Audio By Carbonatix
Maria Marocka is no schoolmarm. Over at Biscayne Gardens Elementary in North Miami, she’s the cool teacher. Tall and glamorous with funky clothes and an asymmetrical haircut, she has CDs filled with songs that she wrote and sang. “Are you famous?” her students ask as they hand over scraps of paper for an autograph. “Are you on MTV?”
Well, she’s not exactly famous either. In fact she’s doing the work herself of burning copies of her latest CD, Ranch Songs, and printing up the cover art on her home computer. But her kids, like most kids, have grown up with the idea that music is the business of stars, something famous people do and regular people listen to.
As a music teacher, Marocka hopes to show kids the do-it-yourself approach she has been following with her pals in the band Curious Hair and other musical gangs who gather at the alternative space C-Roc, and way down south at the Ranch, Mitch Gurdjian’s recording studio/hangout that inspired her new disc.
Although as many as 500 little kiddies can be herded through her classroom every week, Marocka is committed to teaching more than All Good Boys Do Fine. “Some teachers are into teaching half notes, quarter notes,” she says. “I’m more like, this is improvisation. I’m gonna play this, now you play something. Make up another verse. Make up a percussion line.” When she gets frustrated with the limits of the classroom — too little time, too little money — she sometimes introduces the kids to arrangements of her own songs on recorders and bells.
The results, to a listener’s ears, can be mixed. “They can barely control their own bodies and their mouths,” she says of her kids. “I endure a lot of sound.”
The same words have often been uttered by audiences at live performances by the Hair and its ilk, performances that approach and often surpass ritual in emphasizing the experience of the performer at the expense of the listener.
Marocka laughs at the comparison.
When it comes to making music, she admits, “There’s two extremes. A lot of people that are really trained, virtuosos, have total control over their instruments, but that can limit them. They can’t loosen up and play a different kind of music. On the other end, Jeff [Rollason, the head Hair] is not trained. He’s open to anything. With these guys, it’s more about the product of the moment and not having a preconceived notion of what the song is like. Since [the new disc] was [called] Ranch Songs, I wanted it to be very organic and a representation of all the creating we have done in that place.”
Ranch Songs does indeed sound spontaneous and often wacky: Wavering vocals cut through a drum, bass, and guitar haze that is broken up by odd runs on the accordion and a variety of toys that just sound funny.
That spontaneity led to a bit of confusion when Marocka recruited a new drummer for her live gigs (she and Gurdjian shared all musical duties on the disc). Someone recommended a trained drummer from Colombia named Andres (“I don’t even know his last name,” giggles Marocka), who far from espousing the philosophy of playing in the moment, had actually notated the songs exactly as he heard them on the CD and came to rehearsal ready to replicate the recording.
“Then we play and he says, ‘Oh, that’s not it,'” marvels Marocka. “Mistakes became part of the song because Andres mapped it out. So we said to ourselves, ‘Oh, he learned it, so we better learn it.’ Which is very different from the Curious Hair. I’m not trying to say anything negative,” she hedges. “That’s just a different vision. There has to be some kind of middle ground in between those extremes.”
