Matt Zimbel Transcript

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Matt Zimbel:

I learned a tremendous amount from them and to be in a family of freelance artists, you learn a way of life in that environment, and the way of life that you learn is that we never have much money, but we always eat well, and we always figure out ways to get it done and we're always very responsible with money. You have to be responsible with money. My mother used to say, she goes, "Oh, these bankers," you'd go to a bank and try to get a bank loan and they wouldn't give it to you because you're an artist. And she's like, "Are you kidding me? You think we're going to default on something because we're artists? We're the ones that have learned how to put together something from nothing. You've got to be worried about the guy who's got the job in an office and then suddenly loses that job. That's who you should be worried about, because that's the guy that's going to default on his mortgage, not us."

Leah Roseman:

Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. Matt Zimbel is a percussionist with the band Manteca, and also an award-winning writer, producer, documentary filmmaker, artistic director, broadcast executive and radio and TV host. In this fascinating episode, he shares his insights gained from a wealth of experience across the music industry. We speak near the beginning about his father the photographer George Zimbel, who died this past January, 2023 after we recorded the episode. We talk about the beautiful documentary film Zimbelism that Matt made with director Jean Francois Gratton. Matt offered that the trailer for Zimbelism, which features the music of Manteca could be used in this episode. He has also generously let me weave in a pre-release of a fantastic new percussion piece with Art Avalos, which will appear on Manteca's upcoming Offspring project.

Matt Zimbel, thanks for joining me today.

Matt Zimbel:

It's a wonderful pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Leah Roseman:

So since I discovered your band Manteca through Mark Ferguson, I've just enjoyed listening to you so much, and it always puts me in a good mood. And then when you agreed to record this conversation with me, I started to research your life and career, and I was a bit overwhelmed because you've just had... You're having such an amazing broadcast career. It's so varied and there's so much to talk about, but let's talk about the band Osi, oh, what is it, Osibisa, how do you pronounce it?

Matt Zimbel:

Osibisa, yeah, that's correct, yeah. Wow. So you're going right back to one of the source materials for me as I just discovered this record when I was, I guess 16 or 17 years old, which is quite a while ago and I loved what they were doing. It was a record that was made in England, and it was a bunch of musicians from different parts of Africa, and they had taken jazz and pop and rock and mixed it all up, and it was very innovative, and it was very much, much inspirational to me at that particular time. I believe they're still recording. I haven't really been following them that much, but it was just such a unique sound.

I had never heard anything like it before. And at the time I was living in Prince Edward Island. So certainly that was a long way away from, a long way away from London, England, that's for sure. But it was very inspirational. I have to say, one thing about learning about music in PEI was that at the time, the CBC had a show, a jazz show, and I think that a lot of maritime musicians, it was one of the few ways that we were exposed to music other than pop music which was being played by our local radio stations and country music to some degree.

But I think a lot of that really came from the CBC, and it was, I remember hearing, the first time I heard Eddie Harris and Les McCann, I was just like, "Oh my God, this is amazing. This is incredible music." And now what happens with the CBC is I call it, they have created a new form of jazz on the CBC. I call it emergency jazz, because the only time you hear jazz on the CBC is when they lose the signal. So if you get in the car at two o'clock in the afternoon, you turn on, or let's say 2:06, because the news is at two o'clock and at the top of the hour, as they say. You turn the radio on, if they're playing jazz, you can be sure that they have lost their signal. So you've heard of bebop and swing, and now we can have emergency jazz.

Leah Roseman:

Well, jazz is one of the styles of music I love the most, and people will notice on this series there's a lot of jazz musicians. And actually was listening to the CBC growing up mostly where I heard most of my jazz, I think at first. You mentioned Les McCann and Eddie Harris and I had read a 2013 interview with you where you talked about them as inspiration. So I was looking them up. When there's musicians I haven't heard of, I'm always curious. So Eddie Harris, did you know he combined instruments in strange ways?

Matt Zimbel:

Yes, of course. But I'm just surprised that you did this depth of research. You really do your homework, don't you?

Leah Roseman:

Well, the thing about you, Matt, is you're a published author and you've done all these broadcast media podcast, or radio, but information about you as a musician is not that available.

Matt Zimbel:

Well, that's interesting.

Leah Roseman:

I had to figure out how did you drop out of school in PEI and then form this band a few years later, so let's talk about that.

Matt Zimbel:

Okay. Okay. Well, I dropped out of school because I was just bored out of my mind. I was just like, I just couldn't handle it anymore. I was just going absolutely crazy because it was just boring. I moved from New York to PEI when I was 14 years old. And the education system in New York is not great because by the time I came to Canada, I thought everybody in Canada spoke French, so there's no way we can say that New York had a great educational system, but PEI's was even worse.

So I just got bored and I quit and soon realized that there was nobody more popular in the neighborhood than a 14 year old kid who could work and wasn't going to school. Every farmer, every fisherman within a hundred miles was like, "Hey, you want a job? So I took a job on a farm and made $80 every two weeks, but it was only a 50 hour week, so that was cool. And so that's how I started saving up to buy percussion instruments. And I was practicing and learning as much as I could off of records and stuff like that. And then I took some lessons from a guy named Jim Farety who was at the... He was the percussionist in the pit at Confederation Center in Charlottetown. And so that's how I got into percussion, and just listening to records and learning what I could and studying a little bit.

And then I ended up studying, when I moved to Montreal, studied with Dido Morris and John Ruddell, really wonderful conga players that were able to teach me some stuff. So that's the educational part of it. But how to start the band was just basically, if you're a percussionist, you end up in the world of salsa and mambo and Latin music. And we ended up, there's a bunch of people in Toronto who started a band and they invited me to play in that band. It was called Armando's Orchestra, and there was disagreements on the way things should go. And so that band split up, and we started Manteca out of that with a number of the people that were in that band, and that's lasted for 43 years now.

Leah Roseman:

Amazing, really.

Matt Zimbel:

It really is amazing.

Leah Roseman:

So you do mostly hand percussion, but I see a drum set behind you as well.

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah, I do that as a hobby, not as a professional instrument. It's just to play time and warm up and do stuff like that, but I don't play drums.

Leah Roseman:

These conga players-

Matt Zimbel:

I'm not licensed to play drums.

Leah Roseman:

Matt has generously shared a great percussion piece, which is premiering on this podcast: Hit Record, written and performed by Matt Zimbel and Art Avalos. It will appear on Manteca's upcoming Offspring project album.

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah, I just realized that it's not a video clip, it's only an audio clip. It's just a little one minute thing. We were just playing in the studio one day when we were doing our new record, and I just asked the engineer to, Art and I were just by ourselves playing, and I says, "Could you just roll?" And he rolled, and we just got this sweet little groove going, and then we did one pass of overdubs on it. Art played the udu and I played the talking drum, and it's what it is. It's nothing, it's nothing fancy. It's just this little quiet percussion piece. It's a minute long. (music)

Leah Roseman:

Okay, wonderful. Thanks. These conga players that you studied with, what did they teach you? What was their approach?

Matt Zimbel:

Well, they were very much about technique, so they taught me the technique and how to get the sound and different rhythms and stuff like that. I learned mostly by playing and by listening to other records and I would say that was the bulk of my learning came from that.

Leah Roseman:

And then on the job.

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah, for sure. I've gone through so many eras in percussion. When I first started playing, I played in folk music, and folk music was a really great place to learn how to do what we call painting, where you're using very delicate things or finger symbols and shakers and chimes and symbols for swells and little clay drums and all kinds of different little percussion things from around the world that you can generate to work in the environment of trying to paint a picture with percussion.

