The hardest working woman in Australian showbiz

By GRAHAM REID

This is a surprise. Other than a few politicians and most people in social welfare agencies, Monica Trapaga is probably the hardest working woman in Australia.

She's a television and movie actress, speaker at corporate functions, presents television programmes such as Better Homes and Gardens, has been a regular presenter on ABC's Play School for more than 10 years, has made videos and recorded albums for kids, is a co-host on the Disney Channel's Playhouse (which has just been launched here) ... and is a successful jazz singer.

These days she's got three groups on the go: a big band outfit with John Morrison's Swing City, which has regularly presented a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald; a Cuban band with Mano A Mano; and a slinky cocktail lounge outfit with a group called the Bachelor Pad.

Yet despite this workload, a chance phone call catches her sitting by the pool.

Monica, shouldn't you be working?

Trapaga laughs and says she's accompanying a friend who is doing laps. She's sitting in the Sydney sunshine watching. And today is a rare day off.

"I'm a little less busy this year than last, but I'm one of those obsessive-compulsive people who doesn't like sitting still. Actually I do, but it has to be a pretty fascinating book.

"I've always had my finger in many pies but it comes from necessity and just survival. As a musician it's hard to eke out a living being fulltime so early on I got involved in television and children's presenting.

"But my first love is jazz, which is why I have so many bands. I just like too many things. I had very progressive parents who exposed me to every kind of music so I never fell in love with just one style."

Trapaga says one style has led to another, so it has been a natural development for her, fronting so many different groups.

She's worked in children's television for 15 years and in music for 18. For three years from 1985 she was in the long-running 40s swing band Pardon Me Boys alongside her brother Ignatius Jones, then left to form the Moochers, which went for "God I don't know how long, a decade or something".

But it is with the Bachelor Pad that she is coming to New Zealand. The band is made up of graduates from the Conservatorium of Music and some who have spent considerable time in New York.

"They are a lovely band, my favourite collection of jazz musicians in Sydney. They are kings of that kind of swing. I look at them as different from any other band.

"It's very intimate. I hate to use the word cabaret because it's had a very bad rap, but I like to think of it as a real story-telling experience. I do a lot of talking about the music and tell stories behind the songs, and about my past and the guys in the band.

"Some might call it cabaret but I just call it performing and entertaining. I have never been one to just sing, I like to engage my audience and take them on a journey.

"There is a look to it and the job description for the boys was they had to be a bachelor to be in the band - which causes problems sometimes. But it does have that 50s lounge sound to it and I wanted to get the ease that lounge music has.

"If you think of that Stan Getz-Astrud Gilberto ease, that Antonio Carlos Jobim sound, the Chet Baker cool thing.

"I do Ella and Nancy Wilson and Dinah Washington. All those things are vocally challenging and we have individual arrangements for them too."

She says there are few women jazz singers in Sydney who take risks with arrangements and change their repertoire ("they set and forget").

But for Trapaga, taking a Billie Holiday tune in another tempo or direction keeps the music fresh for her and interesting for the audience. She transcribes singers' solos, took voice lessons just to keep her vocal chords flexible, and says the television work can take it out of her as a singer.

"The voice can dry out with all the script reading. Doing the Disney work is time consuming because they work in two or three-month blocks of filming.

"You literally learn 25 half-hour scripts, and that's all new songs and words. You can imagine the time that goes into that, it's like learning an encyclopaedia. I have a stack of scripts in my house and after every season I look at this stack, which are as thick as a phone book, and think, 'My God, I remembered all that!'

"That's why doing the music is so important. It just doesn't feel like work."

Performance

* What: Auckland City and Waiheke Island Jazz 'n' Blues Festival

* Where and when: South of the Border with Dilene Ferraz and Sergio Lavia, Auckland Town Hall, Friday April 9; Ladies Go Latin with Dilene Ferraz, Waiheke Theatre, Saturday April 10; Three Wonderful Women with Sonia and Dilene Ferraz, Auckland Town Hall, Sunday April 11; The Last Blast, Waiheke Theatre, Monday April 12, 3pm.