Badi Assad & Simone Sou

Badi Assad transcends traditional styles of her native Brazilian music with a mixture of pop, jazz and world/ethnic sounds. As a result, the extraordinary singer, guitarist, and percussionist is successfully forging an exhilarating genre of music that quite literally defies categorization.

What makes Badi Assad so unique is her hungry pursuit of performance experimentation that no other artist has done: she combines an extraordinary guitar talent, a unique mouth percussion, beautiful singing, rhythmic body movement, to create an exciting, fresh music sound, and leaving spectators simply breathless. Watching Badi perform is like witnessing a spiritual phenomenon. How she does what she does all at once, and delivering an extraordinary performance, is quite unbelievable.

Badi Assad early years were spent in Rio de Janeiro, where the family moved to develop the budding talent of her brothers, Sergio and Odair, the famous classical guitarists Duo Assad. She began to learn piano when she was 8 and guitar at age 14. Within that year, she won her first competition at the Concurso Jovens Instrumentistas (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. Soon after, Badi was selected to perform in the play Mulheres de Hollanda, a musical by Chico Buarque that ran five days a week for over a year garnering rave reviews for Badi's looming star potential in the process.

Mouth percussion and rhythmic body percussion became then part of her sound exploration, intuitively combining with her already impressive guitar approach.

Just as Badi's innovative new direction began to emerge, opportunities began to present themselves; Rhythms was lauded as one of the most important guitar recordings in 1995 - it won Guitar Player Magazine's Readers Poll for Best Classical Album of the Year. In addition, she was voted Best Acoustic Fingerstyle Player by Guitar Player magazine's editors.

In 1997 Badi signed to PolyGram. The result is the ambitious and critically acclaimed ethno-pop soundscapes of her sophomore album, Chameleon, which took Europe by storm. Her breathtaking appearance on the French night-time talk show Canal+ was seen by over two million viewers. In 1998 Badi played Europe's most renowned summer festivals. The single, Waves, landed in Spain's Top 10 for many weeks and was later included in the soundtrack of the Hollywood movie It Runs in the Family, starring Michael and Kirk Douglas.

In 2003 she recorded 3 Guitars with the jazz masters Larry Coryell and John Abercrombie.

In 2004 she signed with Deutsche Grammophon, releasing 2 albums: Verde (2004) and Wonderland (2006). As Badi loves to recreate songs, she brought in Verde a bossa-nova style to One by U2, a tango flavor to Bachelorette by Bjork; and for Wonderland she brought to her own world songs by Eurythmics, Vangelis and Tori Amos among others. Wonderland was selected among Britain's BBC 100 best CDs, and it was also included among Amazon.com's Best 30.

In 2010 Badi released her first DVD, Badi Assad, displaying her extraordinary live performance experimentation. In the same year Badi was Featured Performer in the musical Opera das Pedras, in Sao Paulo, Brasil.

In 2011 Badi started a new project with her brothers Sergio and Odair plus their daughters Clarice and Carolina, as a Quintet. They have also been touring the world.

In 2012 Badi participated at the Venice Biennale of Dance, performing live with the acclaimed dance company BTCA (Bale of Theater Castro Alves).

In November 2012 Badi released Amor e Outras Manias Cronicas, conquering the award of Best Composer of The Year and was selected among the Brazilian guitar masters of history (Rolling Stones Magazine).

Each review of her concerts and albums holds the air of discovery; of a new voice for the guitar; of admiration for Assad's innovation and unusual music delivery.

Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1970, percussionist/vocalist/composer Simone Sou is also an artist with a firm international reputation. In the early 90s Simone recorded with Itamar Assumcao, one of the most important representative artists from So Paulo. In the 90s till 2005 she toured with Chico Cesar on many continents playing the big festivals. Due to that collaboration Simone received her first assignment to write film music. Internationally she established herself even more with the legendary psychedelic rock band Os Mutantes. Later she met Oleg Fateev playing in a project with the New York based Ethel String Quartet. Simone released her first solo CD Sim-One-Sou in 2013. Simone lives at the present in Holland and is working on her next CD, while giving workshops and lectures, and composing music for films and theatre.