But then the downside of playing folk music is you're usually playing with an acoustic guitar player, and many of them have not really played a lot with drum kit or with percussion so their time is not usually tremendously excellent. So I know that when disco came along, I couldn't have been happier, because suddenly I was playing with just kick drum, boom, boom, boom. And then, and because percussion was so much in demand at that time, and drum machines hadn't yet been invented, so I would get to do all of the percussion over dubs, and it was just, it was peak percussion time for sure. That was a great era for percussionists.

Leah Roseman:

Was that studio work in Toronto?

Matt Zimbel:

Montreal, Toronto, yeah. I lived in Toronto during that time, so most of the work was in Toronto.

Leah Roseman:

Okay. And before we leave some of your in early inspirations, because we'd mentioned Eddie Harris combining instruments because some people might have thought that went bypass. So he had the saxo-bone and the guit-organ. I'm not sure how that worked, guitar, organ combo.

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah, well, what I understand is that he had a lot of processing on his horns where he would try and make them sound like other instruments, and that was very innovative at the time.

Leah Roseman:

What I'd written is that he would put a saxophone, he'd combine the mouth pieces, so, and he'd have a reed mouthpiece on a trumpet, stuff like that.

Matt Zimbel:

Oh, okay, that I was not aware of.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. And I guess processing, yeah. Let's talk about the movie you made with Jean Francois Gratton, Zimbelism, it was so beautiful and inspiring.

Matt Zimbel:

Oh, thank you.

Leah Roseman:

Really enjoyed it.

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah, so it was a film that I made about my father and I guess my mother, because they're both prominent in the film. And it was a very interesting project in the sense that lots of people make pictures or documentaries about their parents or think that they have interesting stories to tell. And I remember when I first, when Jean Francois and I first developed the project, I would reach out to potential producers and potential distributors and stuff, and you could always tell that as soon as it was like, "Oh yeah, another Jewish boy making a film about his parents," it was like they were just so uninterested. It was just remarkable how uninterested they were. They could not get me off the phone quick enough. And I was like, "Yeah, I'll send you the trailer and have a look at it and see what you think," and I'd sent them the trailer, they'd call me right back.

Leah Roseman:

Here's a clip from the trailer for the film Zimbelism. For the podcast audience who can't see the images, I encourage you to look up the incredible photography of George Zimbel afterwards. And of course, to see Zimbelism, which I streamed for free, using the app to be Tubi TV, T-U-B-I.

George Zimbel:

Street photography. Now, somebody could call the police on you if you're taking a picture. If they say they're going to put me in jail because I'm taking somebody's pictures with no evil intent, then let them put me in jail. I'm not going to stop because it's history.

Speaker 1:

George has remained truth for six decades now. Stayed with that mission of the watcher.

Speaker 2:

He's the founder of what today we call humanist photography.

George Zimbel:

I really believe that I am a documentary photographer by nature, in the sense that I want to tell stories.

Speaker 3:

He was good at finding things like the Kennedy Parades and the Maryland shoot, of course.

George Zimbel:

I was there. I did the shoot. Next day, I cut the film, put it in envelopes, and there it sat until 1976.

Matt Zimbel:

They'd be like, "Oh, okay. This is interesting," so that's the first thing you have to fight against is that there's a perception of people want to honor their parents and there's no story there, whatever. In our case, there was a good story there, and we had a tremendous time, Jean Francois and I had a tremendous time making the film, and it was a very beautiful experience. We've traveled all over the world with that film, and that's been quite remarkable as well.

Leah Roseman:

Maybe you want to share some of the stories for people who haven't seen it yet. I have to say that your mother, so Elaine Sernovitz was a writer and psychotherapist, right?

Matt Zimbel:

Yes, correct.

Leah Roseman:

Seemed like an incredible woman and role model as well as your dad, photographer George Zimbel. So their love story I found so beautiful too, that is told the film.

Matt Zimbel:

Yes. Yes, it was very much of a different time. And my father was a freelance photographer working out of New York City at the time, and had very, very little money and my mother was working at the UN when they met, and it was the story of two artists meeting in New York and trying to make a go of it. And I don't want to give it all away, but it was certainly something that led to different perceptions as to what happened. And it's funny that we ended up with the editing of that because Jean Francois interviewed my father. I was not present for that particular interview that he did with my father, where my father was speaking about my mother and how they met and so I never saw that interview until it came back from the editors.

Leah Roseman:

Wow.

Matt Zimbel:

We had a very interesting way of making this film, because we did a master interview with George, which took two days and was shot in a very distinctive manner, and then we did an interview with my mother who initially refused to be interviewed, and Jean Francois had to convince her. So anyway, making a film with your parents is a very complicated thing to do. I've done some work in film and television and it's always nerve-wracking to present your project to an audience, to your boss, to the network, to whoever but I don't think I was ever as nervous as presenting the first rough cut to my parents.

I was terrified, and the rough cut was... Rough cuts are always a little bit longer. This one was two hours and 40 minutes long. And I remember playing it for them and just thinking, "Oh, my God." First of all, when you do a documentary, there are standards for documentaries. You are supposed to be an independent journalist, you're supposed to be journalistic, you're not supposed to let your subjects have a say in the cuts and stuff like that. I wanted to respect those things as a documentary maker, I didn't want my parents starting giving me notes on the cut.

So anyway, it was a complicated project, but at the end of it, we were all very proud of it, and it was really an amazing adventure to go on with them, especially once we started doing the screenings and the film became part of our world together. It was in Toronto, it was a sold out screening at the Hot Docs, and I have a photo which I'll send you of my parents and me making our way to the stage. I get emotional.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, you lost your mother a few years ago, right?

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah. But it was a great project, and we've managed to go to China and Italy and the UK. And the UK was quite funny because it was playing at the Raindance Festival, and I went to the place to check in and said, "I'm here with the film Zimbelism." "Oh," She said, "oh yeah, that's on today. We're very excited about that film." And she says, "It's almost sold out." And I was like, "Wow, that's fantastic. How big is the theater?" She said, "It's about 40, 40 people." So you have to moderate your expectations when you go into those situations.

Leah Roseman:

In that film, you included the part about your sister being adopted from Korea.

Matt Zimbel:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

Because I'm an adoptive mother, one of our children's adopted from China. So when I was preparing for that emotional process, I read some books about the Korean adoptees coming to the States because that was that whole generation and it, just to think about a lot of cultural issues and ways to approach things.

Matt Zimbel:

Well, I know that was a very, like my mother says in the film, it was the hardest childbirth she gave was getting my sister here. And there's all kinds of problems with racism in the United States Immigration Service and health challenges. But she's been with us now, she just turned 60, and she is my sister and I love her dearly, and I'm so glad they did that.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Were people more accepting in PEI of your family, or did it come up in terms of racism?

Matt Zimbel:

It was never something that I was aware of when I was living there, because locally it wasn't an issue, but I know that when Jodi went to high school in Charlottetown, she had a lot of problems there. Yeah, it's, at that particular time, I don't know if that's still the case, but at that particular time, Charlottetown PEI was not a very open place when it came to people of different races, which is shocking in a way because there's a huge Lebanese population in Charlottetown.

The premier was Lebanese, and then his son became the premier after him, and he was Lebanese. So it seemed odd to me to hear that PEI was as racist as reports that I got from Jodi about this particular thing. It's a very small place, and when a small place of that nature invites a Lebanese immigrant to become the premier, that's counterintuitive to a racist society, one would think.

