We were lucky to catch up with Matthew Alec recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Matthew thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

This is a great question that I have a very easy answer to. I absolutely wish I had started on my musical path sooner. I started playing the alto saxophone in 5th grade at about 10 years old, but to say I really started that early on would be a bit misleading. Much like most of my classmates, those first few years the saxophone spent the vast majority of its time in my locker at school! I remember the reed I used developed a fine green mold on it… haha. Yeah, I really didn’t know anything about the saxophone aside from some basic fingerings until mid-high school or so. Looking back on my childhood I always loved music, especially old school soul music, but I didn’t know much about it. My mother had piano lessons as a child, my father (who my mother tells me could sing) was out of the picture, and my older brother played clarinet through college in marching and concert bands, so there was music in my family, but never at a professional level or anywhere near it.

The change for me started happening in high school. At first it started with classic rock. I was very into Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Queen, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin and I really wanted to learn to play the guitar as a result. This was perhaps my sophomore year of high school. I seem to recall visions of being a guitar god or something like that! Never happened, though. Instead, around that time I befriended a younger saxophone student in school that kicked my butt at our chair auditions for concert band. As it turned out he was a huge fan of Charlie Parker and turned me on to bebop jazz. I still vividly recall the first time hearing “Bird” (Charlie Parker)… absolutely blew me away. The technical virtuosity of his music was mesmerizing. For the readers out there who’ve never heard Charlie Parker, do yourself a favor and ask Alexa to play him for you. He passed in 1955, but his music continues to influence jazz (and all music) to this day. Anyway, hearing Bird changed my life forever. I was hooked on jazz from that moment on. My attention turned to the saxophone and I never looked back. I grew a great deal once the passion to improve was there. I was first chair in high school my senior year and won the school’s “Louis Armstrong Jazz Award.”

I went to Kent State University for music at 18 and discovered that I was still grossly underprepared for advanced music study. I had no music theory knowledge, I could barely read music, and really only knew a few scales. Much like high school, I worked my way up at Kent, but I started well behind a number of the students there in terms of understanding. If you search YouTube or Instagram today you’ll find dozens of “content creators” that are dazzling instrumentalists at very young ages… but, they started young. For most, if not all, of those musicians began with music playing in the womb. I recently interviewed living jazz great (and Cleveland-born) saxophonist Joe Lovano for All About Jazz and he talked extensively about how he grew up in an extremely musical environment, with a father who was himself a pro saxophonist, as well as both of his uncles. It takes a childhood of those experiences to mold a professional career in music. I didn’t have that and I wish I did.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I’m a jazz saxophonist, music producer, bandleader, jazz journalist, and entrepreneur in the Cleveland and Akron, Ohio area.

As a saxophonist, I’ve been playing for about 27 years. I went to Kent State University in Northeast Ohio for classical music and I’ve been performing in popular music and jazz settings for about 20 years now all over the East Coast of the U.S. I formed the jazz-fusion group Matthew Alec and The Soul Electric in 2017. My first record “Cleveland Time” came out last year which featured Blues Brothers’ bandsman and former Saturday Night Live musical director Tom “Bones” Malone and we made the jazz radio charts for a few weeks and got quite a bit of press in some huge publications. My 2nd album as a bandleader “Live at the Bop Stop!” is due out to all of the digital outlets in just a few short weeks on December 2nd. That was recorded live in February at Cleveland’s Bop Stop jazz club and also features Tom “Bones” Malone, who very gracefully appeared with my group and I here in Cleveland.

As a producer and entrepreneur, I started the record label Cleveland Time Records in 2019. The label is really still in its infancy, but my vision for it goes well beyond that of a traditional record label. I look at the label as an all-around production company that not only produces and distributes jazz from the city of Cleveland, but also produces content that promotes all-around jazz education. My group’s debut LP “Cleveland Time” was the label’s first musical release, but since the label has also released an in-depth video interview with Tom “Bones” Malone, and will be releasing the first-ever audiobook version of Louis Armstrong’s autobiography “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” as well as an in-depth two hour video interview with jazz saxophone legend Loe Lovano. I’ve a ton more in the works as well.

