Available for Booking
Aruán Ortiz
Créole Renaissance
(Intakt 2025)
★★★★★
Morning Stars, UK
★★★★ ½
All About Jazz, USA
★★★★
Concerto, Germany
★★★★
DownBeat, USA
★★★★
Jazzwise, UK
“a work of rare intelligence, mystery, and poetic grace”
Alan West-Durán, Rialta Magazine
photo by Sabbatini
Créole Renaissance (Intakt Records 2025) marks a pivotal moment in Aruán Ortiz’s work as a composer, pianist and music conceptualist of Afro-Haitian descent. The project grew out of his long-standing engagement with Black Caribbean intellectual modernism and his commitment to examining the cultural, political, and aesthetic impact of the African diaspora.
This album is a deeply personal creative journey that connects Ortiz’s world artistic vision, where he combines extended piano techniques, avant-garde jazz, and poetry (inspired by Afro-Caribbean dialects, phonetic inflections, and onomatopoeia), allowing the piano to function as both a percussive instrument and a resonant narrative voice.
Créole Renaissance has been listed as one of the Best Albums of 2025 by All About Jazz, Jazzwise, DownBeat, The Arts Fuse, In&Out Magazine, Jazz Portugal, and Sound and the Mainstream. As the prestigious magazine All about jazz stated: Ortiz “is not simply expanding the possibilities of jazz; he is redefining what diasporic music can be in the 21st century.”
Listen to album
“ [Ortiz] has created a record that makes you want to stay glued to your seat to catch every detail of the fine playing.”
Jan Granile, Salt Peanuts
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“[Créole Renaissance is] one of the most inspiring recordings of the moment, music that does not allow us to forget, that compels us to recall, and that quietly demands more of us."
Thierry de Clémensat, Paris Move