Leah Roseman:

So when your parents immigrated, it was the Vietnam War was on?

Matt Zimbel:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

And they had visited PEI in the summer.

Matt Zimbel:

Yes. It's the typical story. Family goes on vacation to this quirky little island. There was no causeway then. It was a actual ferry boat that got you there. This was in 1970 that they went on vacation there and fell in love with the place. And I don't know if you or your viewers have been to PEI in the summer, but if you get on a really nice sunny day and it's warm and you're in Prince Edward Island, it's pretty easy to fall in love. It's a spectacularly beautiful place, and the people are extremely kind, not withstanding what we just were speaking about.

And so they bought this old farmhouse with a hundred acres, and it was on the water in Argyle Shore in between Charlottetown and Summerside. And it had been abandoned for a couple of years. And when we arrived the next year, we drove right by it. We didn't even recognize it. It had been so injured during the winter that it was like, "There's the house." "No, that's not the house." "Yeah, that's the house." And there was no running water, and there was 2,000 pounds of rotting potatoes in the basement, so it was an undertaking. But my family stayed there for 10 years and it was a wonderful adventure for all of us, and I think it put us on different paths that than we would've found in New York. I mean, you can't really go back and analyze those things, but certainly I had opportunities in PEI that I don't think I would've had in New York.

Leah Roseman:

Interesting. Your dad, I mean he had late critical success as a photographer later in life. In fact, wasn't his first retrospective in PEI?

Matt Zimbel:

Yes, it was. That was at the PEI Art Gallery, it was a beautiful art gallery there, and that was one of his first retrospectives. That's when he started making a shift from a photojournalism to becoming more of a documentary photographer. There was a bit of a transformation there.

Leah Roseman:

So your parents are, obviously this is an incredibly creative, unusual household. How did they react when you dropped out of school?

Matt Zimbel:

I was told that I was to stay in school and eventually I just couldn't take it anymore and I disobeyed that order, and then I think the general perception at that moment was like, "Okay, well what are you going to do now?" So it wasn't so much about punishing me for making that decision. It was about, okay what's your path? What are you going to do? I always quote Bud McDougald, the Canadian entrepreneur and capitalist extraordinaire who's founded the Argus Corporation. Because his quote is, "I quit school in grade nine, my biggest regret in life is that I didn't quit in grade eight." So I've never regretted leaving school. I mean, we had a house full of music and books and there was lots of stuff to talk about at the table. There was an education in that house.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. In Zimbelism your dad is quoted as saying that he... I'm probably not exactly quoting him. But that he'd really liked the freelance life, and as long as he had music and his dark room and his studio he was happy.

Matt Zimbel:

Yes, that's correct. He did enjoy that, he was always hustling. I mean, that's part of being a freelance artist. You're always trying to get your work in front of people, you're always trying to make sure that you have an opportunity to create projects. That's what the life of an artist is, it's always working hard to get the work out there as I'm sure you know yourself.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I'm more aware of it through talking to my guests on this series honestly, because I have a orchestra job. So I have a very straight and narrow path in music, just kept my head down and practice violin and I have this wonderful job, but wasn't a freelancer very long. But I'm more and more aware of the need and especially for anyone coming up now in the music business. They need to develop those entrepreneurial skills and you need to have a backup plan. I mean, look what this pandemic has shown us in this industry.

Matt Zimbel:

It's funny, I met a symphony musician who just recently retired and she said, "I'm not going to read music anymore, I'm only going to play my instrument."

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Matt Zimbel:

And I thought I'd never heard anyone say that expression. I'm not reading music anymore. It was quite powerful.

Leah Roseman:

One of my colleagues a few years ago said it's a conveyor belt of music and that really stuck with me. Because when we're busy, we're so busy and if I get a ballet score as a violinist it can be 100 pages, and especially the beginning of your career when you don't know anything. You're just plowing through and you have to play at a very high level. You're expected at the first rehearsal to play everything perfectly at tempo, but we don't have to memorize anything and in my discussion with Colleen this'll be released before your episode. She said her first gig with Manteca you told her, "You better be off book for every tune." And it was huge, she had to learn all this stuff.

Matt Zimbel:

Wow, I didn't realize I was such a prick. The whole thing about off book is... I just think that when we walk on stage and we don't have music in front of us, it seems like we've been out touring and playing and stuff like that. So I would really rather not have music and one of the famous stories in our recent life is with our bassist Will Jarvis. Because Will joined the band, and the day that he joined the band he broke his foot. He tripped and broke his foot. So he went through a period of three months of he couldn't leave the house, he was all taped up, blah, blah, blah, whatever, and that's the time that he took the charts and started learning the material. So he shows up at his first rehearsal three months after he is been an official Manteca member, we hadn't worked during that period. He shows up at the rehearsal he's got no charts, we're like wow that's kind of weird and starts playing through the book.

Then we got to a point where there was a bit of a problem with the arrangement and he said, "No, no, that shot's on bar 64, the last 16th note of four." He's not looking at a chart, and we're like, "Dude, what?" He'd memorized everything.

Leah Roseman:

Wow.

Matt Zimbel:

He knew the book better than we did. So I mean we've been through that a lot, lately just in October of this year. We've been doing this television series or a streaming series if you will, called Road Stories and we had four shows to shoot in four days and we had 42 songs to learn. Of those songs, we were also recording them simultaneously for our new record. So it was a huge undertaking, a really huge undertaking.

Leah Roseman:

Isn't that the same title you for that radio series you had?

Matt Zimbel:

That's correct.

Leah Roseman:

Okay.

Matt Zimbel:

Oh God, your investigative journalism is not ending here.

Leah Roseman:

But they're not connected, it's just the same.

Matt Zimbel:

It's the same title, yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Okay.

Matt Zimbel:

It's the same principle, it's storytelling about being on the road basically.

Leah Roseman:

One of those episodes I listened to was about writers, and actually I didn't know that that legendary story about the M&Ms. I didn't actually understand that before listening to that, so that was cool. As band leader and co-composer, I mean you've fulfilled so many roles with this band. You've also been responsible for all this legalistic stuff, right? Writing the riders and-

Matt Zimbel:

Not me personally, that's been developed with our production manager. But when it comes to all those technical things, I'm the one in the band that kind of works on that stuff with our production team. But yeah, it's complicated. I mean, we are nine musicians on stage, there are a lot of instruments. I mean, from your interview with Colleen that she plays I think 10 or 11 instruments with us and as you go through the band, there's a lot of different equipment being used. So getting us up on stage and getting the show to be seamless in terms of audio and video production and lighting and all that stuff, that's a challenging project and we've had a great crew with us over the years. Tony Crea our sound man, I always say he's new he's only been with us 32 years. But yeah, it's challenging.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster who does all the many jobs required to produce the series, and there are a lot of costs I bear as well. Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip or becoming a monthly supporter starting at $3 Canadian. Which is close to $2 or €2 and getting access to unique perks. The link is in the description. Now, back to the episode.

Matt Zimbel:

I should tell you about the new record, there's a good story in this. So over the years a challenge you face as a Canadian recording artist is we have a small country and a very small music press here as it were, especially now that all the major dailies have kind of bailed out of culture reporting. As a result it's not easy to keep people excited about another record. Your fans are excited about it, but the journalists are not excited about it. Because yeah we love you guys, what else is new? You know what I mean? That's something that you hear about quite frequently. So we've always thought, okay we really need to do a project. We need to do something that has an interesting story behind it and some people have always told us you guys should do a concept album like Manteca does Led Zeppelin or Manteca does whatever and we're like, no we don't do that because we love composing the music. That's what we do, that's part of the thrill for us is writing the records.

