For those not in the know, Aruán Ortiz, celebrated piano cubist, distinguished jazz improviser, award-winning composer and idiosyncratic stylist, presents Créole Renaissance (releasing August 29th, 2025), his second solo piano album on Intakt Records; and which comes eight years after Cub(an)ism.

Ortiz is renowned for his prodigious technique, and multiple lineages converge in his hands, from Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Ligeti to Bebo Valdés, Don Pullen, and Cecil Taylor, writes Brent Hayes Edwards and adds Aruán Ortiz’s stunning pianistic reflections on the implications of a Créole Renaissance start here, placing the music within a long history of collective Black study.

Ortiz explains that he was inspired above all by the ways Négritude poets such as Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil deployed surrealist techniques to shape a new kind of narrative of Afro-diasporic life and history in the Caribbean.

If Ortiz’s music is adamantly innovative and forward-looking, in other words, it reminds us of its deep roots in traditions of Black experimentation, he continues.

Créole Renaissance combines intellectual depth, emotionality and creativity to create a fascinating musical statement.

1. L’Etudiant noir
2. Seven Aprils in Paris (and A Sophisticated Lady)
3. Légitime Défense
4. From the Distance of my Freedom
5. Première Miniature (Créole Renaissance)
6. The Great Camouflage
7. Deuxième Miniature (Dancing)
8. We Belong to These Who Say No to Darkness
9. The Haberdasher
10. Lo Que Yo Quiero es Chan Chan

Cuban-born pianist and composer Aruán Ortiz, a musician who is constantly evolving, experimenting and injecting new elements into his craft, open his new recording opens on the starkly layered and yet all-embracing L’Etudiant noir and the melancholically harmonic Seven Aprils in Paris (and A Sophisticated Lady) and then comes the at times agitated, at others emboldened and regulatory Légitime Défense, the emotive From the Distance of my Freedom before the flirtatiously curious Première Miniature (Créole Renaissance) is upon us.

Along next is the languishing beauty found within The Great Camouflage which is itself backed seamlessly by the rhythmically catchy Deuxième Miniature (Dancing), the genre-defying ease of We Belong to These Who Say No to Darkness, the musical journey rounding out on the stylistically prone The Haberdasher, coming to a close on a most elegant ebb and flow within Lo Que Yo Quiero es Chan Chan.

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