MANAYUNK

By Caitlin Maloney

Photography By JPG Photography

Thirty years ago, on any given night, you could find Carmen Tomassetti playing music at bars in the city. At the time, Carmen’s music career was just getting started, but he soon worked his way down to the Jersey Shore and eventually onto Florida to perform on the cruise ship circuit.

“It was then that I realized I had to get serious about music,” Carmen said. “I saw myself becoming a cruise ship piano player with a ruffled shirt playing for tips and I said, ‘I can’t do this, I need to start a business.’”

That’s when he first launched Carmen Tomassetti Orchestras (the original CTO) and began managing bands in the region—booking them for weddings, corporate and nonprofit events. Over the next 10 years, as his bands became popular, Carmen realized he needed a place to properly showcase their talent to potential clients. He eventually found the perfect space above 4450 Main Street and has been there for the last 15 years. At the time, Carmen probably thought the intimate space was plenty big, but now, some showcases are standing room only and clients even stand in the stairway just to hear the bands perform.

“Nobody showcased for the first five years, we were the only company doing it and we really changed the marketplace here,” he said. “And now everyone does, you can’t make it in the industry if you don’t.”

Not only was Carmen a trendsetter for band showcases, he was also the first in the industry to use a three letter company name. After a few years as Carmen Tomassetti Orchestras, the company quickly became known simply as CTO, and now in the Philadelphia area alone there’s CTO, EBE and BVT.

Besides being known for their name and their showcases, what CTO is most known for, is their talent. Carmen gets his talent in one of three ways: he either puts talented musicians together to create a band of their own, finds a band that already exists and brings them into the CTO family, or sometimes he takes in bands and retools them by swapping out a few members or adding additional instruments or singers.

“Sometimes just adding in one person is all it takes,” Carmen said. “It’s amazing to watch a band transform so much from the minute we bring them in from when you first see them at a showcase to when they are ready for their first performance.”

As far as bands are concerned, CTO has something for everyone. When booking a band through CTO, clients work directly with Carmen’s right hand girl Angelina Costa, who has been with Carmen in the Manayunk space from the beginning.

Angie has an initial meeting with the client to get to know their personality and help match them with the band that’s the best fit for them. If someone wants a band with a wild personality, Angie would recommend Park Central; Fifth Avenue is their more seasoned band; and then there’s Tribeca, who’s more young and trendy; Midtown Express is a good mix of everything; and Grand Central is their rock and roll band.

“I always recommend coming to a showcase,” she said. “It’s usually an ‘aha’ moment when you see a band you know is right for you. People who come in for showcases are blown away by the talent.”

At the showcases, the band's give a 20-30 minute live performance to give clients a taste of their performance style.

“Trying to plan a wedding is like putting on the Academy Awards, it’s a lot of stress,” Carmen joked. “Angelina takes them through the process of hiring the band, which is the most critical part of the wedding.”

Besides their well known bands, CTO also can provide DJ services, ceremony strings and unique entertainment. But when it comes to working with a band or DJ, Carmen is the first to say that bands are clearly the winner.

“When a band is playing, you are creating the emotion right then and there,” Carmen explained. “There’s something even in this modern world that cannot come close to creating that emotion on the fly and there’s a feedback loop between the audience and band—it's a symbiotic relationship. People come to us because we are known to keep people dancing.”

What keeps the best talent coming is that CTO concentrates on creating an environment for their artists to grow instead of focusing on a top-down approach, Carmen explained.

“We keep the guidelines simple—show up and do a great job—but we leave the creativity up to the bands, and because of that our bands really enjoy being together. That’s something you really can’t measure because it’s concrete emotion,” Carmen said.

And they’ve had quite a few talented musicians through their doors, including many who have cycled through reality voice and talent shows, and others who went on to be background singers or band members for performers like Rihanna and Jay Z.