We don't want to be covering other people's material and it's just because that's one of the things that we get excited about. So I was talking to Colleen actually two years ago, and she said, "There's so many great young players coming up, why don't we do a project with some of the great young players who are around?" And she said, "I would love to record with Virginia McDonald." Kurt's daughter, "You know Kurt's daughter, don't you?" And I was like, "Yeah, well Kurt played in the band, Kurt McDonald played in Manteca. He was our first saxophone player." So she suggested Virginia, and then it was suddenly a light bulb went on for both of us and it was just like, wow okay. I wonder how many kids there are in Manteca's DNA, I wonder how many of them are professional musicians because my son's a professional musician, Doug's two daughters are both professional musicians. So we started going through and Art's son is a professional... So suddenly we went wow this is crazy. Turned out there were 11 musicians, professional musicians who are from members of Manteca.

Now, some of these kids never saw Manteca before because their parents left the group before they were even conceived. But we reached out to all of them through email, sent them an email and was like, "Hi, my name's Matt. I play in this band, your father played in this band or your mother played in this band. We're going to be doing a record. Would you like to do the record with us? It's called The Offspring Project." And every single one of them said yes. Then we set out and said, "Okay, so you could participate in this by playing on it, or you can write something for us we will commission a piece." Six of them said yes they would take the commission, and then we wrote basically a briefing as to how to write for Manteca, what it is, how we perceive of ourselves. Then at the end of that perception document we said you are welcome to follow these guidelines or you are welcome to throw them out and do whatever you want.

So the results have been amazing and we are just finishing that record next week and it will be out. We're not sure whether it's coming out in the spring of 23 or the fall of 23, that's still got to be decided.

Leah Roseman:

What did you put in that briefing document? Do you remember?

Matt Zimbel:

It was very specific in terms of... I mean, if you want I can actually read it for you. I'm happy to do that or I can just describe it. Okay. So basically we said that we define ourselves by saying that we like memorable melodies that do not suck. What that means is that a melody that is too saccharin, too sweet will just never fly with us or too simple it just would never fly. But we do melody that's very important, and we talked about groove and we talked about some of the concepts for grooves that we have. When we went away for a while, we were on hiatus for a couple of years and when we came back we wanted to kind of redefine a principle of percussion. That was, if you have three percussion it's very often what you'll do is you'll make sure that everybody's playing in a different sonic world. So instead of it being two hand drummers you'd have a cowbell or timbale or metal with skin on skin or something low against something high like a wood block going up against a güiro something like that.

We decided to throw that concept out and that we would create what we call the bubble, and the bubble is all of us playing in a very similar type of range and playing very circular patterns that kind of percolate. So we're all intertwined in each other's sonic space, but we're all contributing to this one kind of linear and circular pattern. Which you can hear very frequently in the more contemporary, the more recent Manteca recordings. So we talk about that. We also talk about in the briefing note how important it is for us to use instruments that are off the beaten path of what is normally considered jazz. So in other words alto flute, bass clarinet, bass and electric guitar is one of the most awesome, awe-inspiring heavy metal-esque things you've ever heard, it's just we love this texture. So we talked about looking for ensembles within the ensemble. How can you arrange the instruments that Manteca has? What would you do with alto flute so that it could be heard, right? Because it's in a low register and it's a soft instrument.

So how would you use that instrument in a way that it could speak for us and communicate that kind of lovely chocolate sensibility that instrument has? Because so many people, when we said we wanted to use you know alto flute and bass clarinet they're like, "No, you're never going to hear them in a band that big. You're never going to hear it. You're never going to hear it." I was like, "Yeah, we're going to hear it because we're going to arrange the music in a way that you can hear those instruments." So there was a lot of naysayers in the early days of introducing those instruments and those are... So having this basic roster of instruments for the children to write with was tremendous fun because a lot of them had never written for some of these instruments before, and the stuff that they came up with is very, very unique.

Leah Roseman:

I was curious your son Lucas, did he sing on it or did he write something?

Matt Zimbel:

No. He wrote something, he didn't play on it. I wanted him to play on it, he didn't want to play on it. He wrote a piece which was probably the most challenging piece on the record, it's called Endless Folies. He got the title because he read something about nepotism being an endless folly. Anyway, it's a lovely piece and it features Virginia McDonald on clarinet on that song.

Leah Roseman:

Okay. Yeah, both Mark and Colleen alluded to this project in their interviews, so that'll be cool for everyone to hear it.

Matt Zimbel:

It's a fascinating project for us too, because I would've never ended up with this configuration of songs on a Manteca record in a million years. I mean, Maddie and Susie Wild wrote a pop song which is kind of like a Maddy and Suzy Wilde doing Michael Jackson, and the title of the song is A Dress You Can Dance in. Well, Manteca has never considered a dress you can dance in so it's really fun. We're very excited about it, but it is going to be a real departure on a lot of levels.

Leah Roseman:

I was thinking the sound of the band, because I've listened to some of your older albums and your newer ones more and when you introduce guitar and with Colleen it sound... It's really cool, I love the textures and the colors you get in the band.

Matt Zimbel:

We've learned a lot of things over the years and we're still learning all the time, but when trombone... We brought trombone into the band very late. Trombone came in 2007 in 2007, and I was excited about the bone for its power and for its low end and stuff like that. But it did something that I never expected it to do, and it seemed to kind of unify. It was a bridge between the rhythm section and the horn section that wasn't there when we had two trumpets and two saxophones, and I was taken off guard by that. I was surprised by that, it was delightful and having Mark Ferguson in the band has been fantastic. Because he's also a wonderful keyboard player and he plays vibes with us as well, and he's just a great person to be around and he's a very good composer. He's not tabled anything for us yet, but I think he's working on a piece for us now.

Leah Roseman:

He played some of his original tunes in the episode that I recorded with him last year, people should check that out.

Matt Zimbel:

He's a great writer, yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Your son Lucas, I was listening to some of his songs and he's a beautiful lyricist as well.

Matt Zimbel:

Yes, he's a very good lyricist.

Leah Roseman:

He reminded me of Leonard Cohen, who I know you interviewed. I listened to that interview when you were a very young man and you had a interview series, right? That you had developed.

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah. I played with Leonard as well, but I interviewed him in 1988 for a TV series that the CBC did called Wired. Which was a co-production between the BBC, the CBC, and ABC in the US and I was their Canadian host for that and that's when I got to interview and meet Leonard for the first time. One of the things about Leonard was that in 1993 we were doing... Doug and I were the band leaders of the band on Ralph Benmergui's TV show called Friday Night! with Ralph Benmergui on CBC, which was CBC trying to do late night TV. The producers book Leonard, but Leonard was like, "No, I don't want to play with the band I want to use my tracks." Because he had just finished his The Future album. Yeah, that's what it was The Future. So I wrote him a note and I said, "Hey Leonard, we met in 88. I interviewed you for this show, wonderful meeting you, blah, blah, blah. Here's what our band sounds like." I had taken some recordings from the show. "We would love to play with you."

