The Passage of Time / October 4, 2021
“Time has always been important to me, both in the musical context, and in the context of my life, how much time I have, and how I choose to spend it. It’s even more important now. I've been given more time. And this is the last chance I’ll get.
My recovery will take time, but each day I'm 1000x stronger than the previous. Like this image, the clouds are moving, whether you realize it or not.
And I think it’s a beautiful metaphor. It’s easy to get discouraged. You don’t always see the progress you are making. In my life as a musician I have hit many plateaus, feeling like I am stuck and no longer gaining. It can be difficult to ascertain what your next move will be. But even if you feel stuck, if you keep moving forward, you will keep progressing.
And since waking up from this surgery, I haven’t stopped moving and I do not intend to. I have many ideas, musical, artistic, many thoughts to express, and I will fearlessly express them.
I’ve been given more time.”
Matt Perko
The Beat of Borrowed Time
For a long time, I knew Matt Perko only as a name I could associate no face to, but that held a legendary status among my circle of musician friends. I was given small hints about this mysterious person—he was a drummer in Santa Barbara, and an extremely good one, according to everyone that knew him. The more I heard the name, the more eager I was to meet him. I couldn’t understand how we had yet to cross paths in a town as small as Santa Barbara, but my best guess was that he was constantly in and out of town, playing higher profile gigs than Santa Barbara could realistically offer. To fill in the spaces, my mind conjured up some image of this Matt Perko, a purely fictitious master of rhythm, drumsticks a blur as his arms moved around the kit. In reality, I didn’t have the slightest clue of what he actually looked like.
The first time I actually met him was at a bar in downtown Santa Barbara called Wyldeworks. It’s not your typical bar with draught beer on tap and 10 different sports games playing on 15 different TVs. Instead of beer, you could get drunk on hard kombucha and mead, and on your way out you might invest in a jar of honey with an artsy label. Instead of TVs, you could sit and examine the brick walls that held work from local artists, most of which depicted dreamlike fairytale scenes. Wyldeworks, in my honest evaluation, is the ultimate millennial bar.
Even though I missed the millennial cut-off by six years, I spent a lot of time at Wyldeworks, which in all reality drew quite a diverse crowd. But I wasn’t there for fancy drinks, whose sweetness could not mask my bitter distaste for alcohol. I was there for their live music.
Since opening, Wyldeworks has been a hub of music in Santa Barbara. On any given night, you could walk by, attracted by the sound of music, and find a band performing to an audience. It was a wonder how they got bands to play so often, until later learning the sad reality that without music, there would be very few people at Wyldeworks. On a rare night where no one is playing, Wyldeworks is quiet, only a few of the regulars chatting with bartenders who polish glasses to pass the time. Luckily, despite a brief sinking moment in 2023 that almost saw their closure, Wyldeworks patched up their financial crisis and has continued to hold space for the small but loud music community of Santa Barbara.
An even smaller part of the music community in Santa Barbara is the jazz community, which Wyldeworks has hosted on many occasions. It was there that I met Matt, some night a couple years ago, in the now discontinued “jazz night.” It was always the last Thursday of the month, and always the guitarist Anthony Camarota who hosted it, joined regularly by Matt on the drums and local bassist Guil Juliao. The night usually went like this: the band would play their own set for the first half of the night, a high-paced showing of skill and musicality, then they would open the floor for a jam session during the second half, meaning anyone who thought they had an inkling of talent could go on stage and show it. This often led to memorable moments of musical disaster, most of which I have been lucky enough to witness and not partake in.
Being my first time going, I left my saxophone at home. The idea of getting on stage with Anthony, Matt, and Guil terrified me, and I wanted to spare myself the potential embarrassment.
I took a seat by the wall and made out the faces of the group. This was the first time I actually ever saw them and, one by one, the names in the back of my mind were being given faces. There was Anthony, whose faded skinny jeans, muted flannel, and dark, sleek hair, made him look more like a punk-rocker than a jazz musician. He played a guitar that looked like if you had sharpened its edges, you could chop a tree in half. Even more unusual was a missing headstock making it look like it had been decapitated. While he played, his face was as still as stone peering off into a distant spot in a wall behind the audience. He played at a hundred miles per hour, and looked as if he might have been dodging imaginary bullets, his knees bending left, right, back and forth as. His fingers moved in concise sweeping motions from one end to the other of the guitar, all the while he held his stare, at times his facing turning red until he finally let out a breath at the end of his solo.
Then there was Guil on the bass, who was completely new to me. He was a tall Brazilian guy who made the electric bass sound like the hardest instrument to play, yet made it look like the easiest thing. When it was his turn to solo, he suddenly went into turbo mode, and the relaxed style turned into a fast, technical flurry of notes that made it look like he was playing a guitar rather than bass. After his solo, the crowd would clap, and each time he would give a tiny smile and nod his head.
Matt was centered between Anthony and Guil, and for most of the show, I just watched how he played the drums. More than ever, I was more interested in the how—the movements of the arms and wrist, the subtle expressions of face and body—than the resulting sound. It was an entire performance, the visual as important as the sound.
