Kayani Revueltas broke the respectful silence that reigned in the Manuel M. Ponce room of the Palace of Fine Arts: Thank you for your dedication, comrade!
a phrase that was echoed by a female shout from the audience: Long live our comrade Olivia Revueltas!
She then took a seashell and rang it in a terrifying way four times, thus ending the guard of honour that the pianist and composer’s three children mounted in front of the funeral urn with the artist’s ashes, who was bid farewell with an emotional minute of applause from family, friends, colleagues and fans.
This was the end of the posthumous tribute paid by the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL) on Wednesday night to the pioneer of jazz in Mexico, a loving and supportive woman, combative and consistent, an exceptional artist committed to her society, as she defined herself at the ceremony, who died on August 2 at the age of 73.
It was a moving ceremony in which, in the voice of her daughter Vina Sophia, two of the poems of the teacher were heard, who, although not very well known, liked to write poetry and paint, as well as one of her compositions, Wounded woman, by singer Verónica Ituarte and pianist Baldomero Jiménez.
Videos were also shown, including one of an interview that the jazz musician held with journalist Cristina Pacheco, also recently deceased, for a television program in July 2021, and another with fragments of a concert she gave upon her return to Mexico, on April 14, 2016, at the Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris.
Already at the ceremony, his friend the writer and musician Alain Derbez stated that The story of Olivia Revueltas is that of a combative person who has known how to claim and make her own space and platform in worlds that did not know how to give her the respect she deserved and deserves.
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It is, he added, the story of a combative and consistent artist who, against all odds, has known how, especially in recent years when time and a calmer situation have allowed it, to shore up her work as a pianist and jazz musician, as an empathetic, supportive social being, as part of a guild of musicians who erroneously tend to disperse, and as a witness and protagonist of a moment, hers, historic. That, I believe, is Olivia’s story, the story of a lighthouse, a buoy, a watershed that knows how to savor life and invites us to do so.
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Always standing
The first of the two poems Vania Sophia read was an untitled one, written in 1989, in San Antonio, Texas, in which the pianist pays tribute to her instrument, which she considered vehicle and throat of the voice of God
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The other is a kind of life box cut in which the author claims that the ravages of life / failed to stain my heart with impurities
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Guitarist Julio Revueltas, his voice breaking, shared several anecdotes about his mother, the most important of which for him was perhaps the one in which the artist joined a month-long hunger strike in 1988 held by indigenous peasants in the Zócalo in protest against the dispossession of their lands: Neither she nor the peasants broke down when some guards wanted to go and lift them up; they always remained standing, and that was what she taught us.
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Kayani was in charge of closing the family participation on Comrade Olivia
as she calls her, who she always wondered about How could such a wounded woman love so much?
y How those little hands, how those precious and powerful little hands, could touch in such a powerful and beautiful way
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She said that the composer and performer considered the Palace of Fine Arts a temple
and once she passed in front of him she crossed herself while saying: “’For art, for science and for consistency.’ That day I understood that those three words would define her forever.”
The director of Inbal, Lucina Jiménez, after considering Olivia Revueltas example of dignity, integrity, artistic excellence, conviction and ethics
assumed the institutional commitment of Honor her by keeping her music, her memory, her commitment and that deep love she always had for Mexico alive.
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