Tucson gets first look at new duo from Brazilian guitar great

Julia Pernet was putting together the Tucson Guitar Society's 2023-24 season when she called Brazilian guitar great Sergio Assad.

Assad has been a regular on Tucson stages for more than 30 years, including coming here yearly for the past 15 years with his brother/Duo Assad partner Odair to teach masterclasses at the University of Arizona. But ever since the pandemic, Odair has been reluctant to leave Europe.

For the past couple years, Sergio has brought his daughter, Clarice, to Tucson, but this year, he told Pernet he had another idea.

What about a bandoneón/guitar duo?

“I was thrilled,” Pernet said.

In two concerts this weekend, Assad will introduce his new musical partnership with Argentinian bandoneón master Richard Scofano. It will be the pair’s first-ever public performance.

“It’s going to be fun,” Assad said during a phone call earlier this month.

The pairing came after Assad and Scofano met in 2022 when Assad saw Scofano perform with Brazilian guitarist Yamandu Costa at Joe’s Pub in New York City. When he learned that Scofano lived in Chicago where Assad lived, he suggested they play together.

“We started to just play for fun and then we thought, ‘Wow, let’s do this for real. Let’s bring this to (the) stage,’” Assad said.

Tucson seemed the perfect place to launch the duo given Assad’s years-long relationship with the Tucson Guitar Society and Thomas Patterson, the longtime leader of the University of Arizona Bolton Guitar Studies program. Assad said he and his brother have known Patterson for more than 30 years after Patterson invited the duo to perform at the UA in one of their first-ever American concerts.

“Then we started to go every year,” said Assad.

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Their concert will include Brazilian and Argentinian works composed by Assad and Scofano, who Assad said is “a great talent.”

“He’s a great player. He’s a great composer,” he said.

The program includes Assad’s “Hopscotch” and Scofano’s “Impromptu 1” and “Guarania para mama” alongside works by Dolores Duran, Carlos Gardel, Luis Bonfa and Jacob Bittencourt. They also threw in a work by Astor Piazzolla as a nod to the bandoneón’s close association to Argentinian and Uruguayan tango.

One of the concert’s highlights will come at the end of the first half when Assad performs “Un Bouquet pour Julia,” a work he composed as a thank-you for Pernet’s devoted service to the Guitar Society.

“We came up with this idea: We’ll write her a piece of music and instead of flowers, we gave her music,” he said. “But we called it ‘Bouquet for Julia,’ but in French because her husband was French and she speaks it fluently.”

Pernet and her late husband, Andre, were longtime fans of the Assads. The couple’s first date some 40 years ago in Chicago was to see the brothers in concert in a hotel room where the audience of about 30 sat in folding chairs.

“They were skinny little guys with big beards,” she recalled of that concert. “Andre had always liked classical guitar and I fell in love with it.”

Even before the couple retired to Tucson in the early 2000s, Pernet became involved with the Tucson Guitar Society. She has led the society since 2010.

Assad and Scofano will perform at 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 19, at Holsclaw Hall, 1017 N. Olive Road, in the UA School of Music. Tickets are $35 through tucsonguitarsociety.org.