Excalibur interviews Sergio Assad of the Assad Brothers duo

Courtesy Of Luminato

The streets overflowed with musical passion at the Yorkville Brazilian guitar festival.

Photo By Erick Labbe

‘Lipsynch’ held the audience captive for nine straight hours.
 

The Luminato festival offers more than just music, ranging from Cirque du Soleil acrobatics to flat-out dancing in the streets of downtown Toronto to creeptastic expositions of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. But clearly the highlight of the week-long festivities was the often intimate, sometimes spectacular, but always enjoyable sound of the guitar. The city played host to a stellar group of both homegrown musicians and performers from around the world, each with a particular style of playing this most versatile of instruments
–blues one day, danceable Balkan music on another. The pickings were wonderfully broad and eclectic.

Among the musicians was a group of Brazilians who serenaded an enraptured audience at Yorkville Park Saturday, June 6 with various shades of Brazilian music. I happen to love Brazilian music, so it was a rare treat to listen to the sounds of perpetual summer performed by incredible musicians. I had the chance to interview one of the musicians, Sergio Assad, of the Assad Brothers, before the performance. It was humbling to speak with such an eminent musician who has won multiple Grammy awards, both here and in Latin America. The following are extracts from our interview:

Excalibur: Are you looking forward to performing at the Luminato festival?

Sergio: Very much! It’s a rare opportunity to get so many Brazilians performing together, out[side] of Brazil, I mean. It’s going to be a pleasure to be among family and friends.

E: I’ve read somewhere that your debut in New York was in 1969, when you were 17, but that you had performed before that, in Brazil. When did you start performing in public?

S: My brother and I started very [early], because we started playing traditional Brazilian music with our father. That was sort of dying back in [that] time but there were a few of us who kept it alive. When we started playing that style, I was twelve years old and my brother was eight. We got the style quickly – we learned very fast – so we were brought on the  television to play with the artists who played that style and were more famous. We played back in ’65 or ’66.

E: You play Brazilian music, of course, but I hear you play classical as well.

S: Yes, this is [our training]. So after we played [traditional music] for a number of years, we started formal classical education with a teacher who was living in Brazil, although she was from Argentina.

E: So your training is classical music and you’re Brazilian at heart. Can you describe for me what you think about the character of Brazilian music in particular, with classical music as your background?

S: The borders of what is classical and non-classical in Brazil are not very clear. They have never been. So it’s very rare that you will find people who are strictly classical musicians: they always play different styles. And because that border is not so well-defined, it’s difficult – even for classical musicians or composers – to tell to what degree they are really classical. (Heitor) Villa-Lobos is a great example: he’s one of the best or the most famous composers to come out of Brazil. He drew from the Brazilian tradition and he wrote his music based on national elements so his music sounds sometimes like popular Brazilian music.

E: You’ve performed in really big venues around the world and the Luminato festival seems informal: it’s at a park; you guys are going to be playing and people are going to be showing up. There’s all this pomp and pageantry that comes with orchestras, but there’s this earthiness, this homeliness in performing informally, casually with a bunch of spectators. Do you have a preference?

S: When we first started playing, we used to play in small venues. We did it for many, many years. And the guitar is an intimate instrument. As we progressed in our career, we started playing larger events and so we had to amplify. Somehow it changed the nature of the instrument dramatically. It depends on the hall also and the style of music you play, but if I had to choose, I’d rather play with no amplification and smaller venues.

E: You’ve been playing the guitar all your life. What’s your relationship with it like?

S: It has to be a love-hate relationship. Sometimes it treats you so well. Sometimes it’s such a nasty instrument. There are days when it has personal wishes and it does not let you do things you wish you could.

E: What do you mean? This is a virtuoso talking about his instrument: enlighten me a little bit.

S: It could be that you don’t always reach the level you know you can achieve. There are days when you play your instrument and you can’t play at your top level, or even close to it. But there’s one thing I think is interesting. When you go on stage, those things, they sort of disappear. It’s like extra adrenaline that comes along the way.