. She was frustrated; she wanted to learn to play piano and just never had the time. And she could play a little bit of electric bass. But she was really into Sarah Vaughn. She had Erroll Garner records. And then she was really into Dave Brubeck, which I found out later, but she got me interested, when I got a little bit older, in a lot of the old big band stuff—Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller Orchestra, all that stuff, which was actually good.
The swing era.
The swing era, yeah. And that's a lot of what we ended up, when I got into the high school jazz band, that was some of the first stuff that we played. I think a lot of high school bands know that stuff, because it's pretty classic. And because those bands like, you know, the kids who are in jazz band are also in concert band. And so there's a lot of kids that play clarinet, and it made sense to play that music with clarinet. The Glenn Miller stuff has gotten out in it. So yeah, that was some of the first jazz that I remember really listening to and being like, ‘okay, this is jazz, and I like this.’ Especially the Dave Brubeck stuff, which I was really fortunate that my mom hipped me to him. Because that was, you know, stuff in five. (odd time signatures)
What was it? Time Out?
Yeah, Time out is the classic record. I had a Dave Brubeck Greatest Hits tape that she bought for me. So it had stuff from all the different records. But yeah, great drummer Joe Morello, obviously, and just a ton of different feels on that music. They're playing really fast sambas and they’re playing bossas, they're playing in 9/8, you know, Blue Ronda a la Turk is in nine, Take Five, all that stuff and lots of waltzes. It just all felt natural to me, like I said, out of what I grew up hearing.
And my dad used to practice the accordion at least an hour a day, every day without fail. And once I got old enough,a and I had the school snare drum, I would practice with him. So he would just have me playing drums along with him. So I think when I was in like fourth or fifth grade, we had a talent show. And I played a duet with my dad.
That’s really sweet.
I wanted to ask about your professional life as a musician. How did you get started?
So I was really lucky that I went to a middle school which was sixth, seventh and eighth grade. Sixth grade had a band and one teacher, and then seventh and eighth grade had a different teacher. He was also the band director for the high school bands, which was really fortunate because he met me in seventh grade, and already saw that I was talented and really driven. So he gave me lots of opportunities to do harder things. And then he knew that I was going to be destined to be in jazz band. So up to that point, I had learned how to read music and how to play drums in the school curriculum, the public school curriculum. I had never hadn't studied with anyone privately. And when it came to drumset, I think by that point, in middle school, my parents bought me a real drum set. Not an expensive one, but not a kid's drum set. A real drum set and a couple of cymbals. And so I was teaching myself how to play the drum set, which I had already kind of been doing up to that point. I remember setting up my own, I had this metal shelf that I used as a cymbal, you know, and I would put my foot on the ground and had a little practice pad on the table. I was doing whatever I could to simulate playing drums until I got the drum set. And then I was teaching myself and I was playing all kinds of music, I was playing jazz, but I was playing rock and pop music.
So yeah, it was the summer before my freshman year of high school, my band director said, ‘if you want to be in jazz band, you have to take lessons.’ And he connected me with the guy that he studied with in college, who I've just really fortunate happened to be like the number one jazz drummer in Cleveland, and the guy who taught everybody. Going back to the 30s and 40s. So he was in his late 60s, early 70s when I started studying with him. So he had a really well defined curriculum, like here's how to turn someone into a jazz drummer. So yeah, I started taking lessons with him. It was a half hour lesson every Saturday morning all summer long, leading up to freshman year. And probably by about halfway through my freshman year of high school, he just said, there's nothing more I can teach you. Because I absorbed it like a sponge. I was just waiting for it, and I worked hard. Those days, I was practicing six, seven hours a day on school days. And let alone on weekends. That's all I did, play drums all day long. All day and night. We had a basement, the drumset was in the basement, the piano was right next to the drums. So I just went down, locked myself in the basement, and my mom would have to come down and flick the lights on and off to get my attention so that I would eat something.
What drove you to be so passionate about the drums?
I don’t know. I wish I could explain it. It's just there. When you find something you love to do, it's not work.
It's funny, I've had this discussion with some other people, I've had these thoughts kicking around in my mind, and let me know if this is too much of an offshoot and doesn't pertain to what you're talking about. But the word that gets thrown around whenever you're young and good at something is ‘Oh, you're so talented,’ or it's like that God given thing. You were blessed with this talent.
And at this point in my life, I've come to realize that I don't believe that talent exists. You're not just talented. You're not just good at something. I was passionate about it. And you've probably heard of Malcolm Gladwell, he has that estimate of 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. I probably had 10,000 hours by the time I was five years old. Obviously not with a teacher and a mentor, but I was listening to music voraciously and trying to understand it as much as a kid that age could. So yeah, by the time I was in high school, I had 20,000 hours. And at that point, I had studied with someone and was in a curriculum. When I started studying with the guy I had been doing so much work up to that point, and understood so much. And he was like, let me just translate it for you. Let me just correct this and correct that. Boom. Okay, there you go. The statue was there, and he shaved off a few extra pieces and was like, boom, now it's done. So that's what I think of talent.
