Music promoter Guim Cifré dies at 34 years old

BarcelonaMusic promoter Guim Cifré has died this Wednesday in a traffic accident at the age of 34. Highly esteemed among Barcelona's jazz community, he was artistic programmer at the Milano Jazz Club, on Ronda Universitat in Barcelona, and just this week he was beginning a new chapter at the helm of the renovated Jazzsí in the Raval.

"With deep sadness, we must say goodbye to Guim Cifré, partner at Girs Musicals and one of the driving forces behind this new stage for Jazzsí. It is very difficult to find the words at a time like this," lament photographer Clara Conill and musician Liba Villavecchia, his partners in adventure at Girs Musicals, who, overwhelmed by Cifré's death, have decided to postpone the inauguration of Jazzsí planned for this weekend. "Now we need time to process this loss and to decide, calmly, how this project will continue. We will inform you of any news later on," explain Conill and Villavecchia.

For Cifré, who had also worked at the Paral·lel 62 venue, "Jazzsí was much more than a project: it was a dream, a life commitment to which he had dedicated all his energy, his vision, and an enormous passion for music and culture," they add regarding this live music activist who, during the Milano era, had to fight against the logic of the dispossession of unique spaces and activities by the franchise economy. "They are not just destroying a musical space, but the whole thing affects a cultural ecosystem," Cifré explained at the time, shortly before the closure of the Milano Jazz Club in September 2023. As Conill and Villavecchia recall, "his way of understanding spaces, musicians, and the people who make them possible was an essential part of this path we had begun to build together."

Guim Cifré was the grandson of the cartoonist Guillem Cifré, one of the reference names of the Bruguera publishing house and creator of the series El Repórter Tribulete. And his father, also Guillem Cifré, was part of the underground comic explosion of the seventies and eighties in magazines like El Víbora and Cairo. Although Guim Cifré chose the world of music, he kept the family legacy very much in mind, and he mobilized to try to recover the originals that his grandfather had made for Bruguera.