Badi Assad

Badi Assad (pronounced Bah-Jee Ah-Sahj) is a Brazilian fingerstyle guitarist, vocalist, composer, and percussionist. Her music crisscrosses and integrates everything from Brazilian folk and MPB to classical, jazz, and world music traditions. She often employs prepared guitar techniques to create unusual timbres, and sings in English and Portuguese. She gained global renown with 1994′s Solo for Chesky. Assad signed to Universal for 1998′s Chameleon. In 2003, she released the collaborative Three Guitars with Larry Coryell and John Abercrombie and followed it with a sold-out world tour. Assad released 2004′s charting Verde and 2006′s Wonderland for Deutsche Grammophon before a recording hiatus of six years. Her 2013 comeback, Amor e Outras Manias Crônicas, and 2014′s Between Love and Luck, were issued on her Quatro Ventos label. After 2015′s English-language Hatched, she wrote a book and returned in 2020 with Around the World for Ropeadope. Chesky remastered and re-released Solo in 2021.
Assad was born Mariângela Assad Simão in the state of São Paulo but spent her childhood in Rio de Janeiro. Her family is quite musical. Her father, Jorge Assad, was a watchmaker and master bandolim player; her mother sang; her older brothers, twins Sergio and Odair Assad, make up the world-renowned guitar duo the Assad Brothers, and her nieces are pianist, composer, and arranger Clarice Assad and singer Carolina Assad. Badi began studying piano at age eight, but at 14, she followed her older brothers and switched to the guitar. Her brothers spent years accompanying their father; as they went on to play professionally, that duty fell to Badi, which she heartily embraced. Sharpening her skills at the University Conservatory in Rio de Janeiro, Assad placed first in a Young Instrumentalist Contest in 1984.
Assad made her professional debut as a member of the Guitar Orchestra of Rio de Janeiro, conducted by Turbio Santos, in 1986. The same year, she sang and acted in the musical Mulheres de Hollanda written by Tatiana Cobbett and based on works by Chico Buarque. In 1987, Assad toured in Duo Romantique alongside guitarist Françoise-Emmanuelle Denis, performing across Israel, Europe, and Brazil. In 1988, she wrote and starred in a solo performance piece, “Antagonism,” in which she played guitar, sang, acted, and danced.
Dança dos Tons, Assad’s debut album, was released in Brazil in 1989 with a limited run of 2,000 copies (it was re-released with bonus tracks as Dança das Ondas in 2003). In addition to her already accomplished guitar playing, it featured her first vocal experiments producing percussion sounds with her mouth, a characteristic that would become standard practice on later releases. She moved to New York and signed a deal with the U.S.-based audiophile label Chesky Records and cut her first international release, 1994′s Solo, produced by her brother Sergio. Though it won approving critical notice, it was actually her second album for the label — 1995′s Rhythms featuring percussionist Cyro Baptista preceded it. The editorial staff of Guitar Player voted Assad Best Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitarist, and its readers picked the album as one of the year’s best. She followed with the instrumental Echoes of Brazil in 1997, which garnered favorable critical notice globally.
1998′s Chameleon was co-written and produced by her musical and partner, former Megadeth guitarist Jeff Young, for the Polygram-distributed I.E. Music label. The album won critical notice and topped the world music charts in Germany and Holland, as well as JAZZIZ magazine’s readers poll, where it was selected as “Best Brazilian Album of the Year.” That victory was short-lived, however. Assad experienced an increased difficulty playing and was diagnosed as focal dystonia; her recovery period left her unable to play for nearly two years. She also separated from her husband during this period and moved back to Brazil.
Ultimately, Assad made a full recovery and returned to work. Focusing on collaborations with other guitarists, she appeared on two albums including Nowhere with Young in 2002 and the re-release of Dança das Ondas with four bonus tracks. She issued the collaborative Three Guitars with jazz artists Larry Coryell and John Abercrombie for Chesky that same year; the trio undertook a sold-out world tour, and her polyrhythmic guitar playing stole the show each night.
Upon her return, she signed to Deutsche Grammophon’s Edge Music imprint and released the acclaimed Verde in 2005. She was backed by a septet that included percussionist Naná Vasconcelos and her niece Carolina Assad on vocals. She followed it in 2007 with the ambitious Wonderland, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The set was composed of reinterpretations of progressive pop hits by Eurythmics, Vangelis, and Tori Amos, among others; Carolina was one of the set’s arrangers. Wonderland made the BBC’s year-end list and became her first international best-seller. After touring, Assad gave birth to a child, returned to Brazil, and undertook a six-year hiatus, devoting herself to motherhood.
She returned to recording, but on her own terms. She created the Quatro Ventos label and released her comeback, Amor e Outras Manias Crônicas, in 2012. That July, accompanied only by her voice, guitar, and a kalimba, Assad performed the entire repertoire from 2004′s Verde for the 23 dancers from the Bahian Dance Company from the Municipal Theater (BTCA) at the Venice Biennale in Italy. In 2013, she issued the charting Between Love and Luck, on which she wrote or co-wrote all but one of its 13 selections. In January 2014, she was commissioned by the Guitar Festival Marathon in New York to serve as festival curator, and to compose a score for the screening of the silent 1934 Chinese film The Goddess. She performed the composition live at New York’s Merkin Hall. That year, Assad was selected by Rolling Stone as one of the world’s Top 100 Guitarists and won the U.S. Songwriting Competition in the World Music category.
In 2015, she privately released the children’s music album Cantos de Casa, and saw the German issue of Amor e Outras Manias Crônicas on the O-Tone Music label under the translated title Love and Other Manias. Further, Assad was invited to work with the Chicago-based global peace-building organization Genesis at the Crossroads. She served as guitarist and vocalist in their Saffron Caravan, a multicultural musical ensemble alongside Moroccan vocalist Aaron Bensoussan, Arab-Israeli oud master Haytham Safia, and Venezuelan percussionist Javier Saume Mazzei. Additionally, she served as a panelist on Genesis’ signature round tables on the arts and conflict transformation and taught the music and peace-building program for the Genesis Academy Summer Institute — leadership training and education in nonviolent conflict resolution for youth from international areas of conflict.
In 2016, Assad released the album Hatched, comprised of radically rearranged covers of hit pop songs such as Lorde’s “Royals,” “The Hanging Tree” (the Hunger Games theme co-written by author Suzanne Collins with composer James Newton Howard and the Lumineers’ Jeremiah Fraites and Wesley Schultz), “Little Lion Man” by Mumford and Sons, and Skrillex’s “Stranger.” It also a included three new originals. It drew rave reviews for its sensitive, innovative covers.
After a long period of touring, Assad authored the book Volta ao mundo em 80 artistas (“Around the World with 80 Artists”), an autobiographical inventory of musicians artists from all continents — ranging from Chico Buarque to Björk and beyond — compiled from a series of guest columns she wrote for Top Magazine during the early 2000s; it was supplemented by essays written specifically for the book. In December 2020, Assad issued Around the World on Ropeadope. Recorded at Historic Studio in Berkeley, California, by Ricky Fataar, the ten-song set provided an aural accompaniment to her book. Performing completely solo, she offered unique arrangements — in several languages — of songs by Lenine and Braulio Tavares, Björk, Alt-J, and several originals. Chesky Records issued a remastered version of Solo in 2021.~ Thom Jurek & Craig Harris