Talent is a good word, I guess that we have to use to describe some people. But really, for me it was just a lot of hard work. But it didn't seem hard because I loved it. So for me, practicing eight hours a day didn't seem like ‘Oh, God, I have to do this.’ I think what a lot of people struggle with when learning an instrument is, ‘oh, I have to play scales’ and ‘I have to play rudiments and this boring stuff’. And I probably didn't do that a lot. I built up the ability to do that by just playing along with records and trying to figure it out, because I did so much of that foundational work on my own. And when I got with the drum teacher, I was a little frustrated because he was like, ‘Yeah, you're gonna play this exercise in this book.’ And you're gonna keep timing in this hand and play these rhythms here and do this academic kind of stuff, right. But once I got over the initial frustration, it became fun. It became a game almost, like how quickly can I get this together?
I’d love to hear about your early professional experience playing the drums.
Yeah, well, like I was leading up to about halfway through my freshman year of high school, my teacher said, there's nothing more I can teach you here. You got to start playing gigs. And he made a phone call. There was a great jazz club in Cleveland at the time called the Bop Stop. It was owned by a musician, he was a really good vibraphonist and he had a jam session every Sunday night. So my drum teacher called him and said I'm gonna send one of my best students, just so you know he's coming. And I came in that first Sunday night and it was a good rhythm section—Ron Bush was the vibes player, he was playing. I don't remember who was playing bass. But the drummer who was another mentor of mine, Val Kent, a great Cleveland drummer, who was also a student of my teacher, Bob McKee, was playing drums. And so they let me sit in. I played three or four tunes. And at the end of the night, Val, the drummer, said, “you want the gig? It's yours.” Because he didn't need a Sunday night gig making 50 bucks playing, you know, behind 1000 horn players. He was recording jingles, he was a full on musician making a good living. He was great. I can tell you stories about him. He actually played with Bill Evans. Bill Evans tried to take him out on tour to be part of his trio, and he couldn't do it. He had to say no, because his mother was ill and had to take care of his mother, which is sad, but he was that level of drummer. So he gave me the gig. I'm 14 and a half years old. And so now I have this thing every Sunday, and I'm gonna go and play with a professional rhythm section of guys who were in their 30s and 40s, and every great musician in town was coming through playing this jam session. It was a real butt-whooping. They're just calling all these tunes, every standard in the book that you're expected to know. And I'm totally wet behind the ears, and at the end of the night, I'd be like, ‘Wow, what song was that? What album should I listen to?’ And then Ron, who was like a mentor to me, he was like, ‘Okay, you got to get this, you gotta get Kind of Blue, Four and More, My Funny Valentine, all these classic miles albums. I may have mentioned this before, when I was coming up, the 60s Miles quintet was the height of what you could try to sound like and try to mimic. So everyone was playing those standards and those arrangements and trying to have that vibe. So that kick started it, then I met every musician in town through that gig and then Ron ended up giving me a Wednesday night regular gig for my own group. And I had made good friends with a young piano player who was my age who had a very similar story. He was also really passionate and “talented,” if you will, from a young age. So he and I became thick as thieves. And we had a trio with various other professional bass players. We were really into Chick Korea, so we pursued that whole thing. I was working four or five nights a week, because everybody was calling me. (17:40)
At this point were you still living in Painesville?
Still living in Painesville. My mom was driving me to gigs every night of the week. The day I turned 16, they found me some shitty used car and they were like: ‘here, you’re driving yourself.
At what point did you become independent?
Well, I mentioned my health struggle last night. So that severely impacted me. When I graduated high school, I had a full ride to Youngstown State University for music and I pulled out of the last second. I went down there and I auditioned, I met the guy who ran the program. They really wanted me. And I was just like, you know, Youngstown, was like a 45 minute drive away from Painesville, an hour from Cleveland or more, and I though: I'm never going to play be able to play gigs in Cleveland, I'll be too far away, and I'll be playing with students all the time. And I just know how that's going to be; that I'm probably going to be one of the better students in the program, if not the best. So it's a question of, Do I want to go and do that? Or do I want to stay here where I'm playing with people who are way better than me every night, I'm getting my butt kicked, and I'm really learning. And that just seemed like the right thing. So I turned that down. And I got offered another free ride at a community college in Cleveland called Tri-C. And that was with one of my mentors at the time, Ernie Cribdon, who was a great saxophonist. He was running that program. So I started doing that for a while, but I eventually quit doing that too, because it was clear to me that they were trying to start the program and they needed some people that could already play. And I was getting asked to do free gigs all over town on behalf of the university. It was a weird position to be in when you've been making money at it since you were 14. Now you're 18 and playing with the best musicians in town.
