Yusimil López Bridón

She is a composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. With her most recent album Haiku, she arrived on the Cuban music scene to dazzle both for her innovative musical ideas and her performances on guitar, keyboard, bass, and percussion, in which she displays virtuosity.

She began her elementary studies at the Alejandro García Caturla Music Conservatory, studying guitar, and completed her intermediate level at the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory.

She is a performer of the tres, piano, and double bass, which has allowed her to be part of different musical groups, such as Interactivo, which includes Roberto Carcassés on keyboards; Omar González on bass; Ruy López-Nussa on drums, and Lucía Huergo on saxophone, with which she performed at Ronnie Scott's in London, England. In Brazil, she performed at the Cité de la Musique with Lenine and Argentine-Bahian Ramiro Musotto; about her visit to that country, she says:

«Brazil was already strong in me, now it is simply part of my life. I have played music from there for many days, I have lived with them, I have met Elsa Zoares, Ney Matogrosso, Paulinho Moska, Pedro Luis (Pedro Luis e a Parede) personally. What more can I ask for?»

She has been the tres player and keyboardist for the traditional music group Soneras; bassist and pianist of the quintet Quasi Jazz, and has sporadic collaborations with the groups Mezcla and Gerardo Alfonso; she sang as a duet with Domingo Candelario, in a style similar to Gema Corredera and Pável Urquiza or a kind of Cuban Tuck and Patty; she has performed both with Interactivo and with soloists such as Haydée Milanés, William Vivanco, Kelvis Ochoa, and Francis del Río. She has toured Europe in the company of Mexican Susana Baca and Peruvian Lila Downs; about these artists Yusa expresses:

«The fact of being three Latin American artists already identifies us as the same sensibility. Life gives me the fortune of being able, in addition to living together on a tour for several days with those two "essences." Each one of them is like a matrix trunk with respect to the music of their respective countries and that impresses me.»

At Cubadisco 2003 she won the award in the fusion category, as well as two nominations for the World Music awards of BBC Radio 3. She was invited to perform at the World Music Fair WOMEX.

«With all due respect, I do not feel part of any specific movement, although I undoubtedly have common signs with my generation and my time. My musical training has gone through very different facets and in all of them I have been happy. I studied classical music, I have played salsa, traditional music, jazz, everything. I have been living through the journey that Cuban music is making.»

«Yusa has "mixed" son and filin to achieve something distinctively Cuban but proudly international.»

«Yusa is a star from head to toe.» «Yusa bets on poetry and good music, reasons that merit her inclusion in the vanguard of Cuban song.» «Playing now the guitar, now the piano, she makes you aware of her colossal talent and that she will surely have a long and legendary career.» «Yusa places Cuban music at the vanguard, without losing its rhythm and roots.»

«A style that takes from many without definitively anchoring itself in any one, cultivating that unsettling no man's land that belongs, not precisely to originality, but rather [...] to difference, which can be much better.»

She has also toured Holland, France, Ireland, Japan, Scotland, Germany, Italy, and Belgium.

Between 2003 and 2004, she performed numerous concerts in England, one of which led to her DVD Yusa live at Ronnie Scott's.

Works
At Twelve
Lullaby Song for Freya
Canda'o cerr'ao (co-authored with Kelvis Ochoa)
Matter of Angle
Chiquichaca (co-authored with Domingo Candelario)
Of Colors
Of Fear
The Sailor's Ghost
On Every Corner (instrumental)
Flash
The Wait
The Fable
Number 2
The Departure
Seas of Innocence
Re-birth (co-authored with Elmer Ferrer)
Rise (co-authored with Roberto Carcassés and Descemer Bueno)
Test the Walls
All or Almost Nothing
Taking the Center
A Cow and a Seal (text co-authored with Manuel A. Rodríguez and Descemer Bueno).