Matthew Jacoby – Founder/Leader
The first advertised Sons of Korah gig that I remember was a night in 1993 at Deakin University in Geelong organized by the overseas Christian students group.
In 1993 I was in my second year of a Bachelor of Theology at the Reformed Theological College (RTC) in Geelong. I had left school determined to use music to serve God in some way and dabbled in writing and performing original material together with Jason Coghill, another young man with the same aspirations.
At some point we bumped into Rod Gear, a musician in quite a different league to us at the time. Rod was a graduate of the Victoria College of the Arts, a very quirky, moody and intellectual musician who had played with some of the best in the business.
My memories of this time are fragmented but at some point I wrote music to a couple of Psalms, as did Jason. At this time, Rod and Jason began to study at RTC and this led to us playing the occasional song together at various functions, mainly within the College.
Naturally this environment encouraged a focus on scripture so we were encouraged to keep looking at the Psalms for our inspiration. Another memory I have of this time is sitting in my Old Testament class where we were looking at the authorship of the Psalms. Most of the Psalms are attributed to David, Asaph and the Sons of Korah.
I thought this would be a great name for a band. When Rod, Jason and I had an opportunity to perform I suggested we call ourselves Sons of Korah, given that we were focusing increasingly on the Psalms for our lyrical content.
Our gig at Deakin university led us to organise our own concert in a room at Rod’s church – Barrabool Hills Baptist – the church I would eventually become a pastor of.
It’s funny how you remember things. The room we played in was no bigger than the average open plan living area in a house, but the room was full and to us it may as well have been a thousand people in a concert hall. The buzz of having a room full of people who had come to see us play was amazingly encouraging for us as young musicians. There were probably around 40 people, all of whom we knew. We played a very odd mixture of Psalms, blues numbers and a hard hitting Keith Green style musical sermon called ‘Hand to the Plough’. The next year we moved to a bigger room in the church and played a concert of which I still have the tape recording.