So the message comes back from management, yes Leonard heard the tapes, he would love to play with the band. So that was very nice. So we found out which tunes he was doing, and I told the band I said, "When Leonard gets here... We're going to practice these tunes before he gets here. We're going to know them backwards and forwards. But when he gets here and passes out the charts, let's just ask lots of questions as if we've never heard it before." And that's exactly what we did. It's all written down on the chart and we knew it backwards and forwards, but we were like, "Leonard after the guitar solo did we go to a chorus?" And he turned to us and he said, "Well, friends should we do this?" And it was just like one, two, three, and it was just like boom we hit it so hard, and he was just like whoa. Because he had never heard this tune being played by a band because he just finished the record, which was made with all these dinky little synth things. So he was thrilled.

He couldn't stop talking about the band through the whole interview, "Wow, your band. Wow." It's like Ralph's trying to get him onto some other subjects.

Leah Roseman:

So you were kind of pranking him, it was sort of a psych out to pretend you didn't know what you were doing?

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah, we didn't want him to know that we had rehearsed the tunes before.

Leah Roseman:

Okay.

Matt Zimbel:

It wasn't a psych out, it was simply we wanted him to be impressed with our accuracy, heft and groove. So to this day, well no one ever knew that.

Leah Roseman:

That's a very good story. You opened... No, sorry Miles Davis opened for your band.

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah. Yes. I recall we were doing a festival in Concord, California, and I get the program and it's like Yellowjackets, Michael Frank's, Miles Davis, after Miles is Manteca. I called the promoter up , "I just got the press release I think there's just a typographical error." He goes, "No, no, Miles doesn't close." I was like, "Okay, we'll close." So that's what we did, which was tremendous. But going on after Miles, I remember Miles walked by our dressing room and he kind of looked in while we were warming up and nodded his head and walked out, and it was pretty thrilling. Then later on I recorded a Miles Davis concert for CBC when I was producing one of their shows for the entertainers. I got to record Miles, it was at Massey Hall for two nights and I got to record one of those two nights with the CBC Mobile which was great fun.

Leah Roseman:

You've worn so many hats, I'm hesitant to even point to a certain project because they're all so big. I'm curious, you oversaw live to air Canada Day celebrations of Parliament Hill several times. You did this PanAm Games, huge production with Cirque de Soleil and many, many performers. You had hundreds and hundreds of people working under you, which of those big projects made the... I don't even know how to phrase this. But sort of was most meaningful or taught you the most in terms of different skills?

Matt Zimbel:

Well, those large projects they are constantly teaching you lessons and they are extremely difficult projects to do for so many reasons. Canada Day on Parliament Hill, I'm an immigrant to Canada and to have the artistic directorship of that show is such a deep honor. But it is fraught with so many challenges, to render a vision of what your country is in a cultural sense in both English and French is extremely hard because not everybody shares your views on those issues. The shows I've done, Canada Day, three times as the artistic director and lead producer. And in each case, I think I've come out of it with a Canada Day show that is very artistically grounded and progressive, and it doesn't suck.

But that show, it has been very saccharin on many occasions. There's been too many young children singing songs out of tune that some bureaucrat thought was the right way to go. And yes, children should have a presence on the show. Yes, youth choirs are fantastic. Yes, all those elements have to be dealt with properly. When they're not dealt with properly, you end up with this saccharin, patriotic Tim Horton's view of Canada, which is just repulsive to me. You know what I mean?

It's not a conservative or a liberal thing. It happens with both regimes, back and forth. It has to do with how producers view those things. I mean, it's basically, you have to be very attentive to creating something that works in what's called a hostile environment, which is outside with a broadcast team that is thrown in at the last minute.

But I'm very, very proud of the shows that we did, particularly the show in 2012, which was a complete different configuration. We managed to do a lot of very innovative stuff on that show including 7 doigts de la main and Pierre Lapointe. As a string player, you'd be touched. We put a string quartet together and we wrote two original pieces for them, one of which they danced in, we taught them how to dance. We worked with a choreographer.

Lyne Tremblay who's my partner, she's a choreographer, and she choreographed this piece that Doug wrote for us, which was like a minute and 10 seconds long. It was so many things that happened in that show. So I'm so deeply honored to be able to do that, as an immigrant, to just to write that show and to create that show, it's an incredible experience.

The show that I did with Cirque at the Rogers Center, again, was a gigantic, unbelievably huge show. One of the biggest I've ever done. It's like doing the Olympics because the Pan Am Games are the baby Olympics. Of course, when you're working in Canada, you're dealing with things like, usually you'd be in the venue for three or four weeks before the show. We had three days.

This is the thing about working here is you're doing these gigantic international level shows, but you don't have the resources that they have in the international arena. Canada Day on Parliament Hill, it's near impossible to do because the video crew pulls in the morning of the show. How do you direct a show with a video team that comes in on the morning of the show? They don't even see a rehearsal. You know what I mean? It's crazy.

But anyway, so all those experiences have been incredibly gratifying and extremely challenging, and you learn a lot about preparation. You learn a lot about how can we make this seem like we've done this show before.

Leah Roseman:

I played just a couple times on the Canada Day thing. Once with my orchestra, and once it was a separate gig with a few string players backing up some pop singers, and it was the year, it was like 47 degrees. We had this crazy heat wave. It was a hostile environment.

Matt Zimbel:

And your instrument wasn't in tune?

Leah Roseman:

Well, the wind was really, really vicious so that our stands blew over in the rehearsal. So I think by the evening they had sandbags, and then somebody backstage decided it'd be a good idea to tape my music to the stand, which was a good idea, except there were several tunes.

We got to the end of the first tune, and I realized I had to rip holding my violin, and it was televised live to air. I had to rip all this music off to access the music underneath, which I could access because they just taped the edges. It was quite funny, actually.

Matt Zimbel:

I know. You cannot imagine how many things go wrong on that show, and it's really a challenging show. The last time I did it, we rehearsed, nobody rehearses. We rehearsed offsite for weeks in advance. That's never done.

So part of making that show good is about trying to bring innovation to not just the choice of artists and how you use those artists and writing a bilingual script, that is a very, very hard thing to do. And dealing with government, I'll tell you, have to be a very wily person to be able to talk them out of some of the stuff that they want to do, some of the perceptions of what we are as a nation.

It's just Tim Horton's. It's not a very enlightened view of our people. When you talk about patriotism and when you love your country, the language that is available to you, there is not a huge amount of choice. And you have to be very careful because you can go off the rails and sound like saccharin in two seconds. It is very, very hard to do, and it is incredibly hard to do in both languages.

It's a beautiful challenge. So when the scripts are approved, and I'm happy with them, and the client is happy with them as they always are, because I mean, just there are battles to get there, but eventually it's like we've done this collectively. Sometimes I've had writers from Heritage working with me, and that's been fantastic.

I'm not saying that it's a wasteland out there. It's not at all. There's very talented people everywhere at Heritage Canada, and there's a lot that you can accomplish there, but it is a trap for everybody to talk about patriotism and not become sucky.

Leah Roseman:

So Matt, many people listening to this aren't Canadian, and they won't get the Tim Horton's reference. So I could just maybe explain, it's this donut and coffee chain that's in every community across our entire huge country. Ubiquitous, bland and corporate.

Matt Zimbel:

I mean, the reason that they have had such success is because their food has no flavor. It's eat a tuna fish salad out of Tim Horton's and good luck trying to discern what is in it.

But Tim Horton was a hockey player. He died very tragically in a terrible car accident on the QEW in Toronto. He was thrown 45 feet from the car.

Leah Roseman:

Oof.

Matt Zimbel:

They have something called a Tim Bit, which is the center hole of the donut. I'm not sure I would have had a Tim Bit if the owner of my company had perished in an automobile accident.

