Aruán Ortiz via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Aruán Ortiz:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Aruán Ortiz
- City: New York City
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Santiago de Cuba
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Aruán Ortiz is an acclaimed Cuban pianist, award-winning composer, and a producer and educator.
Called “the latest Cuban wunderkind to arrive in the United States” by BET Jazz, this classically trained violinist and pianist from Santiago de Cuba considers himself “a curious person who loves music” and portrays his music as an architectural structure of sounds incorporating contemporary classical music, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and improvisation as primary material for his compositions.
Aruan has received a number of awards including the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award (2014), Artist-in-Residence at Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (2014), Latin Jazz Corner’s Arranger of the Year (2011) for his contribution on the album, “El Cumbanchero” (Jazzheads) by flutist Mark Weinstein, semifinalist, Jas Hennessy Piano Solo Competition, Montreux, Switzerland (2001), and Best Jazz Interpretation, Festival de Jazz in Vic, Spain (2000).
Since arriving in New York in 2008 to play with the Wallace Roney Quintet, Aruán has made five recordings, all very well received by the critics. Alameda (Fresh Sound, 2010), received four stars in Jazzwise magazine (U.K.), and was reviewed as "a sophisticated outing of modern jazz." This album was also named one of the top jazz CDs of the year in 2010 by numerous jazz magazines and blogs around the world.
Two thousand twelve was a very intense musical year, as Mr. Ortiz released three albums as a leader: the modern jazz effort, Orbiting (Fresh Sound 2012), was featured in Jazzman and Jazznews Magazine, received four stars from Jazzwise Magazine and Jazz Journal in the UK, and was one of the top ten contemporary jazz albums of 2012 according to "Something Else!" webzine; Santiarican Blues Suite (Sunnyside 2012), received four and a half stars from Downbeat Magazine, and was featured on major jazz blogs and magazines worldwide. Bill Milkowski from JazzTimes Magazine recently proclaimed, "These two simultaneous releases herald the arrival of a major new talent."
On his CD, Banned in London (Whirlwind Recordings 2012, released in 2013 in the U.S.), Aruán co-led a Cuban/US collaboration, a powerful quintet, with bassist/composer Michael Janisch featuring saxophonist Greg Osby and Rudy Royston on drums. Their CD was selected one of the best albums of the year (2013) by Downbeat Magazine, and received five stars on BBC Jazz Radio, and four stars in the Jazz Journal, Jazzwise Magazine, Financial Times, and The Guardian in the UK, where it was also on the list of best jazz albums of 2012.
As a composer, Ortiz has received commissions from the Woodwind Quintet Ensemble of Santiago de Cuba; Música de Camara Orchestra in New York City; Oyú Oró Folkloric Dance Company in New York City; YOUME & Milena Zullo Ballet in Rome; José Mateo Ballet Theater in Cambridge, MA; and University of Albany Symphony Orchestra in New York. In late 2013 and early 2014, he composed and directed the score for the upcoming feature film, 'Sin Alas,' to be released in fall 2014.
Ortiz has also played, toured or recorded with Esperanza Spalding, Joe Lovano, Terri Lyne Carrington, Andrew Cyrille, Oliver Lake, Rufus Reid, Henry Grimes, Cindy Blackman-Santana, Don Byron, Lenny White, Greg Osby, and Wallace Roney, among others.
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://aruanortiz.bandcamp.com
- ▶ Twitter: aruanortiz
- ▶ Instagram: elfuriosojazz
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/3aIaAGgyaHnxNvcMmprS9w
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/6JD5Bpq3EkSp1WiTuchro9
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/4D3Udn0Ly11nJ3gjMikILI
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/4QOF5eWymm5G2iq91DJMwt
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/7jt7Ouw3QXuul3lT0yfAPB
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/1in5xWwB7jta6Aw4tJun52
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
