Jazz composer and pianist Olivia Revueltas Peralta passes away

Jazz composer and pianist Olivia Revueltas Peralta, one of the great figures of contemporary national culture, passed away this Friday at the age of 73 in Mexico City.

The news was confirmed on social media by his son, guitarist Julio Revueltas, who also reported that the funeral will be held at 10 p.m. today at the J García López funeral home, Prim branch (General Prim 57, Juárez neighborhood).

Daughter of the great writer José Revueltas and niece of the composer Silvestre Revueltas, the teacher was a combative and committed artist, who stood out for her intense and vehement personality, in keeping with her family lineage. Revueltas, after all.

He was born in Mexico City on July 17, 1951 and at the age of 23 he began his self-taught studies, specifically in jazz, to start his professional career in 1978.

In the 1980s, he created and directed the Jazz from 5 to 7 series at Casa del Lago, which lasted for seven years and through which he recorded the most important figures of Mexican jazz at the time.

According to a family profile, in 1988 he joined a hunger strike in the capital’s Zócalo that lasted 10 days, in support of a group of indigenous peasants who were trying to be stripped of their lands, achieving an audience with then-president Miguel de la Madrid.

On October 2 of that same year, “in view of the consequences of that strike,” he decided to “self-exile” and live in the United States, where he remained for 25 years.

Humanism was not only an essential premise in Olivia Revueltas’ life, but also in her way of understanding and interpreting jazz, as she reaffirmed in an interview with this newspaper.

““I try to make my music profound, to sincerely project or express the true feelings that run through the soul. Because of the culture that Mexico has and the heartbreaking things that happen there, one cannot ignore the human condition,” he said in May 2000.

“There is no need to explain anything; people are either touched or not, they identify with it or they don’t. Beethoven said: ‘If it is something from the heart, it will reach the heart’; it is something inescapable.”