So yeah, I lived with my parents, and my parents got a divorce when I was 18, so it was really just my mom. I stayed living with her until I was 19, and that's when I got ill and ended up having the heart transplant at 21. And it was about a couple of years of recovery. So probably when I was like 23, I finally was stable and healthy enough, I ended up moving out and getting my own place. And at first I lived in Cleveland Heights above a dry cleaner with five other musicians. We had 2 two-bedroom apartments and we rented both of them the whole top floor of this dry cleaner, which was cool because during the day, it was busy and noisy, and we could just play music all day. We converted the living room of one of the apartments into our rehearsal space, and we just had drums setup, amps, everything. And all we did was just play 24/7, and we had gigs in the area and whatnot. So yeah, that was the start of living on my own.
So during the time of your first heart transplant, I’m sure there was a time where you couldn’t play much, is that right? How was it coming back after that?
Yeah, from 19 to 22 or so I didn’t play. There were a lot of challenges. My body was wrecked from being so ill. So I had a lot of health challenges just to get the strength and stamina to even be able to walk, let alone play the drums, which is physically pretty grueling. But obviously,
And it felt great. I never quit thinking about music, and I played a lot more piano when I was sick because I could do that. So I think I got better as a musician. I was transcribing all kinds of music for those couple of years when I was sick and wasn't able to do anything. Transcribing all my favorite Chick Corea albums that I had listened to and always wanted to.
So you never stopped thinking about music.
I never stopped thinking about music, I just couldn’t play the drums physically.
Coming back, how was your professional life as a musician?
Thankfully, the music community is fairly big, but it also feels small in Cleveland. I mean, I knew everybody, every working jazz musician, there's probably a couple hundred. Everyone welcomed me back to the scene with open arms once I was physically able to play and kind of went back to where I was. I was working with a lot of close friends on a regular basis that were writing a lot of original music. One of them, Bobby Selvaggio, was constantly writing. He's maybe five years older than me. I was in his group for like a decade. He was always pushing the envelope writing really difficult creative music. So we recorded a number of albums together, toured all over the US. At some point, I don't remember how old I was, maybe 25, I signed up for the Banff International Jazz camp up in Banff, Alberta, Canada, which is near Calgary, in the Canadian Rockies. It's a jazz camp that Kenny Wheeler and Dave Holland started in the 70s. And they have it every year, they still have it. You pay tuition and go for three weeks, and you study with Dave Holland. He brings in a whole host of other great musicians; you have to audition. I found out about it through Joe Lovano, who is from Cleveland. He always comes home for the holidays, so I used to play with him once a year during December. So he was like, ‘You need to go to his camp. I'm going to be teaching there.’ So I auditioned for the camp. It was really funny, this is back before the technology we have now. I had some shitty tape deck and recorded a couple of songs of myself playing and I was really fortunate that I had the greatest musicians in Cleveland playing with me. I recorded a couple of audition songs, sent it along, and got accepted. I was one of 75 people or so from all over the world.That was a great three weeks. Dave Holland was there, Joe Lovano. Ari Hoenig I studied with him on drums. Kenny Werner—I have a close connection with him through that whole thing. And I met this German pianist. There were three German guys there. No, two. The other one was a guitar player but they both knew each other. One was from Berlin, one was from Cologne. We just hit it off musically and personality wise right away.
They had this huge, almost like herding cattle process. When everyone got there, they had all 70 musicians and started randomly picking people and throwing them up on stage, putting together groups and having everyone play a song. And we know everyone's good, but let's start to filter people. And so the piano player, Andreas, and I got randomly called up to play together. We're playing some tune, and I’m playing and I realized after a while that every time I hit the snare drum, the piano was comping right with me. And I went over, I opened my eyes and peeked at him, and he winked at me. And he was just watching me like a hawk and listening to everything I was doing. I was like, ‘holy shit, I've never had someone so interested in what I'm doing.’ So we became friends immediately. And so for those three weeks we hung out together; we were thick as thieves.
He had a ton of original music, we formed a group, we played every day, we did a couple of concerts. That was really great. And then a week after I got back, he called me up and said, ‘I want you in my band, I'm going to record an album. I got to deal with the record label here. How does spring sound for a tour of Europe?’ And that was the start of that whole relationship, which was amazing. From that point on, I started going to Europe and touring Europe every year for like four or five years. Playing all of his original music, we recorded two albums. We played all over Germany, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland. I met tons of great European musicians. I was the only American. Well, originally, I brought a bass player with me who I had lived with above that cleaners, but things ended up not working out with him, so we found a German bass player. So for the latter part of that whole experience, I was the only American in the band. Everyone else was German. But they were the best musicians in Germany. I made lots of other friendships, I would play jam sessions. If we went into a town we played a gig. If there was a jam session, the next day, we would hang out, meet all these other musicians and play. It was a really thrilling part of my life.