But anyway, so Tim Horton's is quite popular in the United States as well. It's also, it's even in Korea. In Korea, they have a Tim, I think it's called a... There's another name for the Tim Horton's in Korea, a Tim Morton's, it's called.

Leah Roseman:

Really?

Matt Zimbel:

Yes. It's not run by the Tim Horton's chain, but somebody copied them, everything, color scheme, menu, everything. It's called Tim Morton's.

Leah Roseman:

I was thinking about asking you about metrics. You're a podcaster. You have a very successful podcast, and you've been doing publicity for so many years. You have an advertising agency, and there's a story you told one of your shows about you're at a red light and you hear Manteca album being blasted from the car. If you could share that with us.

Matt Zimbel:

So in the early days, Manteca, we were in our van going to a gig, and we were at the light in Toronto. The record had just come out and it was on the radio, and there was this car full of beautiful women, and they were turning up the music and listening to it. Then all of a sudden, one of them said, "Nah, I don't like that," and moved into another station.

It's always interesting to see how people perceive your work. For us, it's always been a great challenge because we're playing music that is not normally seen as popular music, but it is popular because it is energetic and it's melodic, and it's fun to watch and give us an audience that doesn't know who we think we are. We will try and convince them that their time is worth staying, and we're pretty successful at doing that.

But for us, very, we've had a lot of lessons in doing this, because we would tour across Canada playing theaters, and then we'd go into the States playing sports bars for three people. You have to keep the band's energy up if they're going between those two success and development points. That's always a challenge to do. But we did it, because we had a great deal of pride in what we did, and we wanted to deliver a really, really strong statement to anybody that we encountered.

Leah Roseman:

When you are touring, especially, I know you toured a lot in the '80s and so on, I'm guessing you couldn't always trust the local producer to do enough publicity.

Matt Zimbel:

That was such a different time because newspapers actually covered culture at the time, and the CBC had strong coverage of Canadian culture, not just pop culture at the time. All of the radio stations, there was a huge bunch of radio stations across the country that had a CRTC obligation. It was called Category six music.

So it was like jazz, gospel and religious music, I think, are the three of them, and stations were obliged to play three hours a week. So there were all these jazz programs across the country on pop music stations. Well, eventually, broadcasters got rid of that, and then all those jazz shows were just taken off the air. Those type of things were very helpful in terms of getting the work out to people.

The bassist Miroslav Vitous said, "If you played jazz music for people, if it was available to them, they would like it. They would learn to like it." That's the problem with instrumental music and world music and jazz, it's so seldom available to people in the public sphere that it's hard to find.

Leah Roseman:

Let's talk about genres. I always get amused by these festivals, because in Ottawa we have the jazz festival, they may have renamed things by now, but Folk Fest and all these festivals have such a mix of genres, and I think the original name of the festival doesn't have much relation sometimes to what the product is.

Matt Zimbel:

That's true, and that's unfortunate. Look what appears at jazz festivals, on one level, I understand that festivals need numbers, they need large audiences, and as a result, they've gone into the pop realm. But now you see the festivals are like 85, 90% pop, and they're still called jazz festivals. So I think that's a bit of a misnomer.

It's challenging. It's challenging for everybody to create festivals that attract public. That's hard. There's a lot of competition out there these days, not just from other festivals, from Netflix, from all kinds of things. It is a very challenging environment. So I have sympathy for promoters and artistic directors, but I do think that in Canada, the jazz festivals have... I don't really admire the way they deal with Canadian talent.

Everybody has to apply. Nobody ever phones and says, "Hey, would you like to do our festival?" Or, "Hey, could we potentially work out something with you?" That just doesn't exist. If you don't apply, you don't get asked.

Leah Roseman:

You've talked about hustling a few times, trying to get your film made about your dad and also with the band. I'm finding as a podcaster too, just in terms of making cold calls or even reaching out to people that I know, sometimes it's surprising to me how few people will respond to an email.

Do you find you have to, I don't know, in terms of your role in the band or in your other work, that you just have to keep bothering people, just following up?

Matt Zimbel:

Well, yeah. You've hit on something that I've thought a lot about. I've written about this as well. It is a very, very interesting subject, because when you study people in the arts who have had success, you will very often find, you'll hear these stories about people being incessantly self-promoters and never giving up and stuff like that.

I would say it is not appreciated here. In Canada, the word ambition is a bad word. In the United States, if you say somebody's ambitious, oh, that's a good thing. I mean it. It's like, seriously, you say in a room full of Canadians, "Oh, he's very ambitious." "Oh, that's..." You say that in the States, you're like, "Wow, that's great. Good for you." You know what I mean?

So there's trouble on both sides of that equation. But the fact of the matter is, if you want to succeed with your art and your art is not pop mainstream art, then you have to fight for a place and you have to get to the table. People think, "I like doing that." I hate doing that. I'm tired of it. I have a podcast. I would like my podcast to reach as many people as possible.

I want to spend the day making the podcast. I don't want to spend the day out trying to secure listeners and playing with different radio broadcasters who are dipping their feet into podcasting. That's not fun, but you have to do it. So it's part of how you represent your work. There are agents, I have a literary agent, I have a voice agent. I have different people who work with me on different things. It's always nice to have that kind of representation.

But that's mostly for not having to negotiate contracts, you know what I mean? And to some degree, securing work. But that's a challenge. You have to learn how to be charming. You have to learn how to be aggressive, but not too aggressive. You have to learn how to sell your work. For me, with Manteca, it's always been easier to sell Manteca than anything else I've done, because Manteca, I'm just one member of Manteca.

I mean, Doug and I look after the artistic direction of the band, and we write most of the material, but ultimately, we are part of a larger collective. So it's not like it's that personal thing where I can't say, "Oh, we killed it last night." You know what I mean? If I say, "I killed it last night," it sounds really pretentious. But if I say, "We killed it last night," then it's a little bit more... It's not so ambitious.

Leah Roseman:

I was curious about your writing process with Doug, because he's a keyboard player. Do you also play keyboards or guitar to help you with writing?

Matt Zimbel:

No. I play a little bit of guitar, but just a little bit. So basically the way that we work together is he will draft something and then we will work on it together. I'll sing him stuff, and he'll write that down, and we will work on arrangements together. We'll send demos back and forth to each other.

The way he described it. He says, "I'm the architect. He's the builder." But I don't think that's entirely fair to him because he does a lot of architecture. He does a lot of visioning.

Leah Roseman:

You have such memorable riffs and I have to say, this whole time we've been talking, I've had some earworms of Manteca-

Matt Zimbel:

Oh, nice.

Leah Roseman:

... in my head.

Matt Zimbel:

Nice.

Leah Roseman:

I won't sing them for everybody, but it's really loud in my head.

Matt Zimbel:

Well, one thing I've always loved about Doug's writing is he's a master of the memorable melody that doesn't suck. He's just a master at it, in my opinion. Lyne and I tease, and Lyne Tremblay, who's my partner, who sings with us from time to time, we always tease Doug when he comes up with something that is really, really very memorable, but also just on the edge of being so much of a hook. You can't get it out of your head. She always goes like this like Celine. She calls it the Celine moment.

Leah Roseman:

Was that Lyne's voice on Miss Météo?

Matt Zimbel:

Yes, it is. Yes. Well, yes, Lyne's singing on there, but her mom is the one who's talking on there.

Leah Roseman:

This next clip is from the official music video for Miss Météo with the band Manteca from their album Augmented Indifference, which was released in 2020, and you can check it out on Bandcamp.

