Matt Morrish

Slack-key guitar lulled Matt Morrish to sleep when he was a baby in Hawaii. New Orleans jazz and Latin rhythms awakened his musical sensibilities when he was a young adult. Now, as an LASF specialist, he enlightens Stanley students about the potent mix of brass and breath in that sublime shiny horn, the saxophone.

Morrish, 30, grew up in Lafayette. Last March he moved back, with his wife and young daughter, after six years in New Orleans, where he studied with Ellis Marsalis, founder of a legendary American musical family that includes sons Wynton and Branford.

After he graduated with a degree in jazz studies, Morrish stayed to carve out a name for himself in the city that invented jazz.

"Down in New Orleans music is a part of their culture," he said.  "It plays a prominent role in day-to-day life and is woven into the fabric of the city’s history."

He blew his sax on riverboats and in parades, casinos, clubs and even jazz funerals, in an old-time New Orleans tradition of marching the deceased to glory. But this sinking city, located just up the Mississippi River Delta from the Caribbean, is also known as a center for music from the islands dotting that vast sea and the Latin countries bordering it. Morrish performed and recorded with Los Babies del Merengue, which won the Big Easy Award for best Latin band three years in a row.

Good times and great music, but with the birth of his daughter, he realized it was time to come home. Morrish moved back to Lafayette and promptly ran into Bob Athayde, who invited his former student to visit Stanley’s music department. A new building, high-speed computers and an eight-fold increase in the number of students were some of the changes Morrish found.

In 1982, he started at Stanley after three years of saxophone at Happy Valley Elementary.

"I was into music even before I started to play," said Morrish.  "I just loved it and was really into practicing and playing all the time at an early age."

He gravitated to the sax because that’s what a friend chose. But the instrument stuck, in part because his grandfather played sax at Berkeley High School and his older brother was a fan of R&B, soul and jazz.

Although Morrish’s interest in sax hit the middle school doldrums, he played in Stanley’s jazz band and went to music summer camps. By high school, he was on fire again, performing with the Acalanes High band, attending Stanford University’s summer jazz camp and hanging out with friends to listen to music and go to concerts.

He spent the year after graduation in Italy with an American Field Service program then came back to attend UC Berkeley. That’s where he first met Ellis Marsalis, who traveled west for a Pacific Coast Collegiate Jazz Festival.

"He gave a master class and got me thinking about New Orleans," said Morrish.

Instead of heading for the Big Easy, Morrish left school for a year to tour the U.S. as a musician and bus driver for the McNeil Family Singers, friends of his parents who performed and recorded folk songs in an historical context.

"At that point," said Morrish, "I started thinking I would try music as a career ."

After his return to the Bay Area, he studied with noted jazz pianist Ed Kelly at Laney College and saxophonist Mike Zilber at Los Medanos College. Then he put together an audition tape for the University of New Orleans’ jazz studies program directed by Ellis Marsalis—and got no response. So he and a couple of friends moved east and rented an apartment in the French Quarter. Morrish drove to the university, auditioned on the spot and got in.

Six years later he came home planning to "scratch out a living playing music," with no intention to teach. Bob Athayde, however, had other ideas. Now Morrish works by day with Stanley’s young musicians and some private students. By night he performs in Bay Area clubs, including the Black Cat in North Beach and the Jupiter bar in Berkeley. This past summer he jammed once a month with students at Papillon, a Lafayette coffee cafe, and taught at the Lafayette Summer Music Workshop.

Teaching, Morrish discovered, is a pleasure. He finds Stanley kids excited about learning and easy to motivate.

"I just try to create an excitement level about great musicians, where the music can take them and how they can get there," he said.

Inspirations for that process, he said, are Bob Athayde and Stanley’s music department.

"As far as music goes," said Morrish, "this has got to be one of the finest departments in the country. Lafayette is unique in that people take a serious interest in the arts."