Buravan Gone Too Soon

The following is an excerpt taken from a recent Cappuccino, our occasional newsletter to subscribers.

I once asked Yvan Buravan, who died on the seventeenth of this month at the age of twenty-seven, what had inspired him to pursue a career in music. He preambled with details of his background and his upbringing — how he loved music at an early age and his first experience holding a microphone at a local music competition when he was in his second year of secondary school. He then explained that it was “the ability that music has to bring millions of people, millions of souls together” that pushed him to want to “dive in deep”. He told me winning that contest in 2009 — in which he came second — was also seductive, that he had thought to himself, “let me get into this thing.” The following year, Buravan joined a Christian choir with a group of peers from his neighbourhood. There he acquired more skills and experience.

He later co-founded another choir with a group of friends, which he eventually led. As a singer and a leader of the group at that time, he told me, it was “an opportunity to grow” and that it had “shaped me as an artist more than anywhere else.”