With all of this talent, it’s no wonder that CTO was hired to perform at former president Bill Clinton’s inauguration and two state inaugurations for former governor Ed Rendell. They’ve also traveled as far south as Buenos Aires and Jamaica and as far west as South Dakota.

“We've pretty much played for everybody and anybody,” Carmen said with a smile.

Carmen has also had the opportunity to book several famous performers. He was instrumental in securing the band Train to perform at the University of Pennsylvania after he overheard Penn officials saying they were having trouble booking them. That later led him to book Michael Feinstein and John Legend for the university as well.

“We’re the exact same height and when we met were wearing almost the same jacket,” Carmen laughed, speaking about John Legend. “We were like negative images of each other, it was really funny.”

And booking well known talent is not all that Carmen is up to these days. As CTO grew, Carmen always found himself hunkered down creating new programs to meet the needs of his growing company. He began to find a void for a system that would help him stay organized, productive, and more importantly, efficient. Though he didn’t have a programming background, Carmen took it upon himself to learn the skill, and shortly after developed his own management software. The program does invoicing, accounting, sales management and essentially runs his entire company.

“I’m a compulsively organized person in what I do,” Carmen admitted. “This program was a great way to reduce redundancy in every way, shape and form, and create efficiency.”

At first, Carmen created the software just for CTO, but when the economy crashed in 2007, he knew he needed to do something to survive. One of those ideas was to diversify his technology and start sharing it with the public.

“To my delight, we now have users all over the country and in India and Australia,” he said. “The technology keeps growing—we just added the ability to use exchange rates because so many of our clients are international.”

Though it was originally designed for entertainment based companies like CTO, the software works seamlessly with other event based businesses including event spaces, rental companies and caterers. Right here in Manayunk, Beat Street Station currently uses the program and Carmen recently signed on the Hub in Conshohocken.

When I asked him what he calls this magical program, he paused for a minute, and said with a smile, “It’s called OZ. I always thought it was funny that I was this small guy controlling all of these large companies and nobody knew who I was. I was the man behind the curtain.” And in fact, his business card says just that.

Now, CTO not only stands for the Creative Talent Organization, the division of the company that manages the bands, but also includes the Creative Technology Organization, which manages OZ.

So, what’s allowed CTO to remain as one of the leading entertainment providers in the region for all these years?

“Number one, we care, we really care,” Carmen said. “Number two, is our formula for getting really really great talent. And thirdly, this is how we eat, so if we want to eat, we have to pay really close attention to rule one and two.”

And it’s about adapting to the times, Carmen added. Because of television programs like America’s Got Talent and The Voice, Carmen thinks people have become desensitized to great talent, but what that did was make Carmen step up his game.

“You have to adaptive—the bands now resemble nothing like how the bands looked when we started because tastes have changed,” he said.

“Years ago you would never really get a request for a country song and now clients are requesting them because of people like Blake Shelton,” Angie added.

These days, Carmen commutes back and forth from Manayunk to his other office in Naples, Florida. Though he always loved Florida since his cruise ship days in Cape Canaveral and Miami, he will always have a soft spot for the hills of Manayunk because they remind him of the small towns in Italy.

He’s also enjoyed watching the community grow. One of his dreams is to see the Empress Theater rise again, and he looks forward to the day when CTO bands will play on that stage.

“Everytime I look out this window, I think, ‘God, I wish I could figure out how to make that rise again,” Carmen said.

Now, on any given morning when he is in Manayunk, you’ll find Carmen at Volo Coffeehouse hanging out with his morning coffee crew at the same table (so long as nobody took their usual spot) from 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., sipping away and catching up. In fact, it was right there in Volo where Carmen spent so many hours programming OZ and where he first met some of the Volo coffee crew members who have since become some of his best friends.

“I have the best of both world, of course, what’s not to love about Florida, but Manayunk gives me my sense of community,” he said. “I can’t imagine a morning not going to that coffee shop. It's a part of my life and that really is what the community of Manayunk is all about.”