Reimagining Tropiques: Then and Now is a collaboration between the composer and pianist Aruán Ortiz and singer and percussionist Anaïs Maviel, with cellist and composer Aliya Ultan. The project considers writings on negritude, creolization, and transatlantic Surrealism published by the iconic Martinican magazine Tropiques (1941–1945), and explores the cultural syncretism between French modernism and the Afro-Caribbean experience. Focusing on the work of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire and their wider community of writers and intellectuals, the score integrates Afro-Caribbean rhythms and chants, contemporary classical music, jazz improvisation, poetry, and spoken word. 

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Born in Santiago de Cuba, composer, pianist, music researcher and conceptualist Aruán Ortiz has been an active figure in the progressive jazz and avant-garde scene for more than 20 years. In collaborations with jazz ensembles, orchestras, chamber groups, dancers, and filmmakers, Aruán has explored numerous means of expressing Afro-Caribbean traditions through other genres and musical forms, including jazz, serial music, and contemporary classical. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition 2024 and a Doris Duke Impact Award 2014. Ortiz has released more than 15 albums as a leader, and has collaborated on more than 30 recordings. As a music researcher and conceptualist, his works express a reverence for the rich diversity present in the music, history, politics, literature, visual arts, oral cultural expressions and traditions of the Afro-descendent communities in the Americas.

A vocalist, percussionist, composer, music director, educator, curator and healer, Anaïs Maviel's work focuses on the function of music as essential to settling common grounds, addressing Relation, and creating a utopian future. Inspired by Edouard Glissant's reflections on Creolization, she has associated her work with the inextricable currents that move spaces and people between times and lands. The contemporary context of re-formulation of self, reality and social structures led her to question the use of language, and to explore its vibratory essence in music. As a leader she is dedicated to substantial creations from solo to music direction for large ensembles, and to expanding the power of music as a healing & transformative act. Her path has led her to share her music extensively in New York, as well as in multiple places throughout North, Central & South America, Europe and Haiti. Her solo debut hOULe (Gold Bolus Recordings), received international acclaim.

Aliya Ultan is a composer and cellist from Brooklyn. As a teenager Aliya participated in the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composer’s Program where her music was workshopped and performed at Lincoln Center. In 2011 she was accepted to the Interlochen Arts Academy on a full scholarship where she studied composition with Dr. Cynthia Van Maanen and cello with Crispin Campbell. She has collaborated with musicians based in folk, punk, jazz and classical musics as well as creative writers with an interest in abstract storytelling. She is a Jack Kent Cooke Young Artists Awardee (2015) and currently serves as a Program director for Make Music Cleveland and CREDO Music.