I would love to hear more about that experience. What were the audiences like in Europe?
Incredible. I've described to you already this playing five, six nights a week throughout high school, getting back to that again after my illness. But when I say playing five or six nights a week, I don't mean playing concert halls in front of 300 people where you could hear a pin drop. I'm talking about playing atshitty bars and restaurants, where you think people are listening and then you realize, oh, no, the football games on a TV right behind me and that's what they're looking at. And Cleveland is a blue collar working town, a sports town. The deep appreciation for jazz is few and far between there. So I've played a lot of gigs in my life where no one's listening. Or even, they're just talking louder so that they don't have to hear you.
So Europe was really refreshing. Every gig was packed, sold out. I remember we set up a gig in Cologne—there was one really cool music venue in Cologne called the shock garden, the city garden. There was a recording studio that was a loft on top of the building. We set up a gig there once. We transformed the studio into a listening space, almost like a Snarky Puppy before Snarky Puppy. But there weren't a lot of places, so I remember one of the years, Andreas went to this one restaurant and said ‘Would you be interested in letting us play and have a concert,’ and the restaurant agreed. So they swapped things around and made it a stage area. I couldn't believe it, I remember showing up and playing. I'm like 25 at this point and 90% of the audience was my age or younger. I was the youngest guy in the band; Andreas was 10 years older than me, almost everyone else was older than me. The whole place was packed with young people.
I remember, we played a set, took a break and there was a line of 30 people just to meet me. To buy a CD and have me autograph it. I'm not kidding. I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ Because next week, I'm gonna be playing a gig in Cleveland where they're going to be watching football over my head and not even hearing me.It was a totally different experience, and young people! And every young person that I met was so interested in the music and knowledgeable about it. They could name 10 different jazz artists. They could name songs, they had albums. I think the music education in Europe was so much higher than it is here; that the importance of being educated in music as a part of history. It's an indelible part of European history, right? Classical music tradition there shapes history.
I know we're going to get to this too, but jazz is our classical music. It should be taught in history courses here. Everything that happened in history has had its reflection in jazz. So I was just shocked. I remember Andreas’ girlfriend—he had a much younger girlfriend, she was even younger than me, which is pretty crazy. So I got to know her pretty well. She was like, 22, and had just graduated college. Man, she knew more about music than I did, at least about classical composers and symphonies and all this stuff.
31:15
So there was more of an emphasis on music education in Europe?
The general population; the average person in Europe knows way more than the average person here. That's just the fault of our public education. I feel like they're much more well rounded educationally. The average person knows, is made to listen to classical music and made to learn about and understand it and know who the famous composers are, and know their famous symphonies. So when you put a couple of jazz records in their hand, it's not like this big learning curve to understand it, they can plug right into it and go ‘oh, cool, like I can hear.’ Because obviously, jazz music has classical music infused in it.
Like I said, we were playing concerts all over the place where you could hear a pin drop. Everyone was hanging on every note that we were playing, and they couldn't wait to come up and talk to us afterwards. And I'll never forget one gig we played. This was after we recorded our first album, and we had a tune that was fairly complicated. It went back and forth between 3/4 and 4/4 time and had a lot of metric modulation. And this guy came up to us; he had transcribed the song, he had the record. He transcribed the song, and he said, ‘This is what I think you're doing. Would you tell me, did I get it right?’ And Andreas handed it to me and said, ‘did he get it right?’ I looked at it and I was like, ‘okay, yeah.’ He wanted to check his math, that’s it: ‘Did I understand what you guys were doing correctly?’. Someone transcribed a song that I recorded because it was so far above his level that he wanted to learn and understand it. That was pretty crazy to experience that.
What do you think are obstacles for audiences in the US listening to jazz?
It’s education, and even just exposure. Maybe it's different now, but not once during my education did anyone ever in any classroom ever play a jazz record or mention a jazz musician. Not once. Obviously, when I was in the jazz band we talked about it, but even then my band director didn't know anything about jazz. And listening wasn't made to be a requirement. I was the only person in my high school, and I'm pretty sure that this is correct, I was the only person in my high school of 400 kids that listened to jazz. I was on an island by myself.
Did that feel isolating?
Yeah, totally. I said this many times, I was a stranger in my own generation. My wife is only a year younger than me. She talks about all this great music from the 90s ‘Oh, this song, this song.’ I don't remember any of that shit because that was not on my radar. I was not listening to anything pop music oriented from 90 to 94. When I was in high school, it was nothing but jazz. So I don't even remember the 90s in terms of popular culture; I was not in it. I was in 60s Miles Davis, Chick Corea and Return to Forever, that's where my head was. So it was yeah, it was pretty isolating. That's a big challenge. If you can go through our entire public school system here to 18 years of age and no one's ever even mentioned a jazz musician to you, let alone play it, how are you going to go down the street to Revolver and hear a jazz group and connect with it and understand it, or even have a sense of what it is? I've played gigs where people come in and they look at you like ‘what the fuck are you playing? This is so totally irrelevant.’ And it's like what? It's so totally relevant actually, you just have no idea. So that's a big problem in this country. If it were taught in history classes, which it easily could be, if you're going to teach kids about slavery and the emancipation of slaves, jazz fits right in. That's the birth of jazz.
