An Albany Symphony favorite: Grammy-nominated Clarice Assad, the Brazilian-American composer, and pianist, and singer and inspiring educator, who made her debut at the age of seven on Brazilian TV and has now been performing over 40 years. She was 26 when her career took off in the States, and if you don’t yet know her wildly exciting style of Brazilian folk meets classical, meets pop meets jazz, then you will soon. To me, she’s a painter whose palette happens to be music and she brings a soulfulness and sincerity to her music that I just adore
Born in 1978 in Rio de Janeiro, she already had a famous musical family to look up to. Her father is the legendary Brazilian guitarist Sergio Assad, her aunt and uncle almost as famous, so she had a lot of encouragement early on – not yet playing an instrument because she was born with Ehlers Danlos syndrome, that affects the joints – the piano didn’t come until later. But she could sing, and by the time she was 10 was already composing and a veteran of numerous radio and TV jingles and backing tracks. When her parents divorced it was her father she followed to Paris for a period, studying privately with a teacher at the conservatoire, when she was 15.
And work followed as a pianist and arranger, back in Rio de Janeiro in the late 90s. But she wasn’t then thinking of composing for a living – there just wasn’t the opportunity there. She had enrolled in a degree for marine biology when a lifeline came from the States: the opportunity to study at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. She left Brazil in ‘98, beginning a long road to citizenship, and her big break came when Marin Alsop programmed her violin concerto with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the NSS music label recorded it, and she was off.
Archetypes is her album with her father, her aunt, and Third Coast Percussion, inspired by the 12 archetypes of Brazilian myth and legend. “I'm a storyteller,” she says. “It comes from my upbringing in Brazilian popular music, listening to the lyrics… There's always a story to be told.”
Clarice Assad (1978 –)
MUSIC: Archetypes I: The Rebel
Clarice Assad, piano
Third Coast Percussion / Sergio Assad, guitar
Presented by Anna Clyne
Written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
