Aruán is interviewed by Unlimit Jazz magazine (Italy) about his Flamenco Criollo project and upcoming album, Creole Renaissance.
Solo piano, Criollo flamenco, composition, and collaborations: from Négritude to Black Lives Matter, Ortiz talks about himself as a musician and an intellectual.
Aruan Ortiz, you performed solo piano in Italian cities and at festivals in March and April 2025 (Bergamo, San Vito al Tagliamento, Florence, Naples, Bologna, Castel San Pietro Terme). Most importantly, you recorded a new solo piano album for Intakt, titled "Créole Renaissance – Solo Piano," which was released on August 29th. What is the message of your solo performance today?
My first solo piano performance, and first album ever, was in 1996. It was titled "Impresión Tropical," recorded in Madrid for Magic Music (Universal Latino). I was very young, and there was a lot of Cuban music, danzon... If you compare that 1996 album and "Cub(an)ism" from 2017 (Intakt), the two albums are connected; the feeling is similar.
More than "Cubanism," it's "Cubism": in 1917, I was deeply immersed in Cubism. Picasso, Braque, and other painters of that school were one of the most important sources of information for me in creating pieces, deconstructing and reconstructing music, using Cuban rhythms and playing around with them. Rhythms identify Cuban folk culture, and I deconstruct them, extracting partial sections from them, fragments that I then rearrange.
I come from Santiago de Cuba and have been greatly influenced by the music of that area, but I went further: I studied intervals, twelve-tone music... Now, drawing on these influences, I push myself further. I conducted two years of research on the "Négritude" and "Créolité" movements of the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, his magazine "Tropiques" (1941-1945), the French surrealists and existentialists (Jean-Paul Sartre), and Léopold Sédar Senghor. In this vein, I created a new project called "Reimagining Tropiques: Then and Now" for trio (with singer and percussionist Anïs Maviel, editor's note), which will premiere in November 2025.
I was deeply absorbed and influenced by this research and wondered how this "Négritude" movement, born in Martinique and the French-speaking Caribbean islands, was connected to Cuba—to the Grupo de Renovación Musical (1942-1948, led by José Ardévol, editor's note). – and with Spanish-speaking Mexico, creating a Pan-American dimension. There were connections, which I studied, between the ideology of Surrealism and the manifesto of André Breton (who was in contact with Césaire and "Tropiques"), with the movement of Cuban poets and writers like Nicolás Guillén and Alejo Carpentier. For me, it's as if a "structure" had been created that integrated artistic and musical discourses. As if there were different languages in a conversation: Spanish, French, English, Creole. So with the piano, I draw on different vocabularies (jazz, classical, and Afro-Cuban music, etc.). I interconnect them in my creative process; there are many different influences that come and go in what I do today, but my main path is creativity, improvisation.
Can you tell us about your project "Flamenco Criollo Ensemble. The roots and travels of flamenco from Spain to Cuba and back..."? He presented it in Italy at the Turin Jazz Festival last April.
I have studied the music of the Middle East and North Africa, and there are melodies and maqams that connect various areas. There is a proto-flamenco Andalusian music rich in Africanisms that traveled by ship, departing from the port of Cadiz to the New World, on a "melodic itinerary" that touched Colombia, Mexico, the port of Vera Cruz, the port of Cuba... melodies that were enriched with Afro-Cuban rhythms.
Let's not forget that through flamenco we arrive at the "cante hondo," its true root, its tradition from Seville to Cadiz. I had the privilege of collaborating with Ismael de la Rosa, a flamenco artist who understands the various styles, which tell stories about the melodies that come and go. My project highlights the Afro-Cuban influences, the way of singing, the way of dancing, what came together on the island of Cuba, and the Africanisms in flamenco. “Flamenco Criollo” is a celebration of a journey and a multicultural language, in musical forms that transform one another, travel to the New World, and return to Europe.
You are a renowned composer and were awarded the 2024 Hermitage Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition. This year (2025), you were awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Goddard Lieberson Fellowship in Music Composition. You work on film scores, choreography, classical ensemble scores, and more.
These are different things. I have a narrative approach. I know my way: I research first, and then I can compose. I am often inspired and motivated by the story I have to write music about. I act as a sort of soundtrack of the story I am telling. It happens for