SULLIVAN Fortner has made his most unfiltered album yet — and he’s not pretending it was some pristine, carefully manicured process.

Between sets at Rotterdam’s North Sea jazz festival, the 39-year-old New Orleans pianist explained he’d had enough of endless tinkering. After years of multiple takes and heavy post-production on past records, Fortner says he flipped the approach for his sixth album, Leave That In There: “For this record, I took an edible and I just said, screw it.”

That looseness doesn’t mean lightweight. The record’s opener, Sugarcane, leans into Louisiana’s history as a hub of the sugar trade — the “white gold” built on enslaved labour that helped make the region wealthy in the 19th-century US — with Kayvon Gordon’s criss-crossing bàtá drumming anchoring the track.

From there, Fortner roams: Latin acoustic piano, Hammond organ lines, nods to Thelonious Monk and swirls of Moog synth. The album closes with Fortner singing a wordless, Stevie Wonder-like hymn for a late friend, Linda Payne.

The spine of the project, though, runs straight through Hurricane Katrina. Fortner grew up in New Orleans, and the album title is lifted from a moment in Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke, where a woman gets out of her car and—told she’s left her purse behind—cuts in with: “Leave that in there.” Fortner turns that line into a manifesto against self-censorship: music as a safe place where you don’t hide parts of yourself — you keep them.

He was 18 and heading into another year at Oberlin Conservatory when he learned his city was underwater. Watching CNN, he saw his girlfriend and her mother at the Convention Center waiting for buses. With communications down, he panicked until his sister briefly confirmed their family had evacuated to Baton Rouge; his girlfriend’s family ended up on a seven-hour bus ride to Arkansas.

Two tracks, A Poignant Time and Another Poignant Time, reference a Wynton Marsalis quote from Lee’s film about exposing “what’s wrong with us,” including the grinding aftermath: denied insurance, poor housing and federal disaster agency Fema sluggishness. Fortner says people are still dealing with the trauma — while also remembering the stubborn resilience of those who insisted on coming back.

Leave That In There is released 28 August via Artwork Records.