Ben LaMar Gay Ensemble

"Open Arms To Open Us"

Described as a fluid interweaving of jazz, blues, ballads, R&B, raga, new music, children's songs, tropicalia, two-step, hip-hop, Ben LaMar Gay releases his latest album, Open Arms to Open Us. It is his most colorful and collaborative work to date, a radiant expression of Gay's signature, genre-bending, "Pan-American" brew.

Ben LaMar Gay, one of the defining figures of Chicago's vibrant jazz periphery, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, poet, and apparent eclectic polymath who has been called "strikingly original" by Afropunk, "uncategorizable" by Pitchfork, and "undoubtedly one of my favorite musicians on the planet" by Jeff Parker. He channels a radical palette of sounds, colors, and sonic spaces through the universal language of folk; but despite the widely attributed and acknowledged genius of his work, his artistic approach and general demeanor are marked by an endearing humility and warm humanity.

He is one of the most prolific forces in Chicago's creative music community, making active contributions to Theaster Gates' Black Monks of Mississippi, Nicole Mitchell's EarthSeed, Mike Reed's Flesh & Bone, Matthew Lux's Communication Arts Quartet, Joshua Abrams' Natural Information Society, Bitchin Bajas, and many others. He is an intellectual descendant and longtime participant in the AACM (i.e., the legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). Furthermore, he was also a central component of Makaya McCraven's Highly Rare and the cornet cameo on Jaimie Branch's Fly or Die (both of which were included in the "Best Albums of 2017" by the New York Times). Suffice it to say, Ben LaMar Gay is nearly ubiquitous in the current zeitgeist of progressive jazz sounds emerging from Chicago.