Jerome Harris
In the past month alone, Adam Matlock has appeared on the stage of College Street Music Hall with hip hop hero Ceschi. He has played Italian songs for a family at Goodfellas on State Street. He has played Balkan music at the Outer Space and jazz at a country club. And he has performed as An Historic, singing his own sprawling songs in his powerful voice and accompanying himself on the accordion, at bars and on the street, at salons in New York City, and wherever else the string of gigs he’s set up takes him.
On Thursday evening, that string leads the intensely busy Matlock to Best Video — the video store that has recently transformed itself into a nonprofit cultural center — where he’ll play solo, splitting a bill with Brooklyn-based songwriter and musician Elisa Flynn.
In full disclosure, Matlock and this reporter (who leads a double life as a musician) have played together many times in the past few years; we are bandmates in one of Matlock’s musical projects. But Matlock’s musical life extends far beyond that, and will continue to do so as this New Haven-based musician gets his name out there, one gig, one show, one collaboration at a time.
Matlock, who grew up in western Massachusetts, began playing piano when he was four. Well: “I want to say four,” Matlock said, because “that was when I had my first piano lesson with a private teacher…. But if you listen to the way my mom tells it, I started at two, which was just me trying to reach the keys from my junior height.” His mother sang in church and in musical theater; his father was briefly a church organist and played piano as well.
Matlock discovered the accordion as a junior in college. “I was convinced by a roommate who was sort of a lapsed violinist, and she wanted an excuse to get back into the instrument,” Matlock said. “She signed up for a klezmer band, and signed me up as well, because she didn’t want to go alone.”
They were students at Hampshire College, but could enroll in programs at other schools. “So every Tuesday we got on the bus to go to Mount Holyoke to join this klezmer ensemble, with Adrianne Greenbaum, who’s this incredible flutist, and she played viola when she was leading the class so she could yell at us — which was great,” Matlock said. “So I came in with a melodica — you know, similar sound to an accordion — and Adrianne had an accordion in her trunk that she just carried around with her. And she said, ‘have you ever played one? Would you like to? It’s more traditional for the music — can I convince you to go out to my trunk and grab it and bring it in and start playing for the class?’ And I was convinced.”
Matlock bought his own accordion shortly afterward, and years of genre-hopping gigs and street performances followed. At the same time, he developed his chops as a composer, whether it meant writing elaborate narrative songs for himself or writing pieces for other ensembles as opportunities arose. His interest in composition led him to apply for, and receive, a commission to write an operetta, Red Giant, for the Baltimore-based company Rhymes With Opera in 2011. A concert of the score was performed in New Haven in the following year. In early 2014, Rhymes With Opera put on a full production of the work, for three singers and a six-piece chamber orchestra, that had performances in Baltimore and the New York area.
Also in 2014, Matlock was drafted into a project by esteemed jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader Mario Pavone, who was looking to soak some of his compositions in the atmosphere of his youth, growing up in deeply ethnic Waterbury. The accordion was the logical instrument of choice, and Matlock — with chops as both a traditional player and an improviser — was the logical musician for the job. The result was an album, Street Songs, followed by a summer that saw dates in New Haven, New York, and the Litchfield Jazz Festival. As a New York Times writeup pointed out, with Matlock at the center of the stage, his sound and sensibility helped guide the proceedings as surely as Pavone did from the bass as bandleader.
Matlock came to New Haven due to a relationship. He stayed for the music. “I like it a lot, because I’m not really a huge city person,” Matlock said. “Most people doing what I’m doing would probably be living in New York or some other more major hub … and I get exhausted by New York after just a few days.” He prefers “living in a place that is close to New York — and also really does have a real scene of its own.”
For Matlock, this is partly thanks to the connection between New Haven and Wesleyan that keeps the city flush with improvisers. Carl Testa’s Uncertainty Series “was one of the first things I saw that made me realize that I could do some of what I wanted to do in New Haven.” Since moving here, he has come to see the musical richness of the area more broadly.
“There are similarly minded people in the southern Connecticut area and all over the state, too. That’s the nice thing about a small state — people will drive an hour or more to see a show, or play a show,” Matlock said. Meanwhile, as a restless genre-hopper, “it’s nice to have multiple places to have my feet in. I like to be able to engage with people who are just focusing on one thing. Having their reactions helps me grow as I do all the things that I do, too.”
Adam Matlock plays as An Historic, splitting a bill with Elisa Flynn on Nov. 19 at Best Video, 8 p.m. Tickets are $5. To hear the full interview with Matlock, click below.