Cuban-born, Brooklyn-based pianist and composer Aruán Ortiz returns with Créole Renaissance—his first solo piano album in eight years—due August 29, 2025 via Intakt Records. Drawing deeply from the intellectual and cultural ferment of the Négritude movement, the album is a singular reflection on the evolution of the African diaspora as told through sound.
Renowned for his fearless musical experimentation, Ortiz here constructs a deeply personal and intellectually rigorous world—a musical tapestry interweaving Afro-Cuban tradition, avant-garde classical techniques, and the radical poetic vision of 20th-century Black thinkers like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor.
“Ortiz’s compositional style bears the imprint of Cuba’s musical heritage: the pulse of African-derived beats, the modern vocabulary of classical pianism, and the abandon of free improvisation.” — DownBeat
The Créole Renaissance is not just a return to solo performance; it’s an auditory reckoning with Black modernity, imagined as a series of intricate piano reflections. The opening track, “L’Étudiant noir,” sets the tone: Ortiz traverses the full expanse of the keyboard, signaling a musical geography that stretches from Paris to Fort-de-France to Santiago de Cuba and Brooklyn.
Inspired by the poetic surrealism of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire and the incendiary ideas in journals like L’Étudiant noir, Légitime Défense, and Tropiques, Ortiz lets memory and politics bleed into technique. He channels the “determining gaps” between continents and centuries not as a void but as a generative force, evoking what scholar Édouard Glissant called “relation.”
In “Seven Aprils in Paris (and a Sophisticated Lady),” Ortiz spins out disjointed fragments of Ellington into impressionist dreamscapes. “Lo Que Yo Quiero Es Chan Chan” reimagines the classic Buena Vista anthem with jagged harmonies and ghostly counterpoint, while “We Belong to Those Who Say No to Darkness” pushes the piano into new territory. Here, Ortiz dampens strings, plucks them like a zither, scrapes them like percussion, and invokes a sonic palette as broad as the diasporic experience itself—from Afro-Cuban batá to Balinese gamelan.
This is music that speaks to the past while propelling forward. As Ortiz says, a true Créole Renaissance must be diasporic, “a matter of correspondence, interrogation, and boundary-crossing.” Whether drawing from Schoenberg and Messiaen, Don Pullen and Cecil Taylor, or the ethnomusicological lens of Fernando Ortiz, his approach is one of radical multiplicity.
Already the recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and Hermitage Fellowship, Ortiz is being increasingly recognized for his dual role as a visionary composer and cultural thinker. Créole Renaissance is a clear demonstration of both, anchoring his avant-garde explorations within a deep understanding of Afro-diasporic history and sonic imagination.
For listeners willing to engage with music that challenges, transforms, and transcends, Créole Renaissance is an album of consequence, one that rewrites the rules of solo jazz piano in real-time.