Créole Renaissance

RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 29, 2025

“Cuban-born pianist and composer Aruán Ortiz is constantly evolving, experimenting and injecting new elements into his craft.” – Karl Ackermann, All About Jazz

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.

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.

(Adapted from the album liner notes by Brent Hayes Edwards)