Tom Patterson can't guarantee he won't choke up when he stands on the Holsclaw Hall stage Monday and introduces Sérgio and Odair Assad for the last time.
"I'm kind of tearing up a little bit right now," he said last week. "I'm going to be sadder when I introduce them and welcome them back."
Tucson Guitar Society's Julia Pernet said the Latin Grammy-winning duo's two concerts on Monday, Feb. 16, and Tuesday, Feb. 17, will be bittersweet.
"It's their farewell tour," she said, and as the words came out of her mouth, she realized the finality of it all. "For us who are in the audience, it's really bittersweet. ... The thought of losing them is still hard."
Nearly six decades after the Brazilian brothers started performing publicly and almost 40 years since they started coming to Tucson, the Assads are making their final North America tour.
Duo Assad has been part of the Tucson guitar community more than 30 years, including as artists-in-residence for 15 years.
The pair kicked it off in Puerto Rico on Feb. 7 and will finish March 17 at New York's historic 92nd Street Y, where they first introduced themselves to an American audience.
"I remember that concert like yesterday, like it was maybe days ago, but I would never imagine that we would go so far so many years later," Sergio Assad said during a phone call a few days before the tour launch.
The Assads' Tucson stop brings them back to a stage they have come to know very well since they made their debut here in the mid-1980s.
Odair, left, and Sérgio Assad have been performing together since they were kids growing up in their native Brazil.
It was part of a small jazz festival organized by University of Arizona jazz pianist and composer Jeffrey Haskell and the Tucson Jazz Society. Patterson, who studied Latin guitar in South America in the early 1980s on a UA fellowship, was in the audience hearing the pair for the first time.
"It was just so incredibly fast, so incredibly accurate and so amusable," Patterson recalled. "It was just head turning."
Assad said he and his brother became fast friends with Patterson over their shared love of Brazilian music and the country.
"Tom developed this passion for Brazil," Assad said. "He learned to speak Portuguese so he seems like he's part of the family. He's a dear friend of ours, and we kept this relationship going for many years."
The brothers also bonded with Pernet, who took the reigns of the Tucson Guitar Society not long after moving here from Chicago in 2008.
Brazilian guitarists Odair, left, and Sérgio Assad have a long history with the University of Arizona and Tucson Guitar Festival going back nearly 30 years. This photo is from 2015.
The Guitar Society has long collaborated with Patterson and the UA's Bolton Guitar Studies program that he heads to bring the Assads here nearly yearly including as artists-in-residence for 15 years. The residency program, funded through an endowment from the late Dr. Sanford "Sandy" Bolton and his wife, Phyllis, also funds a lifetime residency for the Grammy-winning Scottish guitarist David Russell.
Brazilian brothers Odair, left, and Sergio Assad are making their final tour of North America including a stop Monday and Tuesday in Tucson.
Pernet credits the Assads for her love of classical guitar. In 1979 on one of her first dates with her husband in Chicago, Pernet attended a guitar recital put on by the Old Town School of Music in a hotel reception hall.
"There were maybe 30 people sitting on folding chairs and I think I was maybe the only woman," Pernet recalled. "It was just a bunch of guitar geeks with these two skinny, skinny guys with big, heavy beards. They were so young, and it was just incredible."
Pernet said she and her husband became regulars at guitar concerts in Chicago and in Tucson, where they would spend occasional weekends for several years before retiring here.
That's when Pernet and Sérgio and Odaira Assad met for the first time and became friends.
"Julia is a very dear friend ... and she has been treating us so well every time we come," Sérgio Assad said.
Assad in 2023 composed “Un Bouquet pour Julia” (Bouquet for Julia) as a thank-you for her friendship over the years and her support of classical guitar. He premiered the piece during a late November 2023 Tucson Guitar Society concert with Argentinian bandoneón master Richard Scofano. It was the first time the duo had performed publicly.
"Bouquet for Julia" was one of several of Assad's so-called Portrait Series compositions written for Tucsonans. Assad also wrote "Sandy's Portrait" in memory of Bolton and "Phyllis’ Portrait" for Bolton's wife.
He also wrote a piece for Russell, whose yearly residency wraps up this weekend with the second of two concerts at Holsclaw Hall at 3 p.m. Sunday. Russell premiered and recorded a number of Assad's works over the years and the pair have become good friends largely through their association with the Bolton Guitar Studies program.
Pernet said Russell is likely to stick around after his concerts to see the Assads perform.
Assad said he and his brother decided last year it was time to stop touring internationally. Their farewell tour kicked off last year with stops in Asia, Brazil and Europe.
"(Odair) is turning 70 this year and I'm already 73 so another couple of years, I don't think I'm gonna be willing to hit the road," Assad said.
Tucson is one of just 20 stops on the tour and the only city to get two concerts.
Pernet said the brothers' farewell will be "such a special moment in music history for Tucson."
"They are genius musicians. I mean, they are just unbelievable," she said. "I don't know that we'll ever see such a dynamic pair on stage. They're like one being. It's incredible to me."
Patterson said he expects his emotions will get the better of him "at that moment when it's really quite clear to me that, you know, this is an end of a chapter."
He likely won't be the only one shedding tears.
"Well, with Tucson, we have a special relationship. We're going to feel it," Assad said, especially since this will be the first time he and Odair will perform here together since 2018. Odair has not left Brussels, where he has lived for 40 years, since the pandemic.
Tucson has played an outsized role in the Assads' American career.
"We played in that little hall there so many times," Assad said. "I think it's the hall that we played in more than (anywhere) in our whole life."
But just because they will no longer tour the U.S. doesn't mean we will never see them return to Tucson.
"It's hard to say, 'Oh, we're going to stop here,' but we might come back just to teach or something like this," Assad said. "It's not that I will never return to Tucson — probably I will because of the friends I have. You know, we go visit friends, don't we?"
