Carmelita de la Guardia Performed this past Friday evening in the Sicula Italia Foundation “A Night In Sicily” event at the Villa Aletta in Omaha. The evening’s events were part of an awareness and fund raising effort surrounding the Sister Friendship City relationship established this year between Omaha, NE and Carlentini, Sicily. Many of the Italian immigrants that arrived in Omaha came from Carlentini, and there’s many efforts being made to formalize and strengthen that heritage and relationship.

Carmelita’s piano piece The Sicilian Heart was performed as a video and she also gave live vocal performances accompanied by her 4-piece band. Although wintery weather showed up during the course of the evening it didn’t dampen the showing of support by the attendees. My wife and I were honored to be invited and after using a plastic grocery bag as a makeshift windshield snow scraper (I wasn’t ready for winter yet) we safely made our way home.

Two days before Thanksgiving I sent the final files to Stephen Tefft upon his completion of 16 songs. Yes, it does barely fit on one CD – over 79 minutes, but it sounds like it will be released as two discs. I’m very sure I’ve never in the 35-year history of Tesco Productions recorded that quantity of songs in a single project before. His wife had gifted him some recording time a while back, but life and family responsibilities had pushed the doing part down the road (there’s even a song about a long slow road – although not about the project). The recording began the day after Independence Day and we spent a good part of that week laying down all the basic tracks. This included multiple acoustic guitars (up to 4 on a couple of songs), bass and electric guitar, and most of the vocal parts. We generally met one evening a week for the next few months as we continued to add an eclectic collection of instruments from standard and bass harmonicas, banjo, jews harp, penny whistle, melodica (to name some of them), and a wide assortment of percussion. Stephen recorded some of these parts at his home and they usually lined up OK when we dropped them in the original recording sessions. We had tried to coordinate this process so it was as seamless as possible. The final few weeks were mostly focused on initial and revised mixes – with the first full mix runoff providing focused listening on their family vacation trip. With mixes completed I then mastered all the songs and there was only one oversight I missed which was easily remedied.

You can likely tell just from the instrumentation these tunes are not always your “normal” fare of lyric, arrangement and presentation. In your lyrical journey you’ll travel down paths of heart longings, relationships (both with God and each other), memories of childhood, and hope for tomorrow. There’s about as many styles as there are instruments, and yet it’s still a cohesive listening experience as you progress through. The songs aren’t out yet, but will be showing up soon on many internet streaming sites as well as their family website https://www.abitaskew.com/.

Yesterday a unique recording was made capturing the heart of Carmelita de la Guardia as she performed an original creation. Her song The Sicilian Heart was very nicely presented on a baby grand piano at a local recital room. Carmelita’s motivation for writing and documenting this song is a reflection on her family’s life in Italy and ultimately their immigration to America – complete with its struggles, joys, opportunities and living life together.

A video recording was also made by another person so a very pleasing product will be available for a December Gala release. You can find out more about Carmelita’s music and artist events on Facebook and many internet music sites. There’s also a prior post exactly 7 years ago here on the Tesco Productions website.