Yuri Buenaventura

Ne Me Quitte Pas

Yuri Buenaventura (born Yuri Bedoya, in Buenaventura, Colombia, 1961) One of Colombia’s most talented salsa singers that emerge from the salsa circles of Cali. Yuri’s father, Manual Bedoya, was a music and theatre professor, and he transmitted his passion for the Colombian (music-) culture on to Yuri. Yuri went to study in France at the faculty of economic sciences at Sorbonne, Paris. There he met other student from all over Latin-Amarica as well as French students who were more interested in music than studying… Yuri started to play on the streets and subways and took part in the Latin fever which seizes Paris in the early 1990′s. He began singing with Grupo Caiman, and becomes chorus-singer of Mambomania and finally gave up his economy-studies. Yuri Buenaventura then returns to Colombia to record his first album, “Herencia Africana” (African heritage), recorded in several small steps due to lack of funding. Finally Yuri is so much in debts, that he finds it impossibility to complete the record. But as a strike of luck, the french radio-DJ Remy Kolpa Kopoul, of Radio Nova is so enthusiastic by the cover of Jacques Brel’s ”Ne me quite pas” that he plays it to the extent that Yuri Buenaventura gets a record deal the album is released in 1996 and becomes the first salsa-record to obtain a gold disc in France… LINK youtube