We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marsoupial a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Marsoupial, thanks for joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
Before starting Marsoupial, none of us had played in a group that heavily featured unstructured improvisation. Michael, our guitar player, and Alex, our drummer, both have a bit of a jazz background, but most of their prior experience still existed within structured music. Each member of Marsoupial is a fan of jam bands like the Grateful Dead, Phish, and the Allman Brothers, and we had played along to records over the years. That being said, this is the first time the rubber has really met the road for us in terms of long-form improvisation.
The most essential skill for group improvisation is being a good listener, which is actually rooted in being open minded. It took some intense listening when we were first playing together. As an improvisational band, it’s imperative that we all take turns driving the ship when we’re in a jam. Each member has a say in the direction our music goes, and that can only be realized when everyone else is intently listening while simultaneously playing. That also allows our music travel in directions that none of us expect, and that creates opportunities to call on all of our individual influences and determine what to play next.
The biggest obstacle we have in terms of learning more and speeding up the learning process is simply a lack of time. We all have full time jobs and other obligations (which are wonderful in their own ways), but we would be able to grow so much more quickly if we could dedicate more time playing together than just a few hours each week. That being said, we’ve already learned so much from each other and feel that we are just getting started!
Marsoupial, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Marsoupial is a cover band that exclusively plays original music. We may not write the lyrics or underlying parts for the songs that we play, but our take on the music is entirely our own. Our performances feature long-form improvisation between songs, often featuring genre and stylistic jumps and key changes, decorating space and time while contemporaneously composing and steering a jam into a different song. Sometimes our jams will move into a different song entirely, and other times they take on a life of their own.
A good example of what we do is on our YouTube page from a recent show at Wild Heaven. We started out with Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter and drove the disco beat into Shakedown Street by the Grateful Dead. We let that jam get a little loose and jumped into Bathtub Gin by Phish. That broke into a reggae-heavy jam that led into Jammin’ by Bob Marley, and we finished up with Dua Lipa’s Cold Heart. We love moving across musical eras and genres and just seeing where the music takes us.
Marsoupial’s story hasn’t been linear at all. Alex, our drummer, and J.T., our bassist and one of our vocalists, have been playing in bands together for nearly twenty years. Both went to high school together and played together in bands there. After high school, J.T. actually followed Alex to Dallas to play in a band that had decent success around Texas. That eventually fizzled out, and they moved back to Atlanta and started other careers.
Michael, our guitar player and another one of our vocalists, was in bands all throughout middle and high school and had a serious band in college. He was fortunate enough to play all over the country with his college band and cut his teeth playing around the Nashville scene. He moved to Atlanta over a decade ago, and he met Alex through his wife when they were classmates in grad school. They had similar musical interests and jammed a few times. Alex moved out of state for a few years, and they vowed to start a band when he got back.
Roy, our keyboard player and another one of our vocalists, played keys in a band in law school in North Carolina, where they had moderate success around Chapel Hill. Roy’s wife and Michael went to law school together at Emory, and Roy and Michael quickly found a shared musical interest and became concert buddies. Once Alex moved back, the four guys quickly set up a jam and found that the chemistry was good. Marsoupial has been grooving steadily almost 2 years and began playing shows seriously in Fall 2024.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
For us as a band, the goal is to make music together, and to create in real time. We enjoy playing songs we all know and love (that’s definitely part of the fun), but we have found it rewarding to improvise collectively. The goal of group improvisation is to take a musical idea somewhere it’s never been before. One of our goals is reaching that uncharted territory, as far as we’ve experienced it together, anyway. We’re looking to find new sounds and lock into a groove together – that’s the mission.
We all have different backgrounds and influences, but one thing we all share is a love of improvisational music. We’re all big fans of bands like the Grateful Dead, Phish, the Allman Bros, and String Cheese Incident, to name a few. Witnessing a group create music together in real time is the height of nonverbal communication.
Michael speaking here: I think it’s worth expounding a bit on different kinds of jams. The most frequent kind is a Type I jam, where the listener can still recognize the song structure. You can hear the same chord progression and could sing the the song’s melody over the current solo. Type II jams are where that song structure dissipates and the musicians’ playing determine what comes next. Phish are masters of the Type II jam, and we have learned so much from them. Sometimes one of our goals is to take a Type II jam as far as we can until it either falls apart or falls into a song – each is rewarding in its own right because you collectively chased a rabbit to see what you can uncover together. We’ve taken jams over 40 minutes without dropping into another song because we’re inspired by what each other is playing and exploring those new ideas. There’s nothing like improvising with these guys – I know that’s what I’m trying to achieve whenever we play together.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Making music together is a really intimate, vulnerable thing that I don’t think you really understand until you’ve been in a band. It’s a really precious gift to be completely open and exposed in a way that transcends verbal communication.
Being a band means being a collective unit. The goal in playing improvisational music as a collective is to suspend ego and move, breathe, and play together. It takes a lot of listening and suspending judgment – judgment on what you’re playing and what others are playing; instead, it’s about creating and moving musically together.
The most rewarding part is achieving that flow state where you can almost read each other’s minds because you’re listening so intently while playing. The best feeling is hearing your bandmate tease a song and everyone picks up on it, and the whole band drives the jam into a final destination that someone called out and the rest answered. There’s nothing quite like nailing that.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.marsoupialofficial.com
- Instagram: @marsoupialofficial
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/marsoupialofficial
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@marsoupialofficial
Image Credits
Keaten Monaghan
Alex Culbreth