Yeah, it’s so intertwined with the cultural history of America.
It is American history. The story of jazz is the story of American history. At least one huge part of it. So that would help, that would definitely help. I know a lot of people when they go to college, they take a music appreciation class, and that's probably the first music appreciation class they've ever taken. And it seems like no matter where you go, I've been to a lot of cities, there's always the kids that will show up because they're required to go hear a jazz show as part of their music appreciation class. And I remember getting this all the time. We would get off of our set and some kid would come up with their paper and I’d be like, ‘Okay, I know you're the kid from the community college. That's taking the music appreciation class. Yeah, you're gonna ask everyone's name and what were the three of the songs that we played.
Even now, there’s the UCSB Listening to Jazz class that requires the students to listen to the UCSB Jazz Ensemble play.
Which, I don't know any other way to do it. There’s nothing wrong with that, I'm just saying, if you're 18, or 19, and that's your first exposure to it, it's kind of too late. You know what I mean? Like, my son is not gonna be a musician. He's not interested in music that way. But he loves music. He hears music every day in the car, I'm playing jazz every day when I pick him up. So he knows it. I hear him humming along with it. He hears the melodies and picks him up. So yeah, when he's in college, if someone says, ‘Let's go hear some live music,’ he's going to be down. He's well prepared for it, because he's grown up hearing it. But that's just not the case for everyone. And I just think as a society, we shouldn't just leave it up to the random parents that prioritize music in the household. I just think music is too important for that, that everyone should be exposed to it. It could be part of every year of your public schooling. There could be a music component that's in your history class, your cultural studies class, math class, why not? Music is math. The physics of sound. You could take physics and bring it in.
I’d like to bring it back to your professional career. We were talking about the differences of audiences. What about coming back and continuing professionally? How much longer were you playing professionally?
I played until I moved here in 2009 when I was 33. So yeah, I was playing from, at least a year after my first transplant. So from 22 to 33 years, 11 straight years of playing music. I mentioned it to you last night, after a while, I realized that I needed health insurance. I needed to have a day job, there was just no way I could keep going on and playing music, and I had developed this passion for graphic design and photography throughout my hiatus from music while I was sick. I was doing music and photography and graphic design all at the same time and really loving both and marrying both worlds. Musicians became clients because they needed CD album art, and they needed photography. After a while, I realized this is the same part of my brain. I'm still expressing myself creatively, it's just a different medium. So I was really heavily into both, but I ended up getting a job as a graphic designer. And then I was able to scale down the playing. As I mentioned last night, when you're trying to make a living exclusively from playing. And I never taught. I think it's because of the way I grew up; I didn't study with anyone until I was like 14. Everything for me was intuitive. I learned on my own. So I've never been really good at explaining to someone else how to do what I do. At that point in my life, at 37 years old, the majority of it was done 30 plus years ago. All of the foundation was built longer ago than I can remember. So if someone came to me and said, ‘Could you teach my five year old son drums?’ I'd be like, ‘No, I just don't, I can't do that. I can't start from there.’ So I didn't teach all I did was play. And that means you cannot say no to any gig you have to play everywhere. If you can get two gigs in a day, three gigs in a day you do it. Because you need it. Because you don't know when all of a sudden, you know, especially like holiday time of year, all of a sudden it’s cold, especially in Cleveland. There's a blizzard, gigs canceled. Five feet of snow. If you don't have a day job, you're like, ‘Well, shit I'm out 100 bucks, I might not make rent this month.’ So you take every single gig you can. So once I got the day job, I was like, ‘Well, I don't have to play every gig.’ I can say no to the people that I don't want to play with, and only prioritize the gigs that I really want to. And that's what I did. I ended up scaling back to maybe two or three times a week, only playing with my really close friends and the best musicians in town. One of them was every Friday night at a Brazilian restaurant playing Brazilian music with a guitar trio. My good friend, Kip Reed is an incredible bass player who toured with Tanya Maria, one of the foundational Brazilian artists of the 80s. So he moved to town after my first transplant when I was in my mid 20s, and we really became close friends. He's like, he's maybe 10-15 years older than me. But he was like, another musical hero and mentor of mine taught me everything about Brazilian music, all the grooves. We used to get together and shed and he just was like, ‘here's the baseline, here's what you need to play.’ And, and so another good friend of ours, Gary April, who played guitar, we formed a Brazilian group. That was one of the one of my favorite gigs. Playing every Friday night, playing Brazilian music at a restaurant, getting free dinner, free drinks, and 100 bucks. And with really good musicians, and we were rehearsing a couple times a month, adding new tunes to the repertoire, and new arrangements. And when you're playing with really good musicians like that, some things develop naturally over time. When you have a long span of gigs to play together regularly. You're playing one tune, and one night, one of the players plays something and you're like, ‘Oh, that was hip.’ Then it starts to become part of the arrangement over time. It starts to solidify, that's hip enough that we should do that every time. So a lot of your arrangements develop over time, and they evolve. And that's a really fun thing to be a part of. I was lucky to have that experience.
