Thomas Swick - Palm Beach and Jupiter Magazine
THE BAPTISM OF SONG
Singer Adriana Samargia finds life in song.
by Thomas Swick
Adriana Samargia lives in a house with three kids, three cats and four dogs. She is not so much a single mom as a singing mom. “We communicate through song all day. We harmonize. We make up operas about the dishes,” she says, breaking out in a soprano and ordering offspring to the sink. “There’s a grand piano a foot away from my bed.”
The musical house sits in a modest neighborhood of West Palm Beach, a short drive from downtown and St. Ann Catholic Church, where Samargia is the director of music ministries. She plans all the music – she’s added Latin chants – plays piano and flute, and of course sings. The self- effacement – what she calls “the act of disappearing into the liturgy” – is the opposite of being on stage, but she finds it actually helps her other performances. “My favorite thing is to come here and do a Mass, and then go out in the evening and do a jazz gig.”
Her interest in jazz goes back to her pre-teen years growing up in California. Her mother, who had been a live radio singer in Croatia, would send her on dates with her older sister, whose boyfriend (now husband) played trombone with Maynard Ferguson.
She came to Florida to attend what is now the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, where her studies included opera as well as jazz. The classical training helped her to sing without hurting her vocal chords. She continues to be conscientious about her health, working out at the gym and abstaining from meat, not to mention other substances sometimes associated with people in jazz. “My body is my instrument,” she says, “I don’t even drink Coco-Cola.”
In the middle of November Samargia celebrated her family’s patron saint’s Feast Day with a traditional open house. Musicians, friends and nuns happily moved among children and dogs (the cats kept their distance). A pot of bean soup simmered on the stove, and homemade breads – baked in the shape of crosses – were centerpieced colorfully atop embroidered clothes. In the background, Slavic folk songs played. World music joins classical, liturgical and jazz in the life of Samargia, who began in a folklore group in California. Extending her repertoire even further, she is a member of the a cappella vocal ensemble The Parson Brown Singers.
A chart of multiplication tables hung on one wall. The children – Josef, 13; Jacob 11; and Mila, 9 – are all homeschooled and “addicted to learning. It’s never occurred to them that there’s anything tedious about it," Samargia says.
Though she handles only “75 percent” of their musical education, she finds it difficult to be a tough critic. Josef sings in the men’s chorus of the Young Singers of the Palm Beaches, and Jacob and Mila sing in the treble chourus. It’s a kind of Trapp Family without the trappings.
And there’s constant collaboration. Last year Samargia came out with her second CD, “Both Sides,” contributing one dollar from every sale to the St. Ann Church’s Food Pantry. The songs – by people like Antonio Carlos Jobim, Thelonious Monk, Johnny Mercer, and Do rival Cayman – were chosen by her children.
“Among the three of them they probably know a thousand standards,” Samargia says, not with boastfulness, but rather joy at the beauty of a shared love.