Brazilian guitar duo gives Tucson warm farewell at sold-out concert

At their first Tucson concert in 1986, Sergio and Odair Assad had thick, dark brown beards with matching thick wavy hair.

At their last Tucson concert on Tuesday night, the beards were trim and gray, matching the tint of their hair. Sergio, the oldest at 73, sported short cropped, while Odair, who just turned 70, tied his nearly all white and still wavy hair in a pony tail.

Just like that — 40 years that felt like a minute.

Their concert Tuesday night was the second of two farewell shows at the University of Arizona's Holsclaw Hall, part of Duo Assad's 20-city North American Farewell Tour that kicked off Feb. 7 in Puerto Rico and ends next month in New York City. 

Tucson was the only city to get two shows — Monday's also sold out — which was a testament to the Brazilian brothers' history and affection for the city. The concert, like all the concerts over the past four decades, were a collaboration between the Tucson Guitar Society and the UA's Bolton Guitar Studies program, both of who have long championed the pair. 

"We have great friends here and all the times we've come here we made a lot of friends," Sergio told the audience. 

But you had a feeling watching Odair and Sergio that the connection to Tucson went deeper.

"This is our home," Sergio said. "We used to come here every year. After the pandemic, we stopped."

Although we've seen Sergio a number of times since the pandemic, the farewell tour was the first time Odair has come to the U.S.

Those absent years seemed a distant memory as soon as the brothers started playing their Tucson-made Cooper Guitars. Watching them together, back on the Holsclaw stage, brought back a flood of memories for longtime fans and folks who have followed the pair and their music since that first concert here.

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Tuesday's audience lavished the brothers with thunderous applause and more than a few "whoop whoops" and whistles. 

You would think after all these years we'd be used to the way the brothers finished one another's musical sentences, sounding like a single voice when they performed a pair of works by Piazzolla before segueing to "Abismo de Rosas" by Brazilian composer Américo Jacomino (aka Canhoto). The way they brought out that wonderfully melodic dissonance in Villa-Lobos's 'Alma brassileira" and a pair of songs from Egberto Gismonti with subtle flourishes was sublime.

Perhaps it was from not having seen him in several years, but it was hard to take your focus off Odair. For the most part, he closed his eyes when he performed, one foot resting on a footstool, the other raised an inch or so off the ground when the tempo or Latin beat moved him.

While Odair picked out the melody on Paulo Bellinati's "Jongo," Sergio added a hollow percussion by patting and tapping his guitar. In Sergio's self-penned, frenetically-paced "Tahhiyya Li Ossoulina," it was Odair's turn to tap and slap the percussive beat. 

As a playful encore, the brothers performed a song with  four hands one guitar, with  Sergio wrapping his arms around his brother's shoulder and laying his hands on the instrument just above where his brother was playing.

We've heard of four hands piano, which is pretty straight forward, but four hands on a single guitar? That was some crazy dexterity on Sergio's part. 

But not surprisingly, the pair remained perfectly in sync.