I had another regular gig with a different guitar player, Bob Peraza, the same bass player, Kip, but we just played jazz standards out of the Wes Montgomery vibe. And we played every Wednesday night for years. It became so tight after a while that there was almost no verbal communication. Bob, the guitar player, could just start playing and you know what tune it’s gonna be, I’m in. Nobody had to go, ‘Okay, here's the setlist.’ It was just organic. We just showed up and we made music all night long. So those were really valuable gigs to play, to clean out all of the bad gigs and just focus on the ones where I'm really learning something from this. I'm really developing as a musician here.
42:47
So it was a good thing then, getting a day job.
Oh yeah, absolutely, I realized that after a while. I’m calmer, less angry.
Health insurance.
Yeah, I have health insurance. I’m actually making really good money as a graphic designer.
And continuing to play.
Yeah, continuing to play. The one drawback was a lot less time to practice because now I'm 40 hours a week or more. Actually at that first job, I was encouraged to work overtime. I was hourly, so I was working 60 hour weeks. But then I also found that the gig was actually a little sweeter. When you've worked so hard all week and this is what you've been longing for. And you have a lot of shit to get off your chest. There's something about music that, you need to be communicating something to the audience. So you gotta have a story to tell. You can build up that story by working a job that, even though it was graphic design and I was interested in it, as the years went on (I worked there for five years), I got to a point where I wasn't really happy working there. So yeah, I couldn’t wait for those gigs.
When did you move to Santa Barbara.
That was 2009. Yeah, that was after five years of doing that job. I was like, 'I think I really love photography and I want that to be my main source of money outside of music. And I'm just gonna go to school.’ I just googled and found what's the best photography school in the country and it was Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara. I couldn't even have found Santa Barbara on a map at that point, I didn't know anything about California. I was from the Midwest and East. We went to New York, we didn't go to LA.
That’s a big move.
Huge move. I was married already at the time for a couple of years. So my wife Marge and Ihad a great life. She she had a nice gig, we had a lot of money, we were comfortable financially, playing good gigs. We were like upper echelon in Cleveland and we traded all that to be pioneers, if you will, and get in our wagon and go to the West Coast and try to make a better life. And the really shocking thing that happened was that I was signed up, ready to go to school, and then we found out she was pregnant. I almost said no. We sat down, and we were like ‘We shouldn't do this. We don't know anyone in California. We’re gonna go there and have a baby all alone?’ I just remember growing up my parents, I mean, I'm thankful they were very supportive of me being a musician because not everyone's parents are. They were always like, ‘You know, you can be anything you want to be.’ It's the cheesy American Dream. There's some truth to it. It's not as true, not as easy as it sounds, but I knew that my mom never followed her dreams and was miserable because of it. And so I just said to my wife, ‘If we're going to have a child, and we're going to tell him that same sentiment, I don't want it to be a lie. I want to prove to him that it's true. So let's go.’ And she agreed. We hopped in the car, and she was three months pregnant. We drove across the country and landed here and I started photography school full time. She gave birth to our son, Eddie, three months later. She was a full time mom and I was in college for three years just busting my butt. Scraping by. It took everything we had to make that happen. That was the start of our California experience.
Wow. So three years in photography school. What was music like for you then?
I didn't play at all then. I was busting my ass to be the best photography student I could be. And it was good. I graduated magna cum laude. I had top grades. I really loved it, you know? And it's interesting. Like I said, I turned down a full scholarship to music school at 18. Now, I’m 33 and I'm going to college and I'm paying for it. I could have had a free BA or BFA. So yeah, I was motivated. I was one of the few students in that school that was like, ‘I know why I'm here. And I'm gonna bust my ass and get everything I can out of this.’ And I did. And it was great. But I didn't play music at all during that time. A little bit. I found a couple of people. I just happened to stumble on some people on State Street who were playing a gig. And unfortunately, they were not the greatest musicians in town. I played a few games with them, but it was too painful. And so I was just like, ‘You know what I'd rather just not play.’ And that was it. I didn't play at all.
After I graduated, I was so focused on running my business and then eventually getting another day job. I found a job at a company in town where I was an art director, which was the perfect marriage of all my skills. I was doing product photography for them, and videography and graphic design.
