ARUAN ORTIZ TRIO

"Hidden Voices": "an imposingly assured album informed both by folkloric Afro-Cuban custom and the postwar jazz avant-garde"
- Nate Chinen, New York Times
"the year's [2016] best piano trio album" - Francis Davis, NPR
***** Jazzism, Netherlands
**** "To the open mind, "Hidden Voices" testifies to Ortiz's eloquence and originality". - Bob Doerschuk, Downbeat Magazine
**** "the deepest recesses of the groove where strict time evaporates in a blaze of forward momentum." - Cormac Larkin
**** "Tracing a finger along the piano trio spectrum, you'd slide past the traditionalists, beyond the edgy-but-still traditional guys and into Andrew Hill territory. Not that Ortiz and company sound like Hill. They break their own ground, constructing loose musical architectures... even simulating something akin to holy church bells on the trio's collective composition"
- Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz
*** "Ortiz belongs in the ballpark of time-bending piano experimenters such as... the late Paul Bley, but his group plays with one mind... bracing contemporary jazz" - John Fordham, The Guardian, UK

"Serranías" Aruán Ortiz, acclaimed as a piano cubist, excellent jazz improviser and wayward stylist who strays far from Cuban music while remaining so deeply rooted in Cuba's musical tradition, presents an impressive trio album with two congenial collaborators.
Cuban influences from toques, rumba and Afro-Haitian music blend with European art music and modern jazz.
"Serranías is a special album for a double anniversary: the 20th anniversary of the recording debut as a leader in the United States and the 50th birthday milestone of Aruán Ortiz, a pianist-composer from Santiago de Cuba who has become an undisputed protagonist of the New York avant-garde jazz scene thanks to the original processes of abstract Cuban creative crossfertilization that he composes with unusual Afro-Cuban/Haitian accents", writes Gian Franco Grilli in the liner notes.

"Serranías" is a celebration of his 50th birthday and the musical influences that have shaped Aruán's artistic vision and deepened his personal approach as a performer and composer since leaving his hometown, Santiago de Cuba, in 1996.
Conceived as an ode to self with an eye to the future, this album (Intakt 2023) draws on his love of integrating the Afro-Haitian traditions of Cuba, avant-garde and progressive jazz, serial music, and contemporary classical language in his compositions.
He also finds inspiration in non-musical mediums and concepts such as architecture, Cubism, Pointillism, and Afro-Futurism.
Aruán's ability to understand compositions as living entities - constantly mutating, permuting, and reshaping - allows him to constantly integrate elements of the jazz tradition, as well as his own Afro-Cuban rhythmic heritage, contemporary classical music, and serial music, and allows his creative voice to fuse styles and influences.
Matthew Fiander from PopMatters calls his music "a solid and unique new sound in today's jazz world".
Derek Taylor from Dusted Magazine says Aruán's music "illustrates that alchemy at length in a dizzying display of technique, energy and stylistic legerdemain that regularly leaves ears and brain scrambling to keep up and absorb the abundant details of the extended itinerary as it blazes by".
Lynn René Bayley from The Art Music Lounge remarked that his music is "completely hypnotic, drawing the listener deep into the workings of the trio's musical mind."