Andre Correa Turns His Journey From Berklee to Orlando Into a Seven-Track Debut

The plan was New York. Andre Correa had spent years working toward it, first learning guitar at 12 while growing up in Campinas, Brazil, then earning a spot at Berklee College of Music in Boston, picking up the John Abercrombie Scholarship and Guitar Achievement Award along the way. New York was supposed to be the next chapter. Then it wasn’t.

“Mudança de Planos,” which translates to “change of plans,” closes Seasons, Correa’s debut album released November 29, 2025. The track processes that pivot, when faith pointed him toward Orlando instead. It’s the kind of redirection that could derail someone or define them. For Correa, it became material.

The seven original tracks on Seasons don’t read like a guitar showcase. They read like pages torn from a journal, except the entries are written in melody and improvisation rather than sentences. “First Step” captures the fear and courage tangled together when he first boarded a plane to Boston. “Slow It Down” came from his first semester at Berklee, when everything was moving so fast he couldn’t actually absorb any of it. “Solitude” isn’t about loneliness but about recognizing when one chapter is ending and sitting with that awareness.

Correa grew up absorbing Milton Nascimento, Djavan, and Hermeto Pascoal, Brazilian artists who taught him that music could be both sophisticated and deeply emotional without choosing between the two. At Berklee, he studied with Randy Roos, who gets his own tribute track on the album, along with Sheryl Bailey, John Patitucci, and Danilo Pérez through the Global Jazz Institute. He also worked as a session guitarist on three productions by Grammy-winning producer Matt Rollings. The training shows, but it never overshadows the storytelling.

The album features shifting lineups across its tracks. Thiago Wolf contributes cello and engineering work. Jakob Kobal plays accordion. Ian Coury adds mandolin. Correa handled guitar duties throughout and took on mixing and mastering for several tracks himself. It’s independent in the truest sense, assembled by someone who wanted to say something specific and found the people who could help him say it.

His recent single “Histórias” pushes into different territory. Built on baião rhythms fused with contemporary instrumental ideas, the track explores how stories mutate as they pass from person to person, like a game of telephone where the distortions become part of the meaning. The piece swells and contracts, moving through tension and enthusiasm before landing somewhere cleaner. Correa wants listeners to find their own narrative inside the music, and the composition gives them room to do exactly that.

He’s also stepping into education with a guitar book series called The Ultimate Guide, launching with Major Pentatonic: The Ultimate Guide in 2026. The method behind it, which he calls FCA for Foundation, Connection, and Application, focuses on long-term development rather than shortcuts. Students build vocabulary, learn how the pieces relate across the fretboard, then work on actually making music that sounds like themselves. It’s the kind of approach that requires patience, which seems to be something Correa has thought a lot about.

These days he lives in Orlando, performs regularly at Jazz Tastings, and posts educational content on YouTube alongside performance clips on Instagram.

Correa has thought a lot about what music is actually for. Not career advancement, not technical validation. “It’s a way to create space for people to reflect, to heal, to remember who they are,” he said. “My goal is not to impress, but to be honest.”

That honesty runs through Seasons. The album doesn’t try to prove anything about Correa’s technique or credentials. It just documents what it felt like to leave home, to struggle, to slow down when everything said speed up, and to trust that the plan falling apart might actually be the plan working. Sometimes the redirect is the destination.

Find Andre Correa on Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn, or visit his website.