Music doesn’t save the world; but you can make it a better place. Where I say music I could say Silvia Pérez Cruz, and the geographical space could be occupied by Cuba.
The news of the Catalan singer-songwriter’s concert in Havana has been a balm for fans of songwriters and good music in general.
Although Silvia Pérez Cruz is not known by the majority of the public on the island, her songs have circulated on a round trip among a considerable segment of Cubans. The Catalan has been one of the close presences that trova and song have had in the country. At different times in her career, she has traveled to Cuba to offer concerts, exchange with colleagues and collaborate with Cuban musicians.
With less than 40 years of age, Silvia takes us back to the essence of the author’s song. Her work reveals an inner world that lives from the desire for adventure and contact with reality. She manages to universalize human emotions with the honesty and strength of nova cançeither, the poetry of folklore, jazz, flamenco and other popular music.
The Catalan has had Cuba close since childhood. In Interview with AMPM He declares it like this: “Cuba is part of my emotional map.” His father, a Havana researcher, traveled to the island several times for no less than twenty-two years. He was looking for anonymous, unknown songs, lost in the mist of time or the mist imposed by men. So he took Cuba to his house and introduced it to his daughter, little Silvia, who would find her vocation when she was just 4 years old.
It’s hard to imagine what Cuba sounded like to her then, from a distance; how the songs that her father discovered sounded to her and that spoke of a country that today is not even close to the same, but still feeds her curiosity and her affections.
As a young singer-songwriter, she visited Cuba with her father in 2010. More visits would follow, in one of which she performed with her father. New emotions and new friends also forged her career.
One of the collaborations was with Haydée Milanés, with whom he shares recognizable lines of his generation. From the union was born the version of “Ya ves”, one of Pablo’s classics, which both recorded on the album deluxe love (2017).
The most recent concert of the Catalan in Cuba took place in 2016 at the National Museum of Fine Arts, which today sees her return. It was another memorable night to learn to live and get excited; to try to save us from the world at least for the duration of a song.
A decade after releasing her first album, Silvia returns to Cuba with the echoes of her latest album, Farce and the expectation for the release of the next one. In addition, she does so wrapped in the trail of recognition collected in the National Prize for Current Music 2022.
The Havana concert could reserve a space for the tribute, knowing the coherence of the singer-songwriter and the respect she has always shown for the music from which she drank. Perhaps she remembers with some song the great Gal Costa and others who have nurtured her status as an eclectic artist, always ready to discover, adventure and save us not only from the wild environment but even from ourselves.
