The Argentine singer -songwriter Alberto Cortez , author of great successes of Latin American music that had a formidable impact in Spain, has died this Thursday in a hospital in Madrid at the age of 79 , as a result of gastric ulcers that caused his admission to the health center last March 27. The cure for this ailment was complicated due to the appearance of different infections, sources close to the artist have explained.
Fifty years after anticipating it in one of his most famous compositions, When a friend leaves, Alberto Cortez’s tree fell into “a vacant lot”, although despite his death the artist leaves behind a solid international body of work in which music and poetry became one.
Outstanding member of the influential generation of singer-songwriters of the late 60s and 70s , in addition to the Grammy Award for Artistic Excellence in 2007, this Argentine opposed the “insignificance” of much of today’s music and became a maximum of his career that this discipline was a vehicle to “bring poetry closer to the people… where it should never have left,” he added.
Born in the Argentine town of Rancul, in the Pampas, in 1940, Cortez overcame half a century of activity despite his many ailments . “I sing because I have no other choice”, he would declare just five years ago about his resistance to retirement, in an interview in which he humorously took the number of times the rumor mill had killed him.
“I laugh over and over again because there are so many times that they have killed me that, you see, they have done it so badly that I am still very much alive here, and without retiring,” ironized the musician, who in his last stage also reproached the record industry to get rid of “the old floats”.
The stage was the place where “the happiest” he felt, as reflected in the work La vida, a biography of more than 500 pages written by Laura Etcheverry, in which he recounted that he composed his first song at age 12, A cigarette, the rain And you, when I discovered eroticism .
At just 20 years old, he took a boat from his native Argentina to Europe, following in the footsteps of great masters of popular music such as Jacques Brel ,Gilbert Becaud , and on this continent he recorded his first album, without knowing that this continental leap would become a constant in his career.
Author of important themes of Latin American music, such as Perez told me, Grandfather, My tree and I, Distance or You will get a rose, one of the most important was undoubtedly When a friend leaves, written as a result of the death of her father and become an essential part of numerous funerals .
“I wrote that song because my father treated me like a friend since I was little, taking me everywhere,” explained the artist, who then went through a “tremendous crisis” that led him to think “of leaving everything and going back to the town where he was born. “.
The spirit of exaltation of friendship that emanated from this composition also marked his career, very prolific in sincere collaborations. Among the most relevant, the four albums that he made with the musician and philosopher Facundo Cabral , who was very close to him, stand out, so his murder in Guatemala represented a hard impact. “Her death of him meant the death of all the singers in the world,” he said.
Cortes shared the studio and stage with other great Latin American voices, such as her compatriots Mercedes Sosa and Estela Raval, voice of Los Cinco Latinos, with whom she recorded the album En un rincon del alma, which contained the emblematic song of the same name that also I would perform a duet with Maria Dolores Pradera .
Spain, in fact, became a special place for Alberto Cortez. In this country he fixed his residence, where he sang to Antonio Machado , Miguel Hernandez and Federico Garcia Lorca , also to the victims of the terrorist attack of 11-M (which coincided with his birthday) and it was where one night in 1967 he began to convert his name in legend in an evening without microphones at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid.
