Mathias Lattin Up Next
by Mike Stephenson
Mathias Lattin is one of the upcoming artists who are making a name for themselves in the last few years. He won the International Blues Challenge in 2023 and released a new album on Vizztone Records, Up Next.
My name is Mathias Lattin and I was born here in Houston, Texas and I still live here in Houston. I was born July 16th 2002. My mother and my grandmother, who I grew up a lot around, they always said I was a singing child and I was singing before I could talk so they decided to put me into a kind of musical school. I ended up playing piano to start out and I took piano lessons for a while when I was about five or six and then not too long after that I started playing guitar when I was seven. Guitar at the time was just an instrument that I saw around the school that I knew I wanted to play. I always saw people walking by with it but I was too young and the school wouldn’t let you play guitar unless you were in third grade and all that stuff. I finally made it to third grade and they allowed me to do it and from there I’ve just been gone with it. At school it was always a classical programme so I started out playing classical guitar and learning the basics of the instrument and understanding techniques and they taught us all that and they were really hard on us about that and I learnt to read music there. Then I started learning more about classical music and my household was primarily a R&B household so I would hear a lot of bands like S.O.S. The Gap Band and, Frankie Beverly and Maze but then my grandmother turned me onto the blues as I was going into middle school. My introduction to that was B.B. King, she showed me a video of ‘Why I Sing the Blues’. I’m the only musician in my family. I have an older sibling, Oni Lattin, who is a rapper in France.
It then became a roller coaster and looking up a lot of music and I stayed in B.B. King for a while and I looked up his stuff verbatim and I bought a Peavey JF-1 because it was similar to his as I wanted to get his tone as close as possible. I tried to emulate some of his playing style and some of his music as his music just speaks to me like none other. Then it spiralled into other artists as I looked up other people and I got into Buddy Guy from there then got into Robert Cray and into Jimmie Vaughan and then as I started to play a little bit more I met an artist here Jonn Del Toro Richardson and I went out to one of his events and he let me sit in and he told me I should go to the Big Easy Social Club and sit in on a Wednesday night at the jam session. By this time I was maybe twelve or thirteen and Jonn has gone on to be one of my mentors. and he is a guitar player as well and he has given me so much advice and who to listen too like Pee Wee Smith and Robert Petway and that really started me on my whole delta blues situation.
My mother was always with me going to those blues jams as I was so young and it was on a Wednesday nights and I had to wake up the following day and get to school the following day starting at eight a.m. It was sometimes one a.m. before I got home. So from there being around such musicians the information they gave me was very helpful and every time I went I learnt something new and added it to my repertoire and that would give me another song to add to my musical data base. As I learned more music I started seeing how it intertwined with other genres and why blues and jazz are so similar so I have a jazz background as well. My mother enrolled me in this camp here called Summer Jazz Workshop when I was eleven (11). It is a five week intensive camp of just learning jazz and all the techniques that are involved in all of that so I was getting lots thrown at me and I was trying to keep it all together and understand what I am doing but also seeing how it all intertwines and how it all comes together at the end of the day. It really opened my mind in understanding how it all fits together. B.B. King had a big band and also Duke Ellington had a big band at one point as well and you start hearing the similarities as far as the orchestration of the music and those players. Johnnie Taylor also had a big band. I was focussed primarily on the guitar in the blues and jazz worlds.
At this time I ended up at Emmits Place and I went in one day and sat in on one of their jams and we ended up being friends with the owner and I just asked if I could have a jam session there and they were kind enough to let us do it and then we ended up having a show there one time and I have since performed at that place about several times. I hosted jams for my 16th and 17th birthday at Emmits. My band included a couple of buddies from the Summer Jazz Workshop or at school. The bass player, I met in high school and my drummer I met during Summer Jazz Workshop and they remain members of my band to this day they are my die hard guys, they roll with me no matter what. We did a couple of shows at that place and then a couple of shows at the Big Easy as part of the Houston Blues Society events.
Mathias Lattin King Biscuit Festival 2024 photo Mike Stephenson
I did have a band briefly called Untitled and we were a jazz/ blues kind of band and we competed to be the youth band to represent the Houston Blues Society at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis and we ended up going and we played our hearts out. I think this was in 2018. I went there in 2018 with my band Untitled and I went in 2018 with Sarah Grace and the Soul (previously known as Campfire Soul), a Houston based singer, who was a contestant on The Voice in 2018. I still have the same drummer who was in the Untitled group. I’m friends with Sarah and her family. We are all family. I met them at the Big Easy at one of the jams in 2015 or 2016. They invited me to one of her shows and we became friends. I’ve opened up for Campfire Soul (Sarah Grace and the Soul) a couple of times.
The artist I play for now her name is Keeshea Pratt. They let me sit in with them in my early days and they have also been a part of my musical growth and I thank them for that and for everything I have learned from them. The Keeshea Pratt Band won the International Blues Challenge in 2018. I’ve been fortunate to play with Miss Annika Chambers and I’ve had the chance to sit in with Miss Trudy Lynn and Jewel Brown. I’ve become great friends with The Peterson Brothers and they put on a great show. But what I was able to do was to go on a couple of tours with Keeshea Pratt.