Visually, my imaginary Matt, who might as well have been a silhouette with a question mark on his face, dissipated behind black rimmed glasses, a t-shirt, skinny jeans, and sneakers. In all honesty, he looked like a nerdy dad. I suppose I didn’t know what to expect, being that my fictitious image of Matt Perko was being replaced by the real Matt Perko. And with that image was also the drum-playing.
My first impressions of the playing likely chalked up to my relative unfamiliarity with the drums at the time. Being a sax player, I was mostly concerned with sax-playing and had a better idea of what good sax players sounded like, not so much what a good drummer sounded like. At that point, playing with drummers was an experience that was mostly loud and somewhat uncomfortable, yet watching Matt play for the first time was nothing like that. His playing gave a sense of unity and musicality. He never hit the drums too hard, even when it looked like he put his whole body into the crash like it was a punching bag. It was a balanced sound unlike I had ever heard from the drums. [a couple more sentences about his playing]
I had the urge to go up there and play with him, almost wishing I had brought my saxophone with me, confident that his sound would carry my solo forward like a wave. At that moment, I had a premonition that perhaps I would one day bring that wish into reality one way or another.
I stayed the rest of the night, and once the jam session ended, I introduced myself, unaware that that moment would be the beginning of a longer relationship.
***
Thinking back to that fictional Matt Perko that lived in my mind before the real one replaced him, I realized I got many things wrong, as is the case when it comes to stories transmitted through various sources. Firstly, the biggest surprise to me at the time was when I found out that Matt wasn’t a full-time musician. His musical ability was beyond most of what I had seen in town. Matt was a giant fish in a small pond.
Knowing what I know now, this image of a full time musician in Santa Barbara, let alone a jazz musician, seems close to fiction. I held a certain idealistic view of a career in jazz music, one that believed that reaching a certain level of expertise meant I could make it in life. I didn’t quite consider the cost of living in Santa Barbara, and when I actually began to receive checks from gigs I began to play, the reality became even more bleak. Despite this, I came to realize that this music that Matt and I have dedicated so much time to comes from a deeper place. Little could steer us away from it, even if it tried.
***
But it is true that Matt Perko made a living playing music at one point. Not in Santa Barbara today, but in Ohio in the 1990s.
In my earliest encounters with Matt, ones which mostly took place at his gigs at Wyldeworks and Revolver Pizza, a pizza joint which hosted jazz every week, I was always drawn to the stories he would tell. This was always after the gig, late into the night when most people had gone home and only the musicians stuck around to chat.
It was at Revolver that I hazily recall this detail. Matt, leaning against the wall in the small square patio of Revolver, slice of pepperoni pizza in hand. The conversation must have been about living in Santa Barbara as a musician.
”You know, by the time I was 16, I had gigs every week, making enough money to pay for rent in Ohio.”
He continued on with the story, of which the memory is too hazy to call into full detail, but a story I would continue to think about, among the many others Matt would share over the next months. By that point, I was showing up to every one of his gigs that I could, sticking around late into the night until my eyelids could hardly stay up. I began to play at the jam session, staying longer and longer on the bandstand. Among Matt and the musicians he played with, I felt inspired and played my best. But most of all, I wanted to hear their stories.
***
I had my wish when I got the chance to interview Matt at his office at UCSB, nestled on the outer corner of a building on campus. It was a pain to find, and after 5 minutes of aimless wandering he stepped outside and signaled me down.
He welcomed me warmly, pulling out a seat at the round table set up in the middle of his office. Around me, photo equipment leaned against walls, shelves were full with books, a few Star Wars figurines posed about the space, and fittingly, a photo of saxophonist Wayne Shorter was taped on the back of his computer monitor, staring directly at me.
I felt strangely nervous, not by the photo of Wayne staring into the depths of my soul, but by the interview. By this point, I had known Matt for almost a year; I had watched him play countless times, even had the chance to play alongside him professionally, yet this was unlike any interaction we had before. I would have never pictured myself in this situation with him before I had the idea for this project, so being there felt like some sort of scene from a dream.
As I set up the audio recorder, I admitted that I hadn’t done an interview like this before, feeling my lack of experience getting to my head. He gave me a few words of encouragement, confident that the conversation would flow naturally. How he sat, leaning back and one leg resting on the other, gave me a sense of ease. I finished setting up the recorder, explained the project once more, and hit the record button.
“Hopefully I don’t say anything stupid,” was the first thing Matt said. Then we continued, going on an hour-and a half journey through his life.
***
“I was born in Painesville, Ohio in 1976, which I think makes me 47 years old.” He paused for a moment and smiled. “You stop doing the math accurately after like 35, maybe.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at the fact that the city he grew up in was called Painesville. It sounded like some move a wrestler in tights might do to their opponent while grunting and sweating. One-way ticket to painesville coming right up!
”The founder 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 only about 35 miles east of Cleveland. I’d go on school field trips to all the major museums, and then my parents would take me on the weekend if there were any special events. It was always something special.”
”Was music part of your childhood in Painesville?” I asked him, still laughing every time the name came to mind.
