Aruán Ortiz
Créole Renaissance
Intakt CD441 (CD, DL) ★★★★☆ Editor’s Choice
Aruán Ortiz (p).
Despite the malign efforts of a hostile US state department and, some would say, its own government, the small nation of Cuba continues to produce a steady stream of world-class athletes, artists and musicians – outstanding pianists in particular. Aruán Ortiz is one such: native to Santiago De Cuba but now resident in Brooklyn, he’s established a formidable reputation as a performer and composer equally at home with the diverse traditions of jazz, Afro-Cuban music, and the European avant-garde.
This, his second solo recording (released on 28 August), evokes the spirits of Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Ligeti as much as Bebo Valdés, Don Pullen, or Cecil Taylor. It’s a stimulating rather than an easy listen: eschewing regular tempo, conventional harmony and easily digestible melody, Ortiz deploys his formidable technique across every part of the piano, alternating deep bass thumps with frantic tone clusters on ‘L’Etudiant Noir’, strumming and plucking the strings on ‘We Belong Too Those Who Say No To Darkness’, dropping plangent dissonances into a well of silence on the Morton Feldman-esque ‘The Great Camouflage’.
Only on ‘Lo Que Yo Quiero Es Chan Chan’, written in tribute to the famous tune by Compay Segundo, is there any overt reference to the Afro-Cuban tradition. Instead, as both the title and the spoken word interlude of ‘From The Distance Of My Freedom’ suggest, Ortiz is inspired by the tradition of black diasporic experimentation exemplified by the mid-20th century Négritude movement. A challenging, intellectually rigorous but rewarding listen from a major artist.
