Créole Renaissance, out August 29, 2025 via Intakt Records, is Ortiz’s first solo piano outing in eight years and a fascinating musical and intellectual interpretation of the African diaspora
“One hears the firm imprint of Cuba’s musical heritage on Ortiz’s compositional style: the pulse of African-derived beats, the modern vocabulary of classical pianism and the abandon of free improvisation.” – Suzanne Lorge, DownBeat
“Cuban-born pianist and composer Aruán Ortiz is constantly evolving, experimenting and injecting new elements into his craft.” – Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz
His own journey having retraced the path of jazz’s evolution from his native Cuba to the United States, pianist and composer Aruán Ortiz has long been fascinated by the ways in which the African diaspora has morphed into fascinating new permutations in its travels across the globe. On his latest album, Créole Renaissance, Ortiz takes Négritude, the cultural, political and literary movement that emerged among French intellectuals in the 1930s, as the leaping off point for a fascinating collection of solo piano explorations.
Recognised as “one of the most creative and original composers in the world” (The Art Music Lounge), Ortiz has received prestigious honours, including a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, Doris Duke Impact Award (2014), and the 2024 Hermitage Fellowship. Most recently, he was named one of two “composers of extraordinary gifts” awarded with the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A celebrated piano cubist, distinguished jazz improviser, award-winning composer, and idiosyncratic stylist, Ortiz combines intellectual depth, emotionality, and creativity on his fourth solo piano album, which arrives eight years after its predecessor, the much-lauded Cub(an)ism. Where that album offered an undiluted excursion into the crossroads of Cuban rhythms and Cubist abstraction, Créole Renaissance, out August 29, 2025 via Intakt Records, takes a similarly abstract view on the music’s mid-20th-century manifestations and the artistic and cultural context in which it took shape.
The awakening of racial consciousness known as the Négritude movement is often described as commencing in 1935 with L’Étudiant noir, the short-lived but influential journal founded by a group of ambitious graduate students in Paris including Aimé Césaire (from Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (from Senegal). Ortiz’s stunning pianistic reflections on the implications of a Créole Renaissance start here, placing the music within a long history of collective Black study.
Ortiz explains that he was inspired above all by the ways Négritude poets such as Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil deployed “surrealist techniques to shape a new kind of narrative of Afro-diasporic life and history in the Caribbean.” If Ortiz’s music is adamantly innovative and forward-looking, in other words, it reminds us of its deep roots in traditions of Black experimentation.
At the same time, as a Cuban composer invoking the major mid-20th century French-language periodicals of Négritude – including not only L’Étudiant noir but also Légitime Défense (1932) and Tropiques (1941–45) – Ortiz suggests that a Créole Renaissance must be diasporic: a matter of correspondence, interrogation, and boundary-crossing, a matter of the ways Santiago de Cuba or Brooklyn “hears” Fort-de-France or Paris. With the first notes of the opening track, “L’Étudiant noir,” he traverses the full expanse of the keyboard, from the bottom of the bass register to the upper regions of the treble, as though to remind us of what the French writer and poet Édouard Glissant would call the “determining gaps” – the miles to be traveled.
Ortiz is renowned for his prodigious technique, and multiple lineages converge in his hands, from Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Ligeti to Bebo Valdés, Don Pullen, and Cecil Taylor. Drawing on the ethnologist Fernando Ortiz’s famous description of Cuba as a unique ajiaco or “stew” of sources, the pianist describes his music as an “eclectic mix grounded in twentieth-century avant-garde music but also shaped by the oral traditions of my Afro-Cuban roots.” Throughout the album oblique allusions surface, whether a chromatic snatch of Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” on “Seven Aprils in Paris (and a Sophisticated Lady” or hints of Compay Segundo’s infectious “Chan Chan,” which he transforms into “Lo Que Yo Quiero Es Chan Chan.”
The culmination of this relentless exploratory urge is “We Belong to Those Who Say No to Darkness,” where Ortiz employs an arsenal of extended techniques, dampening the strings into surprisingly nasal thuds and metallic strums, expanding the palette of the piano to suggest a range of other instruments (zither, shekere, oud, electric guitar, gamelan jegog). The title is drawn from Césaire’s defiant preface to the first issue of Tropiques, where he writes that although the “shadow” of imperialism seems to be encroaching on life everywhere, still “we belong to those who say no to the shadow. We know that the salvation of the world depends on us, too.”
The declaration feels as timely in 2025 as it must have in 1941. In Ortiz’s brilliant hands, his music responds to that mid-century literary vanguardism, taking the Créole Renaissance back into the realm of sound.
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photo by Mario-Sabbatani
Aruán Ortiz
Aruán Ortiz is an award-winning composer and pianist whose work seamlessly blends contemporary classical music, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, spontaneous composition, and improvisation. His compositions span chamber ensembles, orchestras, dance companies, and film, continuously pushing musical boundaries while embodying and redefining the intersection of contemporary classical, creative music and Afro-diasporic traditions. Ortiz’s multidisciplinary artistic vision has led to the premiere of projects such as Reimagining Tropiques: Then and Now at Constellation in Chicago (2024), Flamenco Criollo at the Flamenco Biënnale Nederland (2021), and Pastor’s Paradox at the Latino Theater in Dallas (2022). He has released several albums with Intakt Records, including his solo effort Cub(an)ism (2017), awarded five stars by DownBeatMagazine, and Inside Rhythmic Falls (2020), featuring master drummer Andrew Cyrille, praised as “a narrative of deep human emotion” (Morning Star Online). His works have been performed internationally at renowned venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, and Southbank Centre (UK). Key chamber works include Episodes in an Unforeseen Departure (2023), premiered by the Harlem Chamber Players at the Schomburg Center, and Piedras de Ida y Vuelta (2023), commissioned by the Contemporary Music Ensemble Ipse. Ortiz’s music is lauded for its structural complexity and its innovative fusion of serialism, aleatory techniques, and avant-garde improvisation.
Aruán Ortiz – Créole Renaissance
Intakt Records – Intakt 441 – Recorded December 17-18, 2024
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