(2026) PROCURANDO SILAS

For Saxophone Quartet

Commissioned by Nova Linea Musica for the Nois Ensemble

Saxophone Quartet
5 minutes
Premiere: Nois Ensemble, Guarneri Hall, Chicago, January 27, 2027

Program Notes

I met Silas Sarmento a year before I was offered a scholarship to study at Berklee in Boston. I was still a teenager, and I had come to his music through a friend we had in common: Luhli, of the duo Luhli & Lucina, two of the most influential artists in my life. Luhli had believed in me since I was 14, and every now and then she would hire me or recommend me to her friends, musicians 25 or 30 years my senior whose songs sounded like the music I grew up hearing at home with my family.

Silas hired me to transcribe and arrange a demo of his songs. They were wonderful, and one of them stole my heart: “Frevo das Meninas.” Frevo is the music of carnival in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil: fast, bright, full of brass and syncopation, and impossible to hear sitting still. I loved this song so much that I recorded my own voice on the demo, and I never forgot the melody.

Years later I tried to find him, and couldn’t. We had met before the internet existed. I knew his last name, but not the names of anyone in his family, and searching turned up almost nothing. Then one day, after hours of trying different keywords, I landed on the page of one of his daughters, Júlia Sarmento, who was very moved to hear how long I had been searching for her father. What followed was a beautiful reunion.

Procurando Silas (“Searching for Silas”) is an homage to his music, to the long search for him, and to my reunion with his music and his legacy. It opens with scattered, pitchless sounds, as if listening for a trace. “Frevo das Meninas” can be heard in its entirety, surrounded by moments of it slipping away and returning in different guises: playful, precise, mysterious, tender, and sometimes almost improvised.

A songbook of Silas’s works is coming out soon, and Paterna, the album he recorded in 2003 with lyricist Luiz Alfredo Millecco, is there for anyone who wants to discover his songs.

My heartfelt thanks to Silas’s family, his wife Ana Maria and his daughters Júlia and Luíza, for granting me permission to use “Frevo das Meninas,” and to the poet Luiz Alfredo Millecco, whose words are as much a part of this song as its melody.

And to Silas, who may no longer remember the teenager who once sang his frevo: I remember. Thank you for making me smile every time I hear that melody.

Clarice Assad