Compelling Cuban • constructs from legendary sound architect

ARUAN ORTIZ, who was born into the Cuban world of total music in 1973, spent his boyhood walking through the working class streets of his home city Santiago de Cuba.

There, he experienced popular music, folkloric dance companies, random amateur guitarists, vocalists jamming and singing, choirs, rumba- percussion and Cuban-Haitian groups all this while simultaneously exposed to European classical music at the local conservatory.

He learned violin as a boy, became a celebrated youth viola soloist in orchestral works and made a decisive switch to piano when he was 19. He migrated to Barcelona to study for a jazz degree, recorded an album of traditional Cuban songs in Madrid and, in 2002, recrossed the Atlantic to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, becoming immersed in the study and performance of free jazz.

In 2008, he found both his musical home in Brooklyn and a mentor in the great Chicago pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, founder of the Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a community- grounded organisation dedicated to breaking all boundaries in music.

It's been quite a musical journey and Ortiz's 2016 album Hidden Voices, recorded in New York, made with the Detroit- born drummer Gerald Cleaver and Los Angeles bassist Eric Revis, is a summation of his sonic travels an amalgam of all that he has heard and learned, powerfully fused and expressed through his keys. The Hidden Voices of the album title are his "friends, mentors and teachers who have nurtured my hunger for knowledge and the forces in Santiago de Cuba that catalysed my development in formative years and are now my source of inspiration."

The trio set off with Fractal Sketches, inspired by the construction and shape of rural African dwellings. "Everything is a pattern and can be translated into music," says Ortiz and his spatial sound, with Cleaver's shimmering cymbals and the piano's percussive repetition, create a timbre which is almost solid. Ornette Coleman's tunes Open and Close and The Sphinx follow, with the onrush of keyboard charges and fierce patterning of phrases of affirmation that are powerfully sculpted.

Caribbean Vortex begins and continues with a chorus of claves and expresses the Gaga rhythms of Ortiz's own Cuban- Haitian roots, while Analytical Symmetry, another evocation of architecture, expresses the Ortiz ideals of "balance, beauty and the full spectrum of possibilities," with Revis's bass and Ortiz's piano conducting an exchange of slow and serene voices.

17 Moments of Liam's Moments is a dedication to Ortiz's son and uses the Cuban son genre, full of his precious island's cultural history and then it's back to New VOICES York and the Thelonious Monk tune Skippy darting playfully from the pianist's fingers, with Revis and Cleaver throttling along beside him. Finally, the people's song that all Cubans know Uno, Dos y Tres, que Paso mas Chevere completes the album with a proud statement of belongingness.

In December 2016, Ortiz travelled to Zurich to record the solo album Cubanism, inspired as much by the visual as the sonic, with Cuban painter Wifredo Lam the prime inspiration. Again, an architectural sense permeates these pieces and you can hear the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction happening concomitantly in almost all the album's tracks.

Ortiz still plays with those forms he heard as a boy in Santiago and later in Spain and New York, all expressed with a crystalline clarity and beauty in piano sounds of an extraordinary eclecticism and nakedness.

This album sets you wondering where Ortiz will go next. "Everything is moving. Everything is flexible. Everything has its own life," he says, "I try not to be comfortable with anything I do musically."

Comfort has never been a watchword of a jazz which discovers and everything that Ortiz hears he replants in new sounds, new places, new sonic structures. Hear these records and you will understand exactly what that means.

Contemporary Cuban Pianists

A History in Notes

Music fans might think of Cuba in terms of salsa or nueva trova, but the country’s pianistic tradition has built its world reputation. Few countries have had pianists as gifted as Cuba: from the 19th century, with the likes of Cervantes, Saumell and Espadero, to the 20th and beyond, Cuba has been blessed with figures such as Gonzalo Roig, Antonio María Romeu, Ernesto Lecuona, Lilí Martínez and Peruchín (Pedro Justiz), not to mention Bebo Valdés, Rubén González, Frank Emilio Flynn and Emiliano Salvador. They were followed by a host of other pianist-composers like Chucho Valdés, Ernán López-Nussa, Hilario Durán, Omar Sosa, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and Arturo O’Farrill, the last three born in the 1960s. They have been followed by new waves of pianists, but in what follows the focus will be on three pianists from the 70s and 80s who loosely fall within the tradition of “Latin Jazz” and contemporary music.

Aruán Ortiz (1973), born in Santiago de Cuba of Haitian descent, was trained as both violinist and pianist. While he draws on Afro-Cuban forms, he is at ease with classical and free improvisation as well. Ortiz is hard to pin down, as he can go from hard post-bop idioms (as in his first two albums, Volume 1 and Alameda; 2005, 2009) to the rigorous exploration of sound textures evident in his album with Bob Gluck (on piano and Moog Synthesizer; Ortiz, piano and computer) to a contemporary re-interpretation of tumba francesa and Cuban song with the blues as in his Santiarican Blues Suite (2012). A recent album, 23:54 Get Moving (2014), a trio with saxophonist Biagio Coppa and drummer Rob García, has Ortiz on piano and electronics, going from Monkish riffs to eerie atmospherics to funk.

Overall, Ortiz is a restrained pianist: he does not go in for dramatic changes in dynamics, crashing chords, splashy ornamentation, Lecuona-ish lyricism or son montuno guajeos. His approach, while fluid, is slightly jagged and with a keen sense of the overall architecture of the song. He can move up and down the keyboard with considerable velocity but not in a way that calls attention to itself (a la Chucho Valdés or Art Tatum). Both his first albums and the recent live recording Banned in London (2013) illustrate this: on tracks like “Jitterbug Waltz” (Fats Waller) and “Orbiting” (Ortiz), he performs extended solos, and despite some Tynerish flourishes, the notes come out soft, deliberate, as if a kitten were walking over the keys.

His Santiarican Blues Suite is an ambitious project, originally written as a ballet for the José Mateo Ballet Theater in 2011 (titled “Pagan or Not”). The suite has five movements, beginning with “Diaspora,” and opens with percussionist Mauricio Herrera playing a slow beat on timpani, followed by a dark mournful segment on strings which quickly turn spiky, then joined by a dissonant flute. Eventually, the strings are accompanied by the tahona rhythm (brought from Haiti by former slaves and considered a precursor of the rumba). The tahona also bears some similarities to the tumba francesa, prominently featured in the second movement, “Pa’l Monte” (To the Hills), which has inspired singing against the rhythmic presence of the catá. It is followed by “San Pascual Bailón” (part III), a Catholic reference, but musically alludes to the danzón tradition, originally influenced by what was called the tango haitiano. “Sagrado” (IV), inspired by Sindo Gary’s “Perla Marina,” begins in a slow and melancholy fashion with string instruments dominating. Slowly it begins to crescendo, with percussion joining in, then slows down with strings accompanied by a gentle flute. The final and longest movement, “Jubilee/Comparsa.” opens with violin and percussion, then flute. It continuously quotes and reworks a Cuban classic “Drume Negrito,” but in bits and phrases. Slowly the rhythm picks up, then accelerates into a flurry of percussion (becoming a comparsa) with strings and piano providing a strident counterpoint with jabbing notes and ends with a final beat of the timpani. Ortiz’s composition is fresh, highly creative; it takes folk traditions and reinserts them into a contemporary idiom, and is a true tribute to the Haitian legacy of Cuban music, often overlooked.

https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/contemporary-cuban-pianists/