The Peru Gazette

Beloved Jazz Group Getting Back Together For One Night In Plattsburgh

Mambo Combo, the jazz group that delighted North Country audiences for several years, returns to the stage on June 26 at 7:30 p.m. for a drive-in concert at Plattsburgh’s Harborside Stage, bringing the band back together for one night of swinging highlights.

Founded by the late Dr. Rick Davies, and led in more recent years by acclaimed trumpeter Herm Matlock — whose performance credits include gigs with everyone from Benny Goodman to Aretha Franklin to The Temptations — Mambo Combo rapidly became a favorite of local audiences, presenting a wide repertoire that ranged from traditional jazz classics to Latin-infused tunes to funk highlights, all of it imbued with a union of respect for the heritage of the music and inventiveness in the improvisational solos that the group’s members performed.

Much like the Jazz Messengers, the group that became the proving ground for new talent from Wayne Shorter to Wynton Marsalis to Terence Blanchard, Mambo Combo was founded as an ensemble of learning. The group provided an opportunity for Davies and Matlock to teach the students in the band about the artistry of jazz and the craft of professionalism, to coach them fastidiously during rehearsals, and to let them spread their newly discovered wings on the bandstand at their frequent gigs throughout the region.

Now retired from teaching and living out of the Plattsburgh area, Matlock leapt at the opportunity to hold a Mambo Combo reunion concert at the Harborside Stage when longtime band member Eli Moore of Saranac contacted him with the idea. Approximately a dozen musicians from the combo’s prior years of existence will gather on stage for this concert, excited to present a full-length evening of the best music that their genre has to offer, an ideal program for a summer night.

Matlock, a former SUNY Plattsburgh Music Department chair, led the college’s jazz ensemble and directed their symphonic band for several years, along with teaching applied brass and, after coming out of retirement to return to the college as an adjunct professor, playing with and eventually leading Mambo Combo. Between his two periods at SUNY Plattsburgh, he led the Crane Jazz Ensemble at the Crane School of Music and was the Director of Bands at Franklin Academy in Malone.

His professional playing brought him on the road with Aretha Franklin, Bobby Vinton, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Temptations, Clark Terry, Slide Hampton, Phil Woods, The 5th Dimension, and several other luminaries of jazz, pop, and soul music. He continues to count among his all-time highlights the two concerts in Gary, Indiana, where he was selected to play a duet with legendary jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman.

Attendants at the Harborside Stage will begin parking vehicles on a first come, first served basis at 6:30 p.m. for this concert, with tickets available at the gate. Admission is only $20 per carload — not per person — with the box office proceeds going to the artists.

Attendees have the option of bringing a lawn chair or blanket and sitting in the area near their vehicle to watch the concert, or remaining in their car, where they can listen to the music by rolling down their windows or by turning on their car radios and hearing the broadcast over an FM frequency directly from the stage.

Attendees are not required to wear face masks but are respectfully requested to refrain from bringing alcohol or pets (service animals are welcome) into the concert venue.

This concert is generously sponsored by RE/MAX North Country, whose kind financial contribution has allowed this program to take place as an affordable live music offering in the North Country.

For more information, please contact Benjamin Pomerance at pomerance.benjamin58@gmail.com.