Like many families, this one started with a married couple, Fuzz and Carrie Sangiovanni, writing and performing as a duo. “It started as a romantic, bohemian vision of a couple making music, performing on the road, in parks, venues, traveling around and avoiding responsibility as much as possible,” says Fuzz. “The first thing we discovered was we loved singing together, harmonizing our voices. Then Fuzz and Carrie extended their family to include fiery violinist Ben Dean and double bass madman Brian Anderson to complete their colorful vision. Since then, the four of them ran away from home and never looked back.

Since the very beginning, the Caravan of Thieves began to win immediate praise for their unique blend of gypsy swing and popular music, inspiring them to record and release the debut full-length album Bouquet. To accompany this collection of dramatic and satirical tales, they built an interactive stage set of percussive junk and the ragtag quartet took their newly animated show on the road. Driving gypsy jazz rhythms, acoustic guitars, upright bass and violin lay the foundation for mesmerizing vocal harmonies and fantastic stories.

Their show entertains, dazzles and defies classification while welcoming the spectator to join the band throughout the performance in momentary fits of claps, snaps and sing-alongs. According to Fuzz and Carrie, “Our ultimate goal is to always thoroughly entertain our audience, in concert and on our records, and to build a community who we can feel connected to, and who feels connected to us . . . and we try to embody the spirit and liveliness of the old time entertainers to help invite more and more people into our timeless world.”

The group recently released their latest recording, KISSKISS. It combines the dark humor and sarcastic social commentary of their previous efforts with an added emphasis on love and all the beauty and danger it brings. They have created the music to match, adding in tuba, beat box, and everything including the kitchen sink to draw listeners in to the Caravan of Thieves’ world.

Photo by Chad Anderson

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Bird Mancini, Boston’s accordion/guitar rock duo, features eclectic and at times a bit psychedelic acoustic rock pop style with lush vocal arrangements, blues-tinged guitar, accordion, harmonica, and a variety of percussion, bells and whistles. Gospel choirs in country churches and Kansas City blues and swing were Ruby Bird’s early upbringing, while Billy Carl Mancini cut his guitar-playing teeth on high school rock and roll bands covering songs by 60’s greats like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and the Stones. Their recordings have an astonishingly colorful palette. As AllMusic.com puts it, “Bird Mancini is likely to please a wide array of listeners.”

Photo by Jon Cohan

• But what keeps the group coming back to stage after stage, street after street, isn’t the ghosts, Japanese imports, or the laundry list of cool found objects in the percussion collection. It’s the family that has developed, seeing the child of an idea they had with the band connect to audiences. Caravan of Thieves started with a love story, and now it continues to be one that has taken on a life of its own.
  City Newspaper
• New England’s Caravan of Thieves aren’t your ordinary band of wayfarers, although the sound often suggests that in another life they could have been a roaming band of gypsies, musically-speaking anyway. Blurt
• . . .
• Any band that bills itself as a husband-wife/accordion-guitar rock duo is worth investigating. Even more so when the tandem enlists musical friends such as The Sterns and Bentmen. Great reviews for the outfit’s third and latest album, “Funny Day,” don’t hurt either. Led by the core of singer-accordionist-keyboardist Ruby Bird and singer-guitarist Billy Carl Mancini, Bird Mancini mix up a cosmopolitan fusion of blues-tinged rock, Latin-flavored bossa nova, country-folk balladry, and woolly psychedelia. What it adds up to is pop music in the most adventurous inclusive sense of the term. Jonathan Perry, Boston Globe
• In case you were wondering where the name Bird Mancini comes from, founding members Bill & Ruby Mason went back in their ancestry and tool their respective grandfathers’ last names, Bird and Mancini and combined Billy & Ruby have been playing the Boston music scene longer than I care to admit (‘cause I’ve been around just as long too). On their latest album, Tuning In/Tuning Out, the couple delivers the best work of their career. Whether penning pop perfection as with the album’s title track, “Tuning In/Tuning Out;” grindin’out a clever psychedelic groove on “(I Want My Own) Brian Epstein,” be-boppin’ a honky tonk vibe with “Didn’t Last Long Did It?,” or busting out with six strings blazing on “Green Jam,” Bird Mancini have undoubtedly hit their stride. Good stuff! Doug Sloan – Metronome Magazine

• Caravan of Thieves’s

• Website | Video | Interview

• Bird Mancini’s

• Website | Video | Interview