My original plan was I graduated from the High School of Performing and Visual Arts here in Houston. I auditioned and was accepted into Berklee College Of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Due to COVID, Berklee moved to online instruction so I decided to go to Houston Community College where I’m majoring in Music Business. My plan is to apply to Berklee again.
I currently do a lot of gigs between Keeshea and other people who hire me out to do stuff. I do a lot more private shows and I go under my own name. Under my own name I play around the Houston area and I would like to get play some venues out of state or festivals. I have been a part of the Keeshea Pratt Band since I graduated right out of high school and we were hoping to get to Spain before COVID and we are due to go to Florida in January 2022 and play the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise. then right after that we hit the tour. I love every minute of it and wouldn’t change it for the world.
I have done some recordings in under my name I put out a single in my senior year of high school called ‘Notice Me’ I wrote everything, produced it myself, and I think I played every instrument on it. The drums were programmed by me I did the guitar work, the vocals the bass work and the keys myself. I recorded it in my bedroom. That single has a jazz influence and you can really tell my jazz influence in that song. I also did an instrumental single, ‘A Whole Mood’, in partnership with Anthony Frazier. I released a five track EP in 2021 titled ‘Let’s Start Here’ just after my birthday in July. It features songs I had written over maybe three or four years and I decided I needed to start somewhere and show my influences and show people here is what I do and my interpretation of it and here is what I write so you can hear my B.B. King influence and Curtis Mayfield influence and my Gary Clark Jr. type of sound that I try to create so you can really hear who I have been listening to when you put it all together. It is all my own work I played everything on there as well except for a couple of songs my buddy Ian Dessauer tracked the piano part on ‘All On My Own’ which is one of my favourite songs but I don’t get to do it often.
The blues scene in Houston is good although we don’t have an Austin 6th Street but we have a lot of legendary artists that live here. Trudy Lynn and Miss Annika Chambers are from Houston, Keeshea Pratt lives here. Milton Hopkins (cousin of Lightin’ Hopkins) lives here and James “Boogaloo” Bolden who used to play trumpet for B.B. King lives here. We have venues like The Big Easy, Green Oaks Tavern, and I mentioned Emmits Place so there is a great music scene here and a lot of musical content and I feel Houston does not get enough credit. I think it may be because we don’t have a Beale Street or 6th Street you have to travel to get anywhere.
I do jazz gigs as well and I feel it is important from a musician’s perspective to keep up with the technical craft of things so I consider jazz as being the technical aspect of my music. So if I write a song I make sure I keep in mind how chord progressions work. I love jazz and I studied jazz in high school. In the jazz world my influences are Wes Montgomery whom I love, Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, Arnett Cobb and Joe Henderson, Lester Young. There was a time when everyone hated me because all I would listen to is Wes Montgomery and then shortly afterwards it was George Benson. I played those guys to death and if I would love to get my hands on a Wes Montgomery guitar. If you ever catch me live I do a lot of those Wes Montgomery lines it is embedded in me.
Mathias Lattin King Biscuit Festival 2024 photo Mike Stephenson
Guitar is my primary instrument but as I said at the beginning piano was my first instrument and I never left it I just started taking guitar as my serious instrument but I always noodled around and kept up with my keyboard skills. I can still play piano a bit. I picked up bass a lot later than everything else and I’ve been playing it for about four years and I’ve been playing guitar since I was seven so that’s about 12-13 years. Houston is a big drummer area and the city has produced a lot of great drummers so I would never tell people that I play drums. I’m a songwriter as well and as I said I grew up in a r&b household and I heard a lot of Marvin Gaye who was an amazing song writer and also Prince was an amazing song writer so I like to take after them as far as trying to write my own lyrics.
One thing I am grateful for is to be around some of these great musicians who have played with some of the greats like James “Boogaloo” Bolden. He pulled me aside and talked to me a little bit about Robert Petway and Robert Johnson and told me what songs to listen too. Also Lil Joe Burton, who played trombone with B.B. King, I had the opportunity to take him around Houston and we had the chance to hang out and he told me about his time playing with Otis Clay. These guys are living legends to me and the guys they have played with are my access to stories. I’ve recently started a record collection and I get to read the backs of the vinyl and get names. Then my grandmother and my great grandmother are a great source of music and those two have given me a lot of songs to listen too and talk about so much so that I can’t keep everything in my head.
I’m into the gospel world as well and I grew up in the church and more recently I am the guitarist for a church and one of the songs that really sticks out for me is ‘Jesus Is Real’ and I like a lot of quartet stuff like the Highway Q. C.’s. Music is full time thing for me at the moment other than schoolwork. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. The Pinetop Perkins Workshop in Clarksdale, Mississippi is where I met Christone “Kingfish” Ingram at a jam. He lives not too far from and I met him there at the jam and we’ve kept in contact since then. I’ve known Zach Person for a while. I met him in Houston when he was still in high school. He is making himself a name and he used to live in Houston and is from North Carolina and is now in Austin.
I’m learning to play acoustic blues guitar and trying to get better doing that. I can play electric blues but it’s not the same feeling. Acoustic blues is a different art form in itself and I find the acoustic guitar a different instrument to the electric guitar its like a piano player playing organ.
(Telephone interview of this Texas based singer, guitarist and songwriter by Mike Stephenson took place in November 2021. Many thanks go to Shironda White for her help.)
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