PAST
ABOUT
Marcel
I’m a musician, but I think of myself as someone who creates space - for the moment, for people, for the unknown. I perform, compose, produce, and teach music; the through-line for all of my work is to be present and make room for us all to connect with ourselves, with others, and everything around us.
Marcel Camargo is a Brazilian-born guitarist, composer, arranger, and producer whose musical life spans concert stages, recording studios, orchestras, and the quiet intimacy of an acoustic guitar.
With more than two decades as a professional musician, Marcel has toured the world as guitarist for Michael Bublé, served as musical director and producer for Gretchen Parlato’s Grammy-nominated album Flor, co-written original music with Jason Mraz, and created arrangements and orchestrations for artists and ensembles including Mraz, the San Diego Symphony, the New York Pops and the Disney+ series American Born Chinese. His guitar playing has also appeared on recordings, television and films including Rio 2, Pitch Perfect 3 and the show Dexter. He has also worked for artists such as Sérgio Mendes, Herb Alpert, Bebel Gilberto and Macy Gray.
More recently, Marcel wrote and arranged music for Luciana Souza’s New Moon, a project for voice, guitar and string quartet presented at UCLA and Stanford University. His original music has also recently appeared on the TV show The Young and the Restless.
PRESENT
For Marcel, performing, improvising, composing, arranging, and orchestrating have never felt like entirely separate disciplines. He learned to think compositionally through the guitar and through jazz, where improvisation is, in many ways, composition happening in real time. As his writing expanded from guitar to piano, string quartet, and eventually orchestra, he began to recognize the same musical principles operating at every scale.
At the center of that process is a willingness to leave room for the music itself to shape what happens next. Marcel approaches writing and performing as a kind of conversation: making a choice, listening to what it creates, and allowing that moment to inform the next decision. There is always a balance between moving the music forward and leaving enough space for it to push back. Whether improvising, arranging an existing song, or writing for an orchestra, some of the most exciting moments are the ones he couldn’t have planned - the surprises that emerge in the process and reveal a direction he might not otherwise have found.
That same sensibility has increasingly led him toward the smallest possible ensemble: one guitar.
FUTURE
Marcel’s recent solo work looks to the nylon-string guitar as a kind of canvas: a simple framework with enough space for something unexpected to happen. It is an idea that has increasingly found its way into all of his music - the desire to create without filling every available space; an invitation for other musicians, for an audience, for the character of a particular room, or simply for the moment itself to influence where the music goes. Even when playing alone, Marcel thinks of music as a collaborative act.
That approach began to take on another dimension through his parallel work as a massage therapist. Marcel is fascinated by the intelligence of the body and by the ways music can affect us without requiring analysis or even conscious attention. Spending time working with the body and the energy we each carry has made him increasingly curious about what music can do when it is created with the body and spirit, rather than only the thinking mind, in consideration.
His solo guitar music is becoming a place to explore that question. Drawing from Brazilian guitar traditions, ambient music, and a lifetime of playing with others, he is creating music that makes room (for breath, for sensation, for other people, and for the unexpected). Tapping into a sense of stillness and calm are important, this becomes the entryway to create the conditions for something to happen; the door to a platform with enough space to be joyfully surprised by what does happen.
