Crompond couple scales the heights of artistic success
Somewhere among the terabytes, there is a passenger manifest from 1999 for a flight from London to the Vietnam-China border. On that flight was a couple and strapped into the seat beside them – a full-price seat bought and paid for with coin of the realm – was their bouncing bundle of joy, an accordion.
Mario Tacca’s accordions had always fit in the overheads. He was crowned world champion at Carnegie Hall in 1962 and had been performing internationally for decades. But the airline agent was adamant. The accordion would have to buy a seat. And it did.
Mary Mancini, meantime, was at an impasse with the same agent over the carry-on with the sheet music for her, for her husband Mario Tacca and for the entire regional Chinese symphony with whom they would perform. The case was too big.
While Tacca attended to getting his accordion properly seated, Mancini and their tour assistant scrambled to stuff the nut of the entire venture – the music itself on hard copy pages – into whatever lesser-sized bags were available.
Mancini said, “And this was 1999 – security wasn’t like it is today.”
As for the coddled accordion, Tacca said: “When the flight crew saw the instrument, they said there was plenty of room in the overheads, but I said as long as we paid we would strap it in and there it sat the whole trip.”
The couple performs 200 shows per year – 150 together. They make a comfortable living at their art, they said, but the sweat equity in such a schedule is evident. They produce and sell their own CDs at gioiaproductions.com, setting the bar impossibly high for the self-produced rockers practicing in a garage near you.
On June 22, Mancini and Tacca headlined the Abruzzi Earthquake Benefit Show, which included Philadelphia’s City Rhythm Orchestra, comedian Floyd Vivino and singer Steve Ritrovato, at the Paramount Center for the Arts in Peekskill, earning $19,000 toward helping the central Italian region leveled by earthquakes in April.
Their costumes are custom made and, given the variety of music they perform, must be appropriate for the musical gamut: from weekly performances at the Church of the Assumption in Peekskill to international shows with an 80-piece orchestra, and from cabaret to sacred. “I have a huge wardrobe of two-piece things, one-piece things, short dresses, long dresses,” said Mancini. “It keeps me on my toes.” His clothes, too, are custom and he is known for his hat to the degree he was at least on one occasion not recognized without it.
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