Aruán Ortiz: Créole Renaissance

Cuban Cubism is central to Aruán Ortiz's musical identity—but in this album, his vision extends far beyond. While the 1930s Negritude movement was a literary endeavor, Ortiz seeks to embody that movement not through words but through music. His compositions channel their spirit with abstraction, tension, and a deep sense of diasporic reflection.

Ortiz, born in Santiago de Cuba—the island's second-largest city—is shaped by its distinctive sonic culture. His influences stretch widely, encompassing American and European 20th-century composers such as Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Xenakis, as well as icons of funk and soul like James Brown and Sly Stone.

Now based in Brooklyn, Ortiz is a pianist, violist, and composer who defies easy categorization. His music fuses jazz, avant-garde classical, Afro-Cuban traditional and experimental improvisation into a singular voice that is intellectually rigorous and emotionally provocative.

Liner notes are rarely essential, but the essay by scholar Brent Hayes Edwards is a vital guide to understanding this album. Hayes Edwards traces a lineage from a 1935 issue of a Parisian journal—one of the origins of the Negritude movement—and explores its significance for Ortiz. For Ortiz, the "Creole Renaissance" is not confined to the Caribbean; it must be diasporic in scope.

With the album's opening notes, Ortiz spans the entire keyboard—from the highest treble to the deepest bass—symbolizing the vast gaps that must be traversed across oceans and histories. This is not a musical homecoming, but a journey of interconnection.

Ortiz's music bears the imprint of Don Pullen, and Cecil Taylor. He also offers fleeting nods to figures like Duke Ellington and Compay Segundo. However, these are not direct quotations—they are echoes, refracted through Ortiz's unique compositional lens. As Hayes Edwards suggests, listening to Ortiz can feel like witnessing a difficult birth. The piano is not conventionally played; rather, it is interrogated, deconstructed, and reimagined.

In a previous solo album, Cub(an)Ism (Intakt, 2017), Ortiz described his approach as "Cuban Cubism" as: "A process of constructing unfamiliar harmonic movements and layering them with Cuban rhythmic ideas. Much like the Cubist visual art of Picasso and Braque, this technique emphasizes fragmentation, simultaneity, and multiple perspectives."

"Etudiant Noir" embodies the metaphor of gaps—bright treble notes and grounded basslines articulating distance and disjunction. The narrative unfolds with elegance, inviting space for reflection. Rhythms are only hinted at, but the persistent presence of the top notes offers a delicate tension.

A richly-layered piece, "Seven Aprils in Paris (and A Sophisticated Lady)" evokes "April in Paris." It is a track containing oblique allusions to Duke Ellington—especially slivers of "Sophisticated Lady." The "Cubism" in the title is apt: harmonic and melodic shards coalesce into something suggestive yet elusive.

Here, in "Légitime Défense," the influence of Cecil Taylor is undeniable. Ortiz may not readily acknowledge the debt, but his leaping, percussive gestures clearly echo Taylor's explosive freedom. Yet Ortiz also diverges—he allows more space, resisting the urge to overwhelm. His playing is urgent, but never bludgeoning.

A powerful track, "From the Distance of My Freedom" combines spoken word and piano. The litany includes terms like Criticism, Pan-Africanism, Postcolonialism, Black Intellectualism, Caribbean Existentialism, and Black Renaissance. As the words accumulate, so does the musical intensity—notes cluster, tension mounts, and eventually the voice fades, leaving a final, hard chord to punctuate the piece.

Only with "The Great Camouflage" do we fully realize how much Ortiz has stripped his music down. It is meditative, spare, and courageous in its restraint. Each note is deliberate, each decay carefully allowed to resonate. It's a kind of sonic bravery rarely attempted in contemporary piano music.

A bold, defiant statement: "We Belong to These Who Say No to Darkness" finds Ortiz attacking the piano with energy drawn from free jazz, layered with sounds resembling drums, oud, shekere, gamelan, and even zither-like textures. Lyrical interludes balance harsh dissonances, strange intervals, and intense percussive flurries. The pacing is inventive and absorbing, never relying on conventional forms but maintaining coherence through sheer creative force.

Ortiz's vision is rooted in a conception of Cuba not as a fixed identity, but as an ajiaco—a flavorful stew of diverse cultural and historical sources. This idea permeates the album, which moves beyond genre toward a kind of philosophical musical expression. His music challenges boundaries while staying deeply connected to Cuban roots and diasporic consciousness.

This is not an album that comforts or conforms. It is demanding, provocative, fresh, and visionary. Ortiz composes with a philosophical underpinning, using musical fragmentation, contrast, and opposition to construct new perspectives. Melodic fragments shift, collide, and reassemble—mirroring the fractured identities and histories he draws from.

Aruán Ortiz is not simply expanding the possibilities of jazz; he is redefining what diasporic music can be in the 21st century.

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