Like the poets of Négritude, Ortiz shows us identity in fragments—sometimes harsh, sometimes delicate, always alive.
Intakt Records
Aruan Ortiz – piano, compositions (except Lo Que Yo Quiero Es Chan Chan)
Cuban-born, Brooklyn-based pianist Aruán Ortiz has been called a “piano cubist”—a tag that makes sense once you sit with his new solo album Créole Renaissance. Instead of flowing lines or familiar harmonic paths, Ortiz works with fragments, shards, and sudden shifts, more like a Picasso sketch than a landscape painting. Eight years after his last solo release (Cub(an)ism), he’s back at the keys with music that’s as much about thought and history as it is about sound.
The inspiration is the mid-20th century Négritude movement, which was sparked in Paris by French writers influenced by the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. That earlier flowering of Black culture gave us voices like Langston Hughes and the music of Duke Ellington—both of whom lit the path for Négritude’s writers to reclaim Black identity from colonial stereotypes. Ortiz takes that same spirit of defiance and filters it through the piano. What comes out isn’t polite background music—it’s confrontational, exploratory, sometimes cryptic, always searching.
The opener, ‘L’Étudiant noir,’ is all about extremes: deep bass notes tapped like distant thunder against bright, tinkling highs that scamper across the top register. The music swells into a rolling rhythm before breaking apart again, like two currents converging but never fully merging. ‘Seven Aprils in Paris (and A Sophisticated Lady)’ draws from Ellington, though Ortiz pulls it so far inside out you only catch fleeting glimpses. It moves at a slow, almost somber pace, as if the notes are walking with heavy shoes but never quite landing on a melody.
When he does go for velocity, it’s jagged and unpredictable. ‘Légitime Défense’ sets flurries of high notes against agitated bass rumbles, the piano sounding less like a single instrument than two forces in argument. ‘From the Distance of My Freedom’ takes a different route: Ortiz speaks over the music, reflecting on colonialism, Black intellectualism, and his own artistic journey. The voice is fragile and human; the piano builds around it with flourishes that finally hint at melody.
The shorter pieces—‘Première Miniature’ and ‘Deuxième Miniature (Dancing)’—play with repetition, little cells of notes that climb, descend, collide, and cut off abruptly. ‘The Great Camouflage’ takes on a heavier weight with block chords, punctuated by delicate touches that feel like Ortiz is holding something back, testing the edges of silence.
By the time we reach ‘We Belong to Those Who Say No to Darkness,’ Ortiz has opened up the piano like a laboratory. He strokes the strings, taps out thuds that sound like other instruments, and mixes it with bright, almost hymn-like figures on the keys. It’s eerie, inventive, and completely of a piece with the defiant line Césaire once wrote: “we belong to those who say no to the shadow.”
The album closes with ‘Lo Que Yo Quiero Es Chan Chan,’ Ortiz’s abstract take on Compay Segundo. He starts with resonant bass notes and scattered phrases, then lets the music gather steam—short, roaming bursts that almost stumble into melody before dissolving into quiet again. It feels less like a cover than a dream about the song, refracted through Ortiz’s restless imagination.
Ortiz has always thrived at intersections—Afro-Cuban roots, avant-garde composition, free improvisation—and Créole Renaissance might be his most personal crossroads yet. The album isn’t easy listening; it’s a series of confrontations with history, culture, and sound itself. But it rewards patience. Like the poets of Négritude, Ortiz shows us identity in fragments—sometimes harsh, sometimes delicate, always alive.
