Colombian singer Yuri Buenaventura lives “for salsa and without fear because of it”

Every day, a personality invites themselves into the world of Élodie Suigo. Tuesday, September 24, 2024: Colombian singer Yuri Buenaventura. He has just released a new album “Amame” and will be on tour from February 2025, including April 8 at the Salle Pleyel.

His recovery of Don’t leave me by Jacques Brel in 1996, revisited to the rhythm of Salsa, left its mark in addition to shining the spotlight on Yuri Buenaventura. A beautiful story, as they say, for the kid who learned to read and speak by reading newspapers stuck on the walls of the house that his mother used as insulation and decoration. It was to begin studying economics that he arrived on French soil, at the Sorbonne. But his impromptu concerts to beg at the Saint-Michel metro station quickly took over. He will be on tour from February 2025 with a stop on April 8 at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, to perform his latest album in particular Amame.

franceinfo: Amame means ‘Love me’. It is “a hymn, a cry from the heart to the men who fought without bending their backs“, you say, who knew how to project and protect their culture?

Yuri Buenaventura: Yes, that’s exactly it. In relation to Buenaventura, to my origins and to everything I experienced to get to the Salle Pleyel.

Especially newspapers, they were your first lessons in learning the language.

Yes, it’s very poetic.

“Precariousness without poetry and love is very hard, but precariousness with dignity, love and protection of parents, that’s all.”

Yuri Buenaventura

to franceinfo

There is no hatred against society. It makes you realize that love is a very important tool to understand humans and society.

In this album, you talk about others who have had to live with their culture, not necessarily where they were born. In a way, you talk about yourself first.

Yes, there is a part of the album that is exclusively dedicated to love and heartbreak, but also the love of men in society and the heartbreak of men. And, this title We are coming here talks about the black men who arrived from Africa and found a free territory in Colombia and who today, due to an economic and strategic issue, are still displaced by conflicts because there is material wealth, because it is a territory that faces Asia and China and now we need to push these men, these blacks from these regions.

You also pay tribute to New York Latin music and its musicians. They have been a real inspiration for you.

Yes, in fact, Latin America emigrated to the United States, but they met the black men of jazz there. And this music was mixed. This Caribbean music, a little tropical, was mixed with these urban New York sounds and the jazz harmonies. And salsa, Latin jazz, is this mixing. But there is another element that we often forget, it is the technicians, the sound engineers. The sound recording in New York changed the whole sound of Latin music, American technology made it possible to capture these sounds.

Music has always been a part of your life. And this album is also how it speaks about you, that is to say that you decided to record it with the musicians, the instruments. No artificial intelligence. Is it important to keep the human at the heart of musical creation?

Certainly. Artificial intelligence in music produces frequencies. These frequencies reach our ears, but they are dead because inside, there is no human emotion. In music, there is the emotion of letters, in a trumpet of Chet Baker, in the guitar of Django Reinhardt, in the piano playing of Michel Petrucciani or in the voice of Charles Trenet, there is an emotion. The frequency arrives and it is alive. There is this human emotion. And if music takes the road of dead frequencies, it is like eating something that does not nourish. And we are human or not.

As a child, you dreamed of making music. You dreamed of singing, you dreamed of having fun, of smiling, of laughing. How does the little boy you were see the man you have become?

“Our societies are not fair.”

Yuri Buenaventura

to franceinfo

I would tell him not to be so afraid on the road. It is normal that in societies of developing countries, people are afraid because there is an internal conflict, there is corruption, there are bad examples from political leaders. All this is not a scenario for a society to be calm, peaceful and it is perhaps a strategy, but I really appreciate these struggles of the French Republic to find itself, to be itself, to be autonomous in the face of God, in the face of everything. And it is to constitute how to be and to rise. Salsa would like to bring that and it helped me with that. I live for salsa and I live without this fear thanks to it.