On his latest solo album the acclaimed pianist Aruán Ortiz sometimes sounds like he is constructing a ballad still with lots of space between the keys. The bass notes of the left hand bear that kind of leaden, treading or ponderous quality which one hopes will have disappeared upon the completion of the composition, still harbouring traces of doubt even as lyricism begins to flow in spurts through the right hand which now and then is given to deft runs, arpeggios and glissandi.
Take for instance the second track ‘Seven Aprils in Paris (and a Sophisticated Lady)’ which references sonically too those standards by Vernon Duke and Duke Ellington while carrying a thoughtful, even doleful quality before running headlong into ‘Légitime Défense’, where the bass notes become more choppy and the right hand now slips giddily and rhapsodically away.
Créole Renaissance is Ortiz’s fourth solo piano album and second on Intakt Records, arriving some eight years after Cub(an)ism. In the meantime he has released three albums with a rotating trio made up of Eric Revis and Gerald Cleaver or two from Brad Jones, Chad Taylor and John Betsch and he has played alongside the likes of Nicole Mitchell, Ivo Perelman, Andrew Cyrille and his Cuban compatriot Mauricio Herrera, on a second volume of New American Songbooks with Kris Davis, Matt Mitchell and Matthew Shipp and become a fixed part of the prolific James Brandon Lewis Quartet.
While the earlier Cub(an)ism sought an ambitious interweaving of Afro-Cuban rhythms like rumba and yambú or Afro-Haitian gagá with strains of European and American modernism, the title suggesting a frame of Cubism through which he wrested with his forms, on Créole Renaissance the pianist takes a more subdued approach to his compositions though his work continues to be animated by a similar conceptual rigour. His jumping off point for the record was his reckoning with Négritude, an anti-colonialist literary movement which was inspired by everything from the Haitian Revolution to the Harlem Renaissance and spread across francophone writers of the African diaspora with its foundational document a piece in the May-June, 1935 issue of the short-lived Parisian magazine L’Étudiant noir by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire.
Ortiz was captivated by the ways in which Négritude writers such as Aimé and Suzanne Césaire or René Ménil deployed ‘surrealist techniques to shape a new kind of narrative of Afro-diasporic life and history in the Caribbean’. As his Créole Renaissance began to take shape he started to place Négritude and its surrealist outcrops within a broader history of collective black study.
Musically as he continues to listen out for correspondences which criss-cross the Atlantic those gaps between the keys which one can hear being navigated on the album opener – aptly named ‘L’Étudiant noir’ – or on ‘Seven Aprils in Paris (and a Sophisticated Lady)’ are likened in the liner notes which accompany Créole Renaissance to what the French writer Édouard Glissant has called ‘determining gaps’ or the ‘right to opacity’, pointing to the distances between peoples and cultures and the need for both an understanding and acceptance of difference. Brent Hayes Edwards who wrote the liner notes suggests some of the tonal or stylistic leaps which Ortiz is capable of taking when he compares his ‘prodigious technique’ to the compositions and playing of Arthur Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen and György Ligeti on one side of the water plus Bebo Valdés, Don Pullen and Cecil Taylor.
Picking up the microphone, ‘From the Distance of My Freedom’ finds the pianist delivering a string of definitions both personal and academic around the phrase ‘silent exclusion’. Ortiz broaches some of the big ‘isms’ like elitism and colonialism while elaborating with a fond yet not uncritical eye the essential qualities of the black renaissance and his own humanism.
Serving as the title track, ‘Première Miniature (Créole Renaissance)’ is a deft and at times scampering miniature as Ortiz always manages to marry a sense of poise with a certain roiling anxiousness just beneath the surface. And on ‘The Great Camouflage’ that strain of anxiety even carries over into a sense of foreboding.
‘Deuxième Miniature (Dancing)’ boasts rolling arpeggios as a heavy left hand pounds out the frame of a bassline. Then on the standout ‘We Belong to Those Who Say No to Darkness’ he tangles with the innards of his instrument, going deep to stretch out on a piece which bears a cosmic sublimity, hunkering down between the stars. His bass strings get dampened and reverberate and while Edwards compares their ‘nasal thuds and metallic strums’ to such instruments as the zither, shekere, oud, electric guitar and gamelan jegog with its bamboo assemblages what I hear most is the baroque viola da gamba, closely amplified as between plucks Ortiz drifts slowly off into the aether. The title of the piece is drawn from Aimé Césaire’s preface to the first issue of the literary magazine Tropiques and was later quoted by the surrealist André Breton.
‘The Haberdasher’ meanwhile carries a vestige of swing between piquant key strikes before the album closer pools the hesitations and gaps and leaps and intermittent dolorousness as well as the tender ballad-like quality of some of Créole Renaissance into one last absorbing study. Here at moments Ortiz is almost playing legato as with impulsiveness or desirousness he suggests Compay Segundo and his infectious four-chord son cubano song ‘Chan Chan’.
