Aruán Ortiz "Hidden Voices" Trio feat: Eric Revis and Gerald Cleaver - Video
PUBLISHED:  Aug 27, 2016
DESCRIPTION:
Aruán Ortiz "Hidden Voices" featuring Eric Revis on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums.

Live at the San Francisco Jazz Center, August 12th, 2016.

Press release:

On this CD "Hidden Voices", Ortiz consolidates the fruits of intense research and development. Afro-Cuban and hardcore jazz roots are implied, not explicitly stated. “I have been writing tunes flirting with atonal and serial music for quite a while, finding harmonic movements that might not be familiar to some ears, and adding some Cuban Cubism to the palette,” he says.

The album gestated in 2013 when Revive Music, the New York-based presenter and online hub, offered Ortiz a six-concert series at Manhattan’s DROM and Zinc Bar. Titled after the Iannis Xenakis tome Music and Architecture, the events included a who’s-who of New York’s hardcore jazz and Afro-Caribbean practitioners, for whom Ortiz generated works focusing “on specific themes related to architectural patterns and using information drawn from non-musical contexts,” often beginning “with simple materials to which I add layers, creating something more complex by juxtaposition.” Funds garnered from a Doris Duke Impact Award in 2014 enabled him to consolidate his ideas for the trio context, and to convene Revis and Cleaver in March for this recording.

“They are top professionals, who have played, toured and recorded at a high level for many years,” Ortiz says of his partners. “For me, every note and beat they generate sounds like a composition, which made it easy to do this record. I didn't say much musically on the session, and we never did more than one or two takes. You don’t have to demonstrate anything to them.”

Ortiz’ intuitive interaction with his partners reflects the notion of hidden voices. But he reiterates that, however long a distance he has traversed during the past two decades, the title most meaningfully singles out his “friends and mentors and teachers who have nurtured my hunger for knowledge, and the forces in Santiago de Cuba that catalyzed my development and are now my source of inspiration.”

He adds: “But they are also the voices that appear when we listen to ourselves. For example, I admire the prominent figures who established Cubism, like Picasso, Braque and Wilfredo Lam, for their ability to deconstruct reality, inviting you to look closer inside the piece to start to understand what's in it. Their main theme is usually fragmented and hidden inside the painting. It takes time and patience to see that hidden theme. I feel that the more you listen to this album, the more familiar you get with the songs and melodies, the more they will start to resonate and unfold.”

"Hidden Voices" (Intakt Records, 2016)
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