Is that company still around?
Yeah, it's called ErgoMotion. They make adjustable beds. They’re really. Think of a hospital bed but a really nice one that you would buy for your home.
Did you get free products?
Well, next to free. I have a $10,000 mattress and we paid $800 for it.
That’s quite the discount.
Yeah, it was a discount.
So I started working there, and I didn’t play for about 7 years.
When did you back into playing?
Yeah. So I mentioned that when I went to Banff, Kenny Warner was there. So I had this relationship with Kenny Werner and I saw that he was going to be playing at Catalinas in LA, so I planned to go down and hear him but I emailed them ahead of time and said ‘Hey, I'm going to bring a camera and take some photos. Is that cool with you?’ and it was cool.
The band was him, Randy Brecker, Scott Colley, and Antonio Sanchez. Incredible band. Oh, and David Sanchez.. Killing band. They were there for two nights. I went both nights, brought my camera, took a bunch of photos. One of the nights I sat at a table with two other young guys and we just started rapping and they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we're grad students at CSU Fullerton. And so we exchanged information. I gave them my business card, we became friends on social. I saw that they were doing a jam session in Brea, California. And this just happened to coincide with holiday time and my wife and son were going to the Philippines to visit family and I was gonna stay home alone for like a month and a half. I was like, ‘Well, I got a month and a half. What I'm going to do with myself.’
I hadn't thought about music in such a long time, but I just heard that amazing concert and I met some grad students and they had a jam session. I was like, ‘You know what, I'm gonna try playing music again. That seven year hiatus really destroyed me emotionally, not playing music. You know, I came to the realization that as much as I love photography and I want to do photography, I can't not have music in my life. I have to do both. So yeah, that was the first opportunity that I saw. I didn't know any of the good musicians in Santa Barbara, so I was like, whatever I'm gonna drive. I have no commitments here. Just a cat that I need to take care of, but he’s cool. So yeah, I drove to that first jam session, long-ass drive, rush hour traffic, took me like four hours to get there. I walked in, and these guys only thought I was a photographer. I walked in with a stick bag and they were like, ‘What are you doing?’ I told them I was a drummer, can I sit in? And they just had no idea what to expect. I didn't either to be honest, because I had not touched the drums in seven years. I just sat down and we just played like, three standards, and they were completely blown away. And there's a recording of it online, I can find and send to you. There's still a recording. He had one of these zoom recorders just set it up and recorded it. Yeah, that was literally the first time I had played the drumset in seven years.
51:16
So how did things change afterwards, when coming back?
That basically restarted my career. It felt amazing. It was great. I went back to that jam session like three or four times. I actually started a group with those guys, there's a bunch of videos online of us, we played a gig at Vitello’s in LA. I can send you links to this stuff, you'll get a kick out of it. Really complicated, original music of theirs. And actually, what happened was, I played a couple of gigs with them and I had to like part ways because, maybe they saw something in me, they wanted to play with me, obviously. But I was just like, ‘man, your music's too hard for me at this point. Like I haven't played in seven years.’ And unfortunately, it was this realization that my life is just a lot different now. I'm not 23 with a drumset in my basement and I can’t just practice anytime I want. I have these long work weeks, and then I drive two or three hours down to play a gig with them and this music is in five and it’s in seven and you know, the music is like 10 pages long taped together, through-composed. Brilliant, really nice music. I really enjoyed it, but it was fucking hard. And I just said, ‘I'm sorry, I can't do this anymore. It's too hard. It's too much driving. It's too much commitment. And it's too hard. And, and even if you guys think it's good, like, I don't think I'm playing my best.’ But it was fine, and then inadvertently what happened through that was, a musician up here in Ventura was looking for a drummer last minute and was calling everybody. He couldn't find anyone and he called some people in LA, he called one of the drummers who had played on that jam session that I went to. And that guy was like, ‘Well, I'm not available, but you should call Matt Perko. He lives in Santa Barbara, how do you not know him?’ It's like one of those weird things because nobody knew me up here. When I came here, I was just a photographer, so I was completely unknown to the better jazz community in this area.
53:34
55:00
What do you think is the importance of a jam session?
Well, we live in a time now where you can go to any college and study jazz. Almost every major university has a jazz program. Anyone that has a serious music program has some way you can play or learn jazz. And then obviously, there's the big jazz schools. But that wasn't always the case. That wasn't until maybe the 60s or the 70s, that college just started teaching jazz as part of the curriculum. So how did you learn it before that? You had to study privately with someone. You had to figure it out on your own. You know, it's interesting now that I'm in photography and graphic design, which are also very similar. You can study graphic design, but how do you know if your shit is any good? You gotta share it with people and get critiqued, and get feedback.
And so that’s what a jam session is for?
