Covering all the basses: Clarice Assad’s “Bluezilian”

Clarice Assad comes from one of the most talented music families I’ve ever encountered: she’s the daughter of Sergio Assad, of the amazing Assad Brothers Duo, and niece of Badi Assad, the fantastic soloist. It seems that everyone in this Brazilian clan has music pulsing through their veins! Over the years, we’ve have the good fortune to become close friends with them, and our latest CD, “LAGQ Brazil” bears the stamp of the Assad family quite a bit. Clarice herself is a rising star in the composition world, having written concertos for the Assad Bothers, violinist Nadja Solerno-Sonnenberg and the Turtle Island String Quartet; although she’s a pianist, she certainly has heard a lot of guitar music in her life, and she writes for it beautifully.

She wrote Bluezilian for LAGQ in 2005, and it’s a fun piece for us to play, a real show-stopper. The title indicates what she’s going after with the piece: to draw musical connections between American popular styles and Brazilian sensibilities of rhythm and harmony. When I first saw the score, I decided to grab the bass part on this one; I’ve always loved trying to imitate different bass sounds, and this one really calls for a whole gamut of funk, blues and jazz sounds to make it work.

Sometimes, in guitar quartet music, all you get to play is a single line. It’s a whole different aesthetic from solo guitar playing, where you usually have to carry multiple voices. The simplicity of the line makes all the little details that much more important; you have to give extra thought to your fingering, tone color, articulation, and dynamics. As an example, the opening bass lick I had play serves as the underpinning for the piece, almost as a kind of ostinato, and it goes like this:



I tried a few different left and right hand fingerings on it; I knew that I didn’t want the open 6th string ringing over into the other notes, so I fingered it so that I could damp it with my thumb:

Clarice is very specific about how it should change in dynamics, which took a bit of attention on my part; she’s really detailed about tone color, too. When the line repeats a few measures later in pizzicato, I decided to play it all with a fleshy thumb, to get that deep “thunky” sound she wanted.

Later in the piece (around 1:40 on the recording) Clarice changes the groove suddenly to a “cool jazz” feel; to try to do my best “Ray Brown” upright bass imitation, I switched to an all-flesh thumb stroke (which I do by abandoning the traditional classical right hand position, and rotating my hand toward the floor; that way, my thumbnail doesn’t enter into the equation). To simulate the swinging double-bass feel, I sometimes threw in a percussive upstroke of the thumb on the “and” of the first or third beat (indicated by a + sign). I also chose a really inconvenient left hand fingering, playing way up high on the neck to get that throaty double bass sound. At the end of the passage, the piece returns to the opening groove, and Clarice asks for the bass part to be slapped: I did my level best to get a disco-funk pop out of those slaps! It helped to finger the high “e” on the 12th fret of the sixth string for that.

It’s fun to get to play the low stuff in the quartet once in awhile; and hopefully, it appeals to my “bass instincts”!

Bill Kanengiser