Several Chefs Cooking a Latin Recipe, Blending Melodies and Genres

Badi Assad Is a Headliner at New York Guitar Festival

By JON PARELESJAN. 21, 2014

Folk, pop and classical music meet in unlikely places in South America. That was one recurring motif, along with nimble fingers, attention to detail and a sense of humor, in Monday night’s concert at Merkin Concert Hall. It was the evening half of the New York Guitar Festival’s free pair of concerts, “Guitar Marathon: Las Americas,” which was recorded for WNYC’s Soundcheck. The afternoon show had featured North American music, down through Mexico. The evening concert was a quintuple bill largely chosen by its headliner, the Brazilian guitarist Badi Assad, with musicians from Brazil, Uruguay and Peru and a repertoire that also embraced Argentina and Venezuela.

Ms. Assad was the least classifiable musician in the lineup. Years ago, she started making albums as a classical guitarist like her brothers, the duo Sérgio and Odair Assad, but recently she has featured her singing. On Monday, she arrived with a headset microphone and an electric guitar (which could simulate acoustic-guitar tones) that had a drumstick under the strings, lifting them away from the frets. The first sounds she played, in “The Being Between,” were sliding pitches suggesting a koto; soon she was plucking and tapping ethereal chords on both sides of the drumstick and then cooing, in a voice like affectionate baby talk, about innocence and mysticism: “The human’s journey/A cactus flower in a father’s hand.”

She continued with Brazilian pop songs transformed by her imaginative virtuosity, moving from gauzy delicacy to vigorous propulsion, from dreaming to dancing and back. One song summed up the concert. Ms. Assad had discovered that the chords of a Brazilian standard about a caged songbird, Luiz Gonzaga’s “Assum Preto,” matched the harmonies of “Estudio No. 1,” by Heitor Villa-Lobos, with its cascading arpeggios. So she merged them, singing mournfully and then mimicking birdcalls.