Aruan Ortiz
Creole Renaissance
(Intakt Records)
★★★★★

THIS is solo piano at its most intense, inventive and beautiful. Aruan Ortiz, born in Santiago de Cuba in 1973, pays particular homage to the Martinican poet and Communist member of the French National Assembly Aime Cesaire’s student days in Paris in his new album Creole Renaissance, employing “surrealist techniques to shape a new kind of narrative of Afro-diasporic life and history in the Caribbean.”

Melody infused with wayward improvisation, introspection with musical activism, distance with proximity, and history with now-times: tracks like the spoken-word From The Distance Of My Freedom or The Great Camouflage reveal all the white masks falling away in Ortiz’s insurgent notes.

Ortiz writes of his “creative journey reconnecting my artistic vision with the layered complexity of my cultural background as a Cuban artist working across continents.” Just hear his defiant pianism through We Belong To Those Who Say No To Darkness. It challenges these racist, populist times to new assertive ways of freedom.

Kenny Dorham
Blue Bossa in the Bronx
(Resonance Records)
★★★★

KENNY DORHAM (1924-1972) was perhaps one of jazz’s most undersung trumpeters. In the sleeve notes of the previously-unreleased 1967 sessions at Bronx’s Blue Morocco, his son Leslie said of his father: “He was like an Olympic gymnast on the trumpet,” and this album truly shows why.

With him are another underrated hornman, alto saxophonist “Sonny Red” Sylvester Kyner, Texan pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Denis Charles. All are on top song. Dorham and Kyner have beautifully lyrical features on My One And Only Love and Memories of You, among the bop-influenced tracks of this Charlie Parker ex-confrere who always had his own uniquely audacious sound.

His own tunes Blue Friday and Blue Bossa resonate with his characteristic Latin edge, with Kyner’s brotherly hornsong and the ace rhythm section in full accord: a powerful session of its times, and now our times too.

Geoff Castle
Impressions of New York
(Jazz in Britain Records)
★★★★

IN September 1980 the London pianist Geoff Castle (1949-2020) visited New York. While he was there the great pianist Bill Evans died. By November he was performing his Impressions of New York suite at Camden Jazz Week. This unreleased concert is now available on a double CD by Jazz in Britain, together with the April 1983 session of the same suite at the Ealing Jazz Festival.

Some outstanding British musicians are featured: bassist Ron Mathewson, trumpeters Ian Carr and Guy Barker, guitarist Ed Speight, saxophonist Brian Smith and Castle himself, who plays an enticing solo opening to Manhattan Dawn.

These records are a sharp reminder of what powerful and underrated units Castle led. The Ealing session especially is excellently recorded and the musicians play like fire. Hear Village Vanguard or the elegiac Waltz for Bill. All through these recordings the musicians emerge in full light again, out of past shadows.