Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studio site — New Orleans

J&M Recording Studio at 840 North Rampart Street in the Tremé neighbourhood of New Orleans was the room where the New Orleans R&B sound was invented and where some of the most important recordings in American popular music were made between 1945 and the mid-1950s. Cosimo Matassa opened the studio in 1945 and ran sessions that produced Fats Domino's first recordings, Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" and "Long Tall Sally," Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," and a sequence of Professor Longhair recordings that documented the piano tradition at the root of New Orleans music.

Little Richard recorded "Tutti Frutti" at J&M in September 1955 — a recording session in which the original, unprintable lyrics were cleaned up by songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie at Matassa's insistence, producing the version that became one of the founding singles of rock and roll. The session captured something that the cleaned-up lyrics could not entirely contain: the abandon, the falsetto, the sense of a performer operating at the edge of what was permissible. Fats Domino's sessions at J&M through the early 1950s produced "The Fat Man," "Ain't That a Shame," and "Blueberry Hill," making him one of the bestselling recording artists in America before Elvis Presley had made his first Sun Studio recording.

The building at 840 North Rampart Street is now a private business, though it has been designated a historical site. A plaque acknowledges its significance. Matassa later opened additional studios in New Orleans; his contribution to establishing the city as a recording centre in the late 1940s and 1950s is fundamental to the history of American popular music.