At home with...Maria Tecce

Maria Tecce is what we like to call a ‘ten-trick pony’. Having turned her hand to acting on stage and on film for a number of years, it turns out she is also a consummate jazz/blues chanteuse. This bounty of talents have uprooted her from her native Boston and landed her in the jazz boondocks of… Glasnevin.

“This is the first time I’ve lived in a city and not been smack in the middle of the action. Glasnevin is kind of residential, but I’m in town all the time – the city is still my stomping ground,” she concedes.
So what’s happening down Glasnevin way these days?
“The Botanic Gardens. It’s so cool to have them right down the road. Every Sunday I would say to myself, ‘Before I go to the jazz session I’m going to go to the gardens’, and I never would go. Last Sunday was a real scorcher, so I made it my business to get down there. The Victorian glass-houses absolutely blow me away – we just don’t have that stuff in America.”
Like any jazz singer worth her salt, Maria is happy living out a quintessentially bohemian existence.
“I brought nothing with me from the States,” she declares. “I moved here in 1998, but didn’t move to Dublin until a year and a half ago. I’m still not meeting loads of people yet, and everything is still pretty new here. I dived in feet first to see what would happen.”
Now that she is planning to stay in Dublin, she feels it’s time to set down some roots.
“I just got an additional five years on my artist visa, so now it’s kind of cool as I can buy CDs and DVDs and add to my little handbag collection, which seems to be growing mysteriously. They’re all gorgeous and I could never give them away.”
For someone who is just starting to buy CDs and DVDs, she has already amassed quite a healthy collection.
“The CD collection is reaching into the hundreds,” she estimates. “I just bought Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, and I still love Tom Waits’ Blood Money. He’s one of the finest songwriters we have. I’m a Dave Matthews fan too – Crash is my favourite CD. It was a present from my brother. You gotta have some Betty Carter in there, Ray Bryant, Eartha Kitt, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Regina Carter, Ella Fitzgerald…all of whom are just great, solid, well-crafted singers.”
Her taste in films is equally discerning; ‘I go from Blade Runner: The Directors Cut to Room With A View, from Dirty Pretty Things to The Ring… the Japanese version, obviously’.”
It is perhaps her insatiable love of books that is proving to be her weakness.
“I tear out the books pages in the Sunday Times so I can go into the bookstore and splash out,” she laughs. “I’m a complete bibliophile... I usually have two or three books on the go at any given time. I just finished The Divine Beauty (John O’Donohue), and Life Of Pi (Yann Martel). I love literary fiction, but I also love trashy chick detective novels. When you’re doing a “nose-to-the-grindstone” project, something that’s incredibly intense, there’s nothing better than to curling up in a bed with a good chick book. There’s a good series called the Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich. They’re set in the ’burbs in New Jersey and she’s got the big hair, driving a two-seater sports car that breaks down every two miles.
“Being an actor I’ve also got the Complete Works Of Shakespeare, and Girl With A Pearl Earring (Tracy Chevalier) – before the film came out I should add. I was reading The Sexual Life Of Catherine M (Catherine Millet), which was so boring I stopped 20 pages in. It doesn’t even make good pornography.”
It’s amazing she manages to get so much reading done, given that she lives in a hugely creative, energetic household.
“I live with a friend, who owns the house. It’s the house she grew up in,” she explains. “We’re all singers, which is a gas. There’s no competition at all – one of my roommates is a classical singer, and the other is a singer in a wedding band, and I do jazz and contemporary blues, so we all do completely different things. We’re very Sex & The City in the house. We swap bags and clothes. We had a Sex & The City party in the house when the last episode aired. We made cosmopolitans and food – we did the whole nine yards.”
So did she mourn the passing of the show like hundreds of women did that night?
“We weren’t upset watching the last episode, we looked at it and thought, ‘This is the most perfect ending they possibly could have done’. Then we switched over to Friends and we were like, ‘Uh, please...limping along here…hello!’.”
The pièce de resistance of the house, Maria contends, is the bathroom.
“I’m getting into all the smelly bath gear – I love Victoria’s Secret stuff. Our bathroom is just sumptuous...it’s all black and white tile, the bath is a huge old fashioned one with feet, we have candles on the window sill, and our shower is a big glass thing... it’s so beautiful. We have pretty good taste.”
So which handbag would she reach for if – god forbid – the house was on fire?
“I’d grab my guitar,” she says. “It’s a Takemine classical, Spanish guitar, and it’s makes the sweetest, warmest sound. It’s the only real thing of value I have. I love my bits and pieces, my CDs and bags, but it’s just stuff.”
It may sound as though Maria has plenty of creature comforts in her life, but there’s little escaping the fact that she’s something of a beatnik at heart. “I’m not attached to material things,” she concludes. “I’m always going to feel like a transplant here, I never feel as if I’m really at home. It’s an odd feeling. Right now it kind of feels like my home. It’s a strange dichotomy going on, but I guess the important thing is that I live in such a cool house, and for now I’m surrounded by great stuff and people.”

[photos: Cathal Dawson]
Maria Tecce appears live at the Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely, Co. Wickow (May 16th); Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin (18th); The Garage Theatre, Monaghan (20th) and The Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast (22).