Iconic Northwest jazz singer Greta Matassa, visited the KNKX studios earlier this year to perform with her band. During her visit, she shared some pro tips on the life of a jazz singer, and told stories about her unconventional upbringing.
Matassa discovered her love of singing as a teenager, and it involved a crush on a boy.
"I was about 14 when I got into the invitational jazz choir in high school, I guess I was a freshman in high school," she recalled.
"Before that, I was not interested in music at all. I was kind of a tomboy. My brother was a football player, so I spent the summers climbing trees, digging forts and playing football. But I had a crush on the boy that was in choir. So I got into the choir, and I got nowhere with the boy but, but I did find that I liked singing."
Music opportunities came knocking, and by the time Matassa was 15 years old, she'd formed a jazz group that was gigging at night, which made going to daytime classes difficult. So she quit high school and went into singing full time.
"And my parents, God love them, were very liberal, and they were artistic people, and they just said, 'you know, we don't know anything about whether you can make a living at this, but obviously you know you're good at it, and you want to find out about it," Matassa told the studio audience.
Then, in a conspiratorial whisper, she continued: "So my parents forged a fake ID for me!"
From that moment on, Matassa found herself immersed in the jazz scene.
"They would go with me, and we would sneak into clubs. Well, not sneak apparently. So we'd go into clubs and see you know, Ernestine Anderson at Parnell's, and Diane Schuur when she was getting started, Dee Daniels - and all these people that I later got to know, so that I could look at what it was I was aspiring to do."
Matassa said at that time, while there was music education, there wasn't any higher education or vocational trainings that would teach her how to make a living as a singer.
"So I'm self taught, and I use that term kind of loosely to say I didn't go to school for this. I didn't have a voice teacher. I didn't go to college for it or anything like that...but in my day, I listened to records, copied what I heard, and started working professionally when I was 17 years old."
Matassa doesn’t read music and learned songs from listening to records, which she played over and over again.
“If you learned orally, the way I did, that was how I got deep with this music. If you just skim the surface the way that you're able to do now with this sort of immediacy. It doesn't actually go deep," Matassa said.
"I spent a year and a half with Blossom Dearie just studying her, listening to everything she did, going really, really deep into it, so that when I came out on the other side of that, I could steal from her what I wanted about what she does."
Matassa’s career path has been successful for her, and between writing, singing and teaching, those fortunate enough to enjoy her good-humored sensibilities – onstage and off – are indeed grateful.