”Yeah. I’ve been listening to music for as long as I can remember. My dad played the accordion. His parents were first generation immigrants from Slovenia, so he played a lot of traditional Slovenian polka.” He started to pat out a beat on his thighs with his hands and humming a melody along to it. “He used to practice at least an hour a day, every day without fail.”
“And it was actually a pretty good precursor for jazz. He also played all kinds of pop music. He used to play solo gigs at wineries, taking requests from the audience. He played all kinds of jazz standards from the 40s to the 70s.”
“And we had a big record player. There’s a picture somewhere when I was 3. I had a long headphone extension cable and would just lay on the couch and listen to music all day long.” he told me.
To imagine a 3-year old so deeply invested in music is difficult for me, but hearing Matt speak about it in that moment, I could tell that the passion he has now must have been in him all along, even as a 3 year old, kicking his feet on the couch, headphones probably half the size of his head, and before he could even put into words what music was. The sounds must have burrowed deeply into him, seeds for a life that would cultivate a love for music growing endlessly.
***
Somewhere in the kitchen, there is a loud banging. A metal clank-crash-and-boom. Mother thinks it might be a burglar ransacking the house, then remembers Matt in the living room listening to the record player, watching in fascination as the needle spins along the deep grooves of the records. She drops whatever she is doing and comes rushing into the living room, finding it empty of bodies, only the music and banging, as if in dance, filling it. She follows the metallic sound into the kitchen, maternal instinct overcoming any reasonable fear, and finds no one there. The cupboards on the walls are closed, the doors are closed, the window opened slightly as she had left it. The only movement is the sway of the curtains, yet the sound continues. A steady thudding, a beat trying to come to life. She walks slowly around the dining table, her gaze inching towards the linoleum floor, until they finally find Matt sitting among pots and pans thrown along the floor. His hands grip 2 wooden spoons, barely big enough to reach fully around the handle, as they rise and fall. She watches for a moment, relieved, and lets her son continue. Matt does not even notice, and continues throughout the afternoon, stopping only to replace the needle on the record.
When her husband gets home, she tells him the story. He laughs uncontrollably, a laugh straight from the gut. “Sounds like it's time our boy gets a drum kit.”
***
Every weekday was work. Matt never really knew what his dad actually did, but he knew it was work. And the way life falls into routine, what followed a day of work was dinner at home. The clanking of metal on plates, the silence marked by an occasional question or observation.
But after all of it, what seemed even more important to Matt’s father was the accordion which called him everyday for an hour or two, always after dinner. He would slip the instrument’s straps onto his back, and as if to wash away the day’s work, he began to play, the sound filling the home. Occasionally, Matt would watch, well aware that for his father, this was beyond any work that he did in the week. The instrument looked as if it was alive, breathing with each squeeze, and at its extension it became a caterpillar which inched along, elongating its body.
The sound became so familiar to Matt that a day without it was like a day without his father. Once he began to play the drums, he developed a similar relationship, where a day without practice was a day that hardly existed.
It was in the 4th grade when the special time came in school where the kids got to choose their instrument to learn. For Matt, the choice was obvious. In fact, he had already made the decision years prior, a natural one which took no thinking, and this moment was only another step in a journey already taken.
Matt came back home that day with a round hard case which rattled slightly as he walked up to the front door. Inside was a battered Ludwig snare drum, which he set up as soon as he got home. The home was filled with the loud rolling of the snare which accompanied the accordion, and soon, the two sounds would become one, his father’s practice sessions becoming Matt’s too. His father taught him all the songs he knew, songs of the 60s and 70s, as if passing down a sacred tradition.
When the talent show was announced that year, Matt put his name on the list. When he got home he told his father about it.
The night of the show, the cafeteria tables were folded up into the walls to make room for rows of foldable chairs, where parents sat in anticipation for their children to perform. Matt and his father waited in a line of chairs along the side of the stage, and as it got shorter, he became more nervous. Finally, the principal went up on stage.
”Next, we have Matthew Perko in fifth grade. He will be playing the drums in a duet with his father. They will be playing Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival.”
He walked hurriedly off the stage, shuffling his note cards in his hands. Matt and his dad took the spot where the principal stood a moment ago, and looking into the audience, he saw nothing but a dark abyss. The stage lighting shone into his eyes and he squinted.
“You ready?” his father asked, waiting to count in the song.
Matt nodded. Hours of practice 5 days a week, trained him for this moment. He knew he was ready, and feeling his father’s presence, felt safe. He knew his father would help carry him along the tune. Matt would just have to do his part, and play the music as he had always felt it.
Once it began, it came out of him naturally, moving along. He had no idea what the audience looked like, could see no face, only silhouettes before him. His mother was somewhere in there, he knew that, and was sure she was smiling. He even felt inclined to close his eyes, broadening the abyss, seeing his mother’s proud expression, allowing his ears to take control, filled with his father’s voice singing, a song that would never leave him for the years to come.
Left a good job in the city
Workin' for the man ev'ry night and day
And I never lost one minute of sleepin'
Worryin' 'bout the way things might have been
Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river.
***