As a jazz journalist, I’m a contributing writer to the online jazz resource All About Jazz. My first publication with them “Jazz in Cleveland: A Storied Past, Surviving Present, and an Optimistic Future” came out about a year ago. I’ve also published a written account of my interview with Tom Malone with them in two parts. The interview I did with Joe Lovano will also be published, likely sometime towards the end of this year.

Performing and recording music is still my number one priority. I am a creative at heart and I am my happiest when I am in the moment, creating music at a high level. That said, as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realize that jazz education has also become extremely important to me. To me, jazz is the most self-expressive and sophisticated music that exists. It touches all aspects of the human condition, often times without any lyrics. It’s not just happy or sad or black or white. It’s all of the emotions in between and includes a few you didn’t know you could feel. It’s also incredibly challenging to perform. Even as an experienced instrumentalist, I have to practice daily in order to perform it. Listeners are also challenged. It takes a sophisticated and savvy listener to appreciate its complexity and understand its nuance. It’s human expression at the highest level and that’s what makes it so great. It’s art that needs to be heard and needs to be experienced by as many people as possible because it’s art that changes people. I realized at some point as an artist I have to do my part to promote the art itself. Without people out there doing that, jazz will continue to fade into obscurity.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Social media has been a major help to my growth as an artist, although it has taken a great deal of my time in the process. As it stands today, I’ve got somewhere around 40K followers or so across 8 social media channels, but to get that far has been a major undertaking!

I crafted a ten year plan to grow my music career in 2017 and I knew that social media had to be a major tool in that process in order for my plan to work, so I started most of the “Matthew Alec Music” channels around 2017 and then the Cleveland Time Records channels in 2019 when that came into existence. I’ve a few pieces of advise:

1) Start with great photos. If you don’t have photos, you don’t have anything. If you’re a solo artist or a band starting out, schedule a photo shoot with a great photographer immediately. The audience perceives you based on what they see. Additionally keep a “treasure trove” of photos. You may have one great photo shoot, but it will be a while until you have another one. Don’t post them all at once. Post a few and save some for later posts and promotions.
2) Follow other artists people in the industry, and fans of the style of music that you play. They may follow you back and even if they don’t it’s free promotion for you or your group. This approach works particularly well on Instagram.
3) Once you have photos, you need video content. Make it as high quality as you are able to afford. Personally, I would steer clear of grainy cell phone footage. Record the sound separately as individual tracks and have it mixed by an audio engineer. This will give the best possible presentation of your craft.
4) Advertise, advertise, and advertise more. Facebook, Instagram, and Google all offer very inexpensive advertising options which can be targeted explicitly to people who already listen to music like yours. Use them, all of the time. Twitter also offers advertising, although personally I’ve not found it to be very effective.
5) Post multiple times per week. It doesn’t have to be every day, but I recommend at least 2-3 times weekly. This keeps you in front of your audience on a regular basis.
6) Stay persistent! There will be ups and downs, just keep going and don’t give up.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

For me, there are two things that I find to be incredibly rewarding.

The first is simply creating in the moment. Being in the studio or on stage performing at a high level comes with an artistic high that is difficult to top. Those moments are ones where you are seemingly out of body with nothing else on your mind. In an age where we are constantly bombarded with text messages, notifications, emails, phone calls, etc., etc., etc., it’s a rewarding state of mind. Very beautiful. I sometimes wonder how non-creatives cope with life today without a creative outlet.

The second is delivery on my vision. Whether it’s a record that I’m producing or a video series (and sometimes a combination of both), I spend a great deal of time dreaming up the project, writing the project, planning all of the ins and outs of the project, recording it, then hours upon hours of post production work with mixing, editing, mastering, cover art, etc. It’s often times many months or years from the time that you have a vision for something before it gets released. When that finally happens it’s extremely rewarding.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.matthewalec.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/matthewalecmusic
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/matthewalecmusic
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/matthewalecjazz
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/c/matthewalec
• Other: www.facebook.com/thesoulelectric www.clevelandtime.org

Image Credits
Chris Kurka and Josh Land