My brother Odair and I formed the Assad Guitar Duo, a classical guitar team that has worked for nearly 50 years as an ensemble. We recorded extensively for the North American label Nonesuch Records and for the Belgium label GHA. Our sister Badi Assad became an international artist as well, using her unique blend of guitar, vocals and percussion. Odair and I had three children each, and our daughters Carolina and Clarice became musicians as well.
everything he could to give us a chance of becoming professional musicians. When my daughter Clarice was five years old, I could already sense her strong compositional talent, and somehow repeated what my dad did with us. I encouraged her
Three generations of the Assad family in concert
quite strongly in becoming a composer. She is at the moment rising as a major talent in the domain of classical contemporary music, and is starting to get her works commissioned and played by some of the world’s major orchestras. Clarice and I always shared an admiration for Arabic music, and together we made the decision to visit musically this completely new world to us. The only problem was the geographical distance that separates us. Clarice lives in New York city and I live in San Francisco. Well, that would have been be a problem a few years ago, but nowadays with the amazing technology we have it is possible to work from a distance. We wrote back and forth Clarice Assad using Sibelius, the musical notation program, and managed to complete a suite in four movements, I was very much encouraged by my father to become a musician. He was an amateur mandolin player and loved music so much that he did describing our vision of the migratory movement from Lebanon to Brazil.