Badi Assad via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Badi Assad:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Badi Assad
- City: New York City
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Badi Assad was born in the small city of São João da Boa Vista, São Paulo, Brazil. Her early years were spent in Rio de Janeiro, where the family moved to support and develop the budding talent of her brothers, Sérgio and Odair, the famous classical guitarists ‘Duo Assad’.
Watching her brothers’ musical development had its effect, and her introduction to music came at her mother’s urging. “I began to learn piano when I was eight, but all we could afford was a little electronic Yamaha which was made for kids, and I practiced on it until my hands outgrew the keyboards.” Her guitar studies began in earnest at age fourteen, playing with her father, an amateur mandolin player. Within that year, she won her first competition at the “Concurso Jovens Instrumentistas for Young Musicians”, in Rio de Janeiro/1984.
In 1987, at only 17 years old, she was named “Best Brazilian Guitarist of the International Villa Lobos Festival.” A year later, Assad recorded her first solo album, entitled Dança dos Tons which was released only in Brazil. Soon after, Badi was selected out of two hundred women to perform as one of two vocalists in the play Mulheres de Hollanda. The theatrical collage of songs by Brazilian composer Chico Buarque ran five days a week for over a year garnering rave reviews for Badi’s looming star potential in the process.
Badi began to experiment even further with her voice. It is at this point mouth percussion and rhythmic body percussion became part of this exploration. These elements were intuitively combined with her already impressive guitar approach thus creating excitingly fresh sounds that complemented her vision as musician and performer.
Just as Badi’s innovative new direction began to emerge, opportunities began to present themselves; with 1994 came her association with the independent label Chesky Records. Her first album, entitled Solo, introduced Badi as a potent force in the guitar world. Her international stature grew with the release of her second album “Rhythms” in 1995. In fact, Rhythms was lauded as one of the most important guitar recordings of that year. The album won Guitar Player Magazine’s Readers’ Poll for “Best Classical Album of the Year” (The Guitar Player editors jokingly commented: “not a classical album but played on classical guitar…close enough!”). In addition, she was voted “Best Acoustic Fingerstyle Player” by Guitar Player magazine’s editors.
Assad fulfilled her Chesky contract with 1996’s beautiful anthology of Brazilian guitar composers appropriately entitled Echoes of Brazil. Then in 1997, Badi was quickly signed to her first major label contract with PolyGram. The result is the ambitious and critically acclaimed ethno-pop soundscapes of her sophomore album, Chameleon and the WORLD was ready for her.
In 2016 Hatchedreceived acclaimed reviews for incubating a new Brazilophilic way to listen to global hits from modern icon labels including Lorde and Skrillex. In 2018 she released her first book, Around the World in 80 Artists (Pólen Livros). The film, BADIdirected by Edu Felistoque was named Best Film by The FestCine Maracanaú in Fortaleza, Brazil and had its international debut at the 2018 Brasil Summerfest in New York. Recently Stringshot, recorded with the legendary blues slide guitar Roy Rogers and the virtuoso harpist and violinist Carlos Reyes, was released.
Contact Information
- Email: badiassad@gmail.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://badiassad.bandcamp.com/album/around-the-world
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://polenlivros.lojavirtualnuvem.com.br/produtos/volta-ao-mundo-em-80-artistas-badi-assad/
- ▶ Twitter: badiassad
- ▶ Instagram: badiassad
- ▶ Website: http://badiassad.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/canalbadiassad
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UC8g6PaMBwWbnfP4QTyGPf9Q
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/17vcxrzeS2DDYoagZTDZGP
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/6e3jPNPPyRb9byq9YzWuzG
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/3P8bfZHgbfJp6nzj9lRE6d
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/21kkeN3Ejv6U2K3fC24m14
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/3DxVOb9jarK0pCqJnClD89
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/72sLgioNGnKBIbAG68x2Wa
Clips (more may be added)
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"BADI" | Trailer | Documentary
57 views
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O Mundo é um Moinho
186 views
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