Matt Zimbel:

So that's an interesting thing because Miss Météo is what we call her mom, Miss Météo, because she's always talking about the weather. She loves the weather, she loves looking at the weather. She will get her iPad in front of her and read us the weather in different parts of the province. So she did this one day when we had her and her dad, over for a few days.

I heard her reading the weather, and we'd been teasing her for years about being Miss Météo. So I just turned my iPhone on and I recorded her. And we never told her until she heard the new record. And it was like, "Guys, you got to get together. Let's get together and hear the new record." So we all sat around, and it's the first tune on the new record, and we put it on, and she was just completely destabilized.

"Est-ce que c'est moi, ça? Tu trouves ça oú ça?" She had no idea, and it's been very interesting to see, because as an instrumental band, we don't have words in our music. Lots of people started trying to figure out what the meaning of that was and how it worked. And somebody made a reference. Somebody thought it was a piece about the FLQ, and it was crazy. It's really fun though.

Leah Roseman:

But the video you made was sort of about climate change and-

Matt Zimbel:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

Because when I heard that the first time, it really brought me back to, I used to listen to Radio Canada when I was a kid to for jazz, and then they would have the weather all over the province, which I always found amusing because it was always pretty similar in winter, all these small towns all over. When I first heard that that's what...

Matt Zimbel:

Well, it is about climate change, and that's where we landed with it. And because during that time when Lyne's mom was reading the weather, she was reading about the flooding, which was just horrific. And we had never seen flooding like that in Eastern Canada before. So we did a video of that and used those images prominently.

The thing that's so interesting about that kind of musically, that song was very much, it was homage to Weather Report. Weather Report was a hugely influential group to us, and it's the first time that we really did what we thought of as a homage to them. And just by complete accident, if you look at that video, there is a frame in that video, which looks like the cover of the album called Heavy Weather ... Weather Report's very famous, over-million selling album ... and the video director had no idea. But I was like, "Stop that frame there. Look at this album cover here. This is the album that we are paying homage to. Look at that frame," and he was just like, "Oh my God, that's crazy." It is so incredibly similar.

Leah Roseman:

Wow.

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

And there's a satirical video you made, which is so clever, about streaming. What's it called? Busking in Deadwood.

Matt Zimbel:

Busking in Deadwood, yes. Well, this whole streaming thing, it's a crime. It's a crime, it's theft, and we have to call them out. And the only way to really call people out these days, in my view, is to do it with a sense of humor, and so that's what we did. So Busking in Deadwood is what's going to happen to people because the streamers ... they're refusing to pay people. And not only is that affecting our livelihoods, but it's also completely erased other streams of revenue that we've had in the past. If you give a record, if you give a CD that costs you $50,000 to make to somebody, it's almost like, "Oh, no. No, thanks. I don't have anything to play that with." So yes, there is all this infrastructure to streaming. But at the end of the day, they just don't pay enough. They pay hardly anything. I know people who've had very successful songs and have ended up with $4,000.

Leah Roseman:

Well, the only music app I have on my phone is Bandcamp, and I try to buy lots of albums. Some musicians, independent artists, still don't know about Bandcamp, and I've said to them, "Please get on Bandcamp. You need to get there." But with Manteca, I got your albums that you have available. And I wrote to you and you said the other ones, you have to buy the CDs. Why aren't you putting them on Bandcamp as well?

Matt Zimbel:

It's just a matter of -- we will eventually.

Leah Roseman:

Okay.

Matt Zimbel:

It's just a matter of there is so much work to do. We've just finished shooting a series of streaming concerts, and that those were so complex and there's so much to do. I mean, you could have four or five people working full-time on a band's career, and we just don't have the personnel to do that. So it's a matter of choice. It's a matter of eventually that will get done.

Leah Roseman:

So you have your home office, you're used to working out of your home. And then this pandemic hit, for a lot of people, became very new. Do you have advice for people in terms of strategies?

Matt Zimbel:

Well, I think I do have one piece of advice that is extraordinarily important and really got Lyne and I through this pandemic. And that is our creative output did not cease. We kept working. We kept creating, I started the podcast series, Yes We Canada, during that period. I don't know what came over me. I must have had a fever or something, but I insanely made the commitment to do 26 episodes, one a week, which was just ... I should have known better. It was an insane amount of work because each episode was 17 or 18 minutes, but it wasn't just me talking. I had to write the thing. I had to find all of the clips that go with it, the sound design, and then I had to send it to the studio for my sound designer to do, and then mix it and then send it back and get it approved.

It was an enormous amount of work, but it certainly was very gratifying to be able to create something at home every week and get it out into the world the next week. I mean, it cost me money. I didn't make any money on it, but I had the gratification of creating something and getting it to the market, and so I was very much sustained through that creation. And not only just the creation, but also the creation and the distribution, getting an out there. That really meant a lot to me. And I know with Lyne, she launched her second album and we did a cabaret show at The Loft here. That was one of the hardest shows I've ever produced in my life because we were in the middle of a pandemic. We were not even allowed to be in the house together. We couldn't bring the band in.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Matt Zimbel:

That was not legal, so we had to sneak them in. It was crazy difficult to produce a show with three musicians and two technicians during a pandemic blackout in Montreal because we had a curfew, right? But doing those things was extraordinarily uplifting for us. So I would just say being able to create and being able to measure your productivity is very important. My son said that he rehearsed bluegrass during the lockdown. And what he would do is every day, he would turn a notch up on the metronome so that he could measure his success at playing a piece at a faster tempo, and I thought that was very smart because it was like, "Okay, that's precision." That's like, "Okay, I nailed that figure at that tempo. Good."

Leah Roseman:

And your other son is a restaurateur?

Matt Zimbel:

Yes. He owns five restaurants called Lucille's. He's always described it as, "If you were a redneck and you were born with the silver spoon in your back pocket of your overalls, that's where you'd eat." Because it's really good seafood and he's got a wonderful chef that oversees all five restaurants, and it's a very successful restaurant. And they're opening another one in Mont-Tremblant in February.

Leah Roseman:

Good to hear.

Matt Zimbel:

Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

I was wondering ... because part of your growing up was on this farm, and your mom made cheese and you're eating local produce ... if that affected the way you've lived with food, and did you transmit that to your kids growing up?

Matt Zimbel:

Food has been really one of the most important parts of my life for a long time. My mom was a very good cook and my brother was a chef, and so our relationship with food was always something very special for us. My parents grew up in the Depression. My mom was from a very large family, nine people, and so food and family are very important to us. Yeah, I think that that has. Obviously, the boys, both my sons, that's been a part of their lives. Their mom was a very good cook too. She still is. And this family kind of revolves around the dinner table, where we would never listen to Manteca because it's not good music to dine by.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Speaking of the band, I know you had the tragic loss of your trumpet player, Rick.

Matt Zimbel:

Rick Tait. Yes.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Matt Zimbel:

Rick died when he was 49 years old of cancer. He was one of our principal composers and our trumpet player and our keyboard player, and somebody that we loved so dearly. He's really been with us very closely in the last few months because his daughter played on our new record. And when Rick was alive, she was not a musician. She's released a couple of records. She's got a band that was very big in Japan, to the point where ... She told us during this session that we just did that there are cover bands. There's a cover band of her band in Japan. Yeah. So Rick, he was a huge influence on us in terms of writing. We still do one of his tunes to this day, and probably will always do that tune. It's called Perfect Foot and it was written about Joe Mendelson, or Mendelson Joe as he's known. And Rick's influence is still part of what we do today. We've redefined our brand recently. Manteca is jazz-adjacent, heavy metal wannabe. That's us.