It’s a place for up and coming young musicians to put themselves out there and get feedback from their elders and to play with people that are way better than them and learn everything about it. Learn how to act on stage, how to act offstage, how to address the crowd over the microphone, all these things. Show biz! Jazz music is showbiz. It still is. It always was a performance-based live music kind of thing. Sure there's many famous jazz recordings, but that's not the way to really experience it. The way to experience it is to hear it live. And it's showbiz.
So you learn all of those different aspects when you're around guys that are twice, three times your age. You just see how they handle themselves as men and women. When you're a young kid and you're coming up, it's important to see these are your role models in life. And that's certainly how you learn to play music. Then you find a musician that plays your instrument, and you show up to the jam session, they hear you and then you study with them privately. You learn on stage with them, but then you also learn privately at their home. And it really was the only way to learn how to play jazz back then, and I still think it's the best way to do it, despite it being available at all these different universities that offer a valid way to learn it, but I still think a lot of people that go through any of those curriculums still have to end up doing the jam session and studying privately anyway.
What is your opinion on getting a degree in music or jazz performance?
Yeah, it's a difficult question. I'll be honest, I don't know that it offers… I mean, it depends on what type of student you are. It really does. And this is actually true of almost any artistic discipline. It's not true of the sciences. If you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or any kind of scientist, you got to go to school for that, because the network that you would try to enter into is based on that. But if you want to be a photographer or a painter, any kind of artist, any kind of musician, does anyone ever really care what your grades were or what school you went to? Show me your work. Can you play? So if you can get a good deal going to school and not bankrupt yourself… We talked about this last night, too. Are you going to be rich playing jazz? No, you're not. So do you want to be in student loan debt up to your eyeballs because you went to jazz school? The only opportunity you're going to get from getting that piece of paper is going out and getting the next one, the MA, and then being able to teach in a college. Other than that, it offers you no monetary incentive, in terms of a career.
Perhaps networking could be part of it?
Sure, you can network, but you're going to network with people, your age, your peers. You’re missing out on networking with the professionals. That's what you get from being part of the scene. Not every city has the same kind of scene. I think LA is a lot different than Cleveland, because LA is really big and really spread out. Cleveland was like—you know all the spots that are having jazz, and you could drive around all of Cleveland in an hour. It’ll take you eight hours in LA to drive all to all the different places. So in Cleveland, it was very possible to know everyone in the scene and to show up to all these gigs and be part of it, be part of the community, insert yourself into the community. ‘Hi, I'm a young up and coming jazz musician. I'm going to start showing up. I'm going to start paying respect to my elders by listening to them and asking them questions. And then eventually they'll ask me to sit in.’ Even the concept of a jam session. Yeah, there's actual established jam sessions, but people sit in on gigs all the time, maybe in the last set, the last couple of tunes. That's a tradition. You know, then you get to play with the band, the professional rhythm section. It's way better than any rhythm section you would play with in a college environment. I don't want to sound like I'm down on it necessarily, but I guess I kind of am. But I also have a biased perspective, because I didn't go to school for music. Had I gone to school for music, would I have a much more well rounded education? Of course. I would know a lot more about music than I do in a well rounded sense. But I would know less about the specific things that I know a lot about, because I chose to study that on my own. And I studied with musicians that did those things really well. And I said, this is what I want to learn. In the end, if you want to be a successful musician, artist or anything, it's not about being generic. It's about being hyper stylized, and personal and unique. And being yourself.
How does one “be themself” in jazz?
Everyone is unique. There's nothing you can do about that. We could all study the exact same thing and still when you play, you're going to be unique. There are obviously some things you can do to strengthen that. One of the things is just being honest with yourself about what it is you really like. I don't like every jazz musician in history equally. I don't like every album equally. I don't like every time period equally. I think there's a myth in jazz that you have to be a historian of the music, and you need to know how to play exactly like Art Blakey, and exactly like Sonny Stitt, and all this stuff. And I'm like, do you? Who are you proving it to when you do that? I think you should follow your ears and your heart, if you will, and listen to the stuff that strongly appeals to you. Study the stuff that causes you the most anxiety by not knowing. Then you find concepts that certain people are doing that you start to unlock. And you go, ‘Well, I can take this further.’ I've said this many times: the more you learn about music, the more you realize how little you understand about it. It just goes infinitely deep. You can go in any direction to infinity and never learn at all.
So being honest about what are the things that you really like. I don't know how familiar you are with Ari Hoenig, the drummer. He’s like super into metric modulation and odd time signatures. I mean, I would say that he's 100% unique in jazz music as being, almost like a ridiculously far into that trajectory of a very specific way of playing jazz. And he can play traditionally too, but obviously he dedicated a crap ton of time to studying metric modulation and time, and really understanding it and practicing it like crazy. That's not something you're gonna find in academia. That's something you have to find on your own. Academia is going to try and water down and make sure everyone gets the same broad based education. It doesn't lend itself to individualism.