Badi Assad, Guitar in Hand, Redefines Solo Performance

How do you describe a performer who constantly eludes definition? How do you label a classically trained guitarist whose improvisational playing simmers with the gutsy rhythms of Brazil’s streets and favelas, a superb technician whose finger-burning runs over her instrument’s strings are juxtaposed against her fingers’ drumming on its wooden body and vocalized percussive sounds?

The answer, in the case of Badi Assad, is that there is no definition. The artist from Sao Paulo is one of a kind, a musician who is quite literally redefining the range and the extent of what a solo performer can do.

Her appearance at the Baked Potato in Studio City was--despite a distracting array of nightclub noises--revelatory, a brilliant display of innovation, imagination and skill almost hypnotically compelling to the full-house audience.

Assad is a small, young, dark-haired woman with a sunny smile. Her modest demeanor conceals the creative currents that come bursting to the surface when she picks up her guitar. Her program included works by such Brazilian composers as Chico Buarque and Heitor Villa-Lobos as well as her own pieces and some by her brother Sergio.

Some were given precise, articulate readings that clearly revealed Assad’s superb fundamental skills. Others were explosive combinations of guitar, voice and percussion, delivered simultaneously, sometimes in seemingly impossible combinations.

On several pieces, for example, Assad played rhythmic passages by tapping the strings with her left hand while playing percussion shakers with her right hand, humming a melodic line with her voice and delivering bursts of rhythm with her lips--all at the same time. In her own “Solais,” she simulated the sounds of wind on a mountain, then delivered a burst of rhythms by slapping her face, her nose and her neck.

Remarkably, all these odd combinations of sound were delivered with great creative force. Although the clatter of the room (this clearly was not an appropriate venue) did not permit a definitive performance, it was a remarkable outing. With or without a name for her style, Assad is an extraordinary artist who deserves the opportunity for wide, extensive hearing.

* Badi Assad plays tonight at the Amazon Club in Studio City, (818) 986-7502, and Thursday at Genghis Cohen in the Fairfax district, (213) 653-0640. Her guitar-playing siblings, the Assad Brothers, play a classical program Friday in Schoenberg Hall, UCLA, (310) 825-2101.