Leah Roseman:

There's a genre.

Matt Zimbel:

There's our own genre. There ain't nobody else in there but us.

Leah Roseman:

Okay. Jazz-adjacent, heavy metal wannabe.

Matt Zimbel:

Yep. That's what it is.

Leah Roseman:

One thing we didn't talk about was crowdfunding, because I know you crowdfunded Monday Night at the Mensa ... What's it called?

Matt Zimbel:

Monday Night at the Mensa Disco, yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Which, I love that album.

Matt Zimbel:

Oh, thank you so much. Crowdfunding, it's like a lot of things. When it first came out, it was very alive and exciting and people were like, "Hey, this could work. This could work." But I think through time, people have got tired of it. There's so many people asking for money these days. People are exhausted. It's like, "I can't give anymore." So we haven't used that format for funding for some time. I would be very reticent to go back to it. It makes perfect sense when you're touring and you have the infrastructure to set up things where people get free tickets to shows, they get t-shirts, whatever, whatever, whatever. But it gets harder and harder when you don't have that infrastructure, and then you have to get your packages delivered to people and create packages that will make them be excited about helping you out.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Matt Zimbel:

So when we first started that ... I guess that would've been 2013 or something like that, that we kind of funded that record ... it was a very viable way of funding things. But I don't think it is anymore.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. And do you think for more established musicians, it might put you in a perceived position of weakness in terms of your reach?

Matt Zimbel:

Well, look, that's always a dilemma, right? I mean, you're trying to present to your public that you are a success. But in actual fact, if you're a Canadian artist, you were scrounging around to make ends meet. So you're always in that conundrum, right? Perception is not reality ... There's a sleight of hand out there. It's a real challenge. But I mean, the challenge of being an artist in Canada is that you have to get outside of this country in order to have a career that blossoms, and that is critically important. You cannot rely on the geographic and population base that Canada has.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I was going to say we have such a small population spread out so far. It makes touring very difficult, right?

Matt Zimbel:

Very difficult, and perhaps now more than ever because gas has gone up and concert offers have gone down.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Matt Zimbel:

The market is so flooded with artists that, sometimes, I have promoters offering us less money than they offered us in 1992. And you go, "Well, hang on a second here. Gas and hotel prices and per diems, and all those costs have gone up. How is it you can potentially offer us less money than you offered us the last time we played for you? Have we gotten worse? I don't think so." Anyway, that's the scruffy side of the business that we don't like to discuss.

Leah Roseman:

Well, it's reality.

Matt Zimbel:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

We started this conversation, we're talking quite a bit about your family, and it's interesting. Your dad, he hung onto these precious negatives ... that became very famous when he finally developed them ... of very famous people. What kind of perspectives did your dad teach you, and your mom, too, in terms of your success in life and your way of approaching your career?

Matt Zimbel:

They were both very professional in their work. They took it very seriously and they were very dedicated to it. I think that that kind of innovation that they had, they were both innovators in their world. They took chances. My mother, she was very early adapter of computers, an early adapter of blogging. My father was a very early adapter of the 35 millimeter camera. They were always willing to go into places where not a lot of people had been before, and that was very encouraging. And they were both excellent writers. I mean, my parents ... They were well-read, but they had a very great conversational tone in the way that they wrote, and I really learned a lot from that. That really, really helped me in so many ways.

Beyond that, they were just always very supportive. They were always very helpful to me. I could always bring them my projects and they would give me their opinions. My mother and I used to have a joke. For a period of time, I was writing pieces for the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. If she liked them, I knew they wouldn't get published. And if she didn't like them, I knew they would get published. I would always tease her about that because she had some problems with my sense of humor at times. "Oh, good! You didn't like it. That means I'll probably get picked up." Yeah, I learned a tremendous amount from them. And to be in a family of freelance artists, you learn a way of life in that environment. And the way of life that you learn is that we never have much money, but we always eat well, and we always figure out ways to get it done. And we're always very responsible with money. You have to be responsible with money.

My mother used to say ... She goes, "Oh, these bankers." You'd go to a bank and try to get a bank loan, and they wouldn't give it to you because you're an artist. She's like, "Are you kidding me? You think we're going to default on something because we're artists? We're the ones that have learned how to put together something from nothing. You've got to be worried about the guy who's got the job in an office and then suddenly loses that job. That's who you should be worried about because that's the guy that's going to default on his mortgage, not us." The lessons that you learn in a freelance family are live life to its fullest, figure out how to pay for it later, do it responsibly, right?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Matt Zimbel:

Those are good life lessons. Those are lessons that put you on a path to living well, right?

Leah Roseman:

Earlier in this conversation, you refer to professional musicians. And something that often comes out with my guests is I hesitate to make those separations because, like yourself, a lot of the income you've earned has not been from performing as a musician. It's been doing broadcast media and working as a TV executive and stuff but you are a professional musician, you know what I mean?

Matt Zimbel:

Well for a long time in my career, I was a musician and a music producer. At a certain point, I started doing more production and artistic direction outside of the realm of music. And throughout all of that period, I still consider myself a professional musician. But at the same time, producing and artistic directing, they use so many musical skills unto themselves. So much of what I do has to do with A&R and music selection, and definitely commissioning music and stuff like that. You're not a player at that point, but you're still a musician. I've surrounded myself with musicians when I go to do other jobs as well because I think musicians have so many skills. We're producing this streaming series called Road Stories. Everybody on that, they're in the band, right?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Matt Zimbel:

But they're also producers. And it's been really a pleasure to have those experiences with those people, because everybody brings so much to it that it's been so gratifying.

Leah Roseman:

Well, my question about this, Matt, I think was that if you had been given another life path ... if you could go back and say you'll only be playing percussion full-time, not even teaching, you'll just have this thing where you can just constantly be making records and being on the road ... would you have chosen that over what's been, so far, a very interesting life with so many different strands of creativity?

Matt Zimbel:

No, I don't think so. I would like to be broader in my percussion-playing abilities. I would like to be a better percussionist. But I think that there's a part of me that really enjoys these other things that I do, like writing words, creating shows. I find it very gratifying to do that. I find writing this podcast to be extraordinarily fun. I really get tremendous gratification from these other activities. I mean, playing with Manteca, I could do that full-time for sure because it incorporates so many of those other things. We put together a show. We have a technical crew. There's art to that creation as well, which we all enjoy so much. We interact with the audience. There's a lot of things. I think I could be happy touring with Manteca full-time, but these other things that I do, they really bring me such great pleasure and have taught me so much that I wouldn't want to not have those things in my life. Those are there for a very specific reason.

Leah Roseman:

Well, thanks so much for your time today and sharing your perspectives and your great stories.

Matt Zimbel:

Well, thank you so much for your extraordinarily detailed research and kind interviewing skills.

Leah Roseman:

Thank you.

Matt Zimbel:

You really did your homework.

Leah Roseman:

Well, maybe it comes from insecurity. I want to make sure.

Matt Zimbel:

No, it comes from professionalism. And I look forward to seeing your podcast and hearing your podcast because I've been so busy with this series that we've been doing that I haven't had a chance to jump in and see any of your other guests, so I'm looking forward to diving in.

Leah Roseman:

I trust you found Matt's perspectives interesting. And if you missed my episodes with fellow Manteca band members, Colleen Allen and Mark Ferguson, please give them a listen. Thanks for following this podcast. Please consider buying me a virtual coffee. The link is in the description. Have a great week.