Yowzers Ben LaMar Gay

• 1 yowzers 02:22
• 2 the glorification of small victories 04:58
• 3 there, inside the morning glory 05:11
• 4 roller skates 00:49
• 5 for Breezy 03:13
• 6 I am (bells) 06:12
• 7 promontory 02:12
• 8 John, John Henry 03:47
• 9 damn you cute 03:52
• 10 cumulus 07:02
• 11 touch 02:14
• 12 leave some for you 03:24
• Total Runtime 45:16

Info zu Yowzers

Yowzers is a new album by Chicago composer, improvisor, instrumentalist and musical folklorist Ben LaMar Gay. The twelve track collection is a leap forward in the lexicon of Gay’s recorded output, and a veritable masterwork of ancient inner-body rhythms and intuitive melodic storytelling.

It’s worth mentioning that a leap forward for Gay is no small feat. The musical ground he has covered in the last decade, both as a bandleader and collaborator, is immense. His de facto debut album—the 2018 compilation Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun—properly introduced the world to Gay by placing fifteen stylistically diverse tracks from seven then-unreleased albums next to one another, letting the populace outside of Cook County in on an unintentionally best-kept-secret that Chicagoans had already been marveling at for quite some time. That secret has become even more open in the years since, with the full unveiling of those seven previously-unreleased albums, the release of his critically-acclaimed 2021 song cycle Open Arms To Open Us, and the explosive free sonics of 2022’s Certain Reveries.

In addition to being featured on a staggering number of International Anthem releases (including albums by Makaya McCraven, jaimie branch, Damon Locks, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly), Gay is one of the most prolific collaborators in creative music today. He makes active contributions to Mike Reed’s Separatist Party, Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society, Theaster Gates’s Black Monks, and many more. He is also a long-time participant in Chicago’s legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Suffice to say, his credentials are astonishing and the scope of his interests and abilities is seemingly limitless, with Yowzers representing the latest redrawing of that ever-expanding creative borderline.

Much of the music on Yowzers features his working quartet with Tommaso Moretti (drums, percussion, voice), Matthew Davis (tuba, piano, bells, voice), and Will Faber (guitar, ngoni, bells, voice). But the unlisted feature here is Gay’s own ability to summon and unleash the unique strengths of his collaborators. The quartet material leans into a vocabulary that the group has developed over the course of several years together on the road; and the repertoire delivers an arresting cocktail of pulsing and free rhythms that somehow swing alongside a gathering of melodic phrases that sweep the outer-reaches of harmony with nostalgic echoes of family songs from the living room.

“Building a language, or taking a while to build a language—it’s like every other thing,” says Gay. “These stories are passed around through melody. You write a story and you share the story with individuals, and then you allow their individuality to embellish the story and take it on in another way. That person is a whole universe. It’s about trusting these people—trusting the people you leave something with, just like people trust their kids and their grandkids to carry a thing on. To not give it all away. To keep it in this tightly-knit body and to just keep it going.”

It’s not a new concept for Gay. One uniting factor in his deep, multi-faceted discography is a never-ending commitment to taking the stories of the past and pushing them outward, filtered through a sense of self, to keep that information moving. ...

Ben LaMar Gay, cornet, voice, synth, bells, diddley bow, percussion, programming, manipulations
Tommaso Moretti, drums, percussion, voice
Matthew Davis, tuba, piano, bells, voice
Will Faber, guitar, ngoni, bells, voice
Featuring:
Rob Frye, flute, bass clarinet
Ayanna Woods, voice
Tramaine Parker, voice
Ugochi Nwaogwugwu, voice

Ben LaMar Gay
is a genuine original. An imbued composer, conjurer, channeler of cosmopolitan Blues and patently eclectic artist who Jeff Parker calls "hands down, one of my favorite musicians on the planet today." Gay is a Southside Chicago native who was raised in the tutelage of the legendary AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians).

With his first instrument, the cornet, and an intuitive sense of self-production, in youth he traversed the diversity of the city's music scenes (jazz, hip hop, house, electronic, rock, avant garde, salsa, latin jazz, et al) before embarking on a several-year residential relocation to Brazil. Beloved by listeners and collaborators alike for his ability to absorb and poetically refract the sound of any context he's immersed in, Gay's return home to Chicago in the early 2010s marked the beginning of a compositional output that has since been referred to by WIRE Magazine as "Pan-Americana."

As elusive as he is prolific, across seven under-the-radar years of work Gay diligently composed, produced and recorded seven collections of original music before compiling and issuing his unreleased 'greatest hits' as a debut album – Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun – for International Anthem in 2018. Also in 2018 Gay composed an original score for the Tribeca award-winning short doc The Good Fight. In 2019, he composed an original score for the Brazilian underground carnival profile This Is Bate Bola, and debuted new music commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Also in 2019, he composed and performed a duet with the DuSable Bridge while it was raised over the Chicago River. For Time:Spans Festival 2021, at DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, Gay debuted a new composition – "Known Better. Still Lit" – that was commissioned and performed by Wet Ink Ensemble. Later in 2021, Gay released the critically-acclaimed album Open Arms to Open Us via International Anthem & Nonesuch Records. In 2022 he released Certain Reveries, an album of duo compositions on International Anthem, and an accompanying film – “Balogun,” in tribute to the late Eddie Harris - which he staged, directed, filmed, and scored entirely himself.

In 2023, Gay was a Mellon Foundation Archives Innovation Fellow with Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation in Chicago. As composer in residence with The National Theater of France in 2024, Gay wrote original music for Dorothee Munyaneza’s “Inconditionelles.” In June 2025, Gay releases Yowzers via International Anthem.

Dieses Album enthält kein Booklet