Mountain Song Productions presents:
Italian Night Concert with Mike Guggino & Barrett Smith
featuring special guest Amanda Pascali
The Porter Center for Performing Arts at Brevard College. 7:30pm, Doors open at 6:00pm
*Limited availability Spezio VIP experience from 6:00-7:30pm. Must purchase ticket in advance.
Mike Guggino and Barrett Smith have been performing traditional Italian folk music on the mandolin and guitar for over two decades. The duo first met in college, while both were studying jazz and classical music but also getting their feet wet in bluegrass and American folk music. They are both members of the Grammy Award winning band Steep Canyon Rangers. They have hosted "Italian Night" performances at local restaurants, house concerts, and music venues. These widely popular events have provided them the perfect setting to develop their own unique musical expression of these exotic, Italian folk songs. They released their first album, Mia Dolce Farfalla, in 2020.
As the rising voice of America's most ethnically diverse generation of young people, singer-songwriter Amanda Pascali writes music that speaks to the experience of growing up as a first-generation American. After her songs went viral on social media, she amassed hundreds of thousands of fans around the globe. Now, her long-awaited new record, Roses and Basil (a collection of Sicilian-English translations and original music produced by Robert Ellis,) has been praised by NPR, the Bluegrass Situation, and numerous international outlets. Her music, coined, Immigrant American Folk delivers a powerful narrative on being, “too foreign for here, too foreign for home, and never enough for both.”
The internationally acclaimed, bilingual singer/songwriter and 2021 Houston Chronicle "Musician of the Year," was born in New York City, and is based in Texas. Amanda has performed internationally, from the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to the European Union Parliament in Brussels, and her song Over the Sea was featured as the soundtrack to the opening scene of the new Italian film Indelebile (English title: Family First) (2024). Endorsed by the US State Department and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a Fulbright Fellow, she pioneered the first comprehensive project to translate and revitalize Sicilian folk songs.
Blending folk/Americana influences with Mediterranean, Balkan, and Latin rhythms Pascali’s songs are powerful tales of America told through the eyes of immigrants and those who have always felt like the “other”. With a father who was thrown out of his home country for rebelling against the government and an immigrant mother who built a career from scratch in 1980s Brooklyn, Amanda was driven from a young age to be a messenger of her family’s stories and diaspora.
Amanda is an artist in residence with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In 2024, she collaborated with the US Embassy in Italy to open the first “American Space,” in Sicily where she gave performances and masterclasses on translation and American music. She has received awards for her songwriting and poetry from the Calandra Institute in New York, the Lions Club International in Sicily, the Kerrville Folk Festival, the Houston Arts Alliance, The Mid-America Arts Alliance and others. She is a Fulbright Ambassador and serves on the board of the music-activism non-profit, Music to Life. Amanda is currently a Harrington Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin where she conducts research in ethnomusicology and Italian Studies.
