Ben LaMar Gay Ensemble

Sometimes the label is the lifeline when it comes to assigning an album its appropriate place in the record collection. After all, you want to find what you've sorted out again at some point. In this case, the label is called "International Anthem". So: jazz? In May 2018, cornetist and multi-instrumentalist Ben LaMar Gay surprised the interested public with his album "Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun." What came across as a debut album was at the same time a kind of "best of", because the album was a compilation of music created over seven years for seven albums, but then remained unreleased. What was exciting at the time was that the music on the one hand documented countless influences such as diverse playing styles of jazz, hip-hop, pop, tropicália, electronica, dub or folk in a collage manner, but at the same time sounded like a very big deal. As a jazz cornetist with hip-hop roots, who lives and works sometimes in Chicago, sometimes in Brazil, LaMar Gay deliberately places himself between all the stools with his offensive eclecticism, which should perhaps be called "Tranceamericana". Yet the musician is by no means an unknown quantity. Before his debut, he could be heard on albums by Jaimie Branch, Bottle Tree, Makaya McCraven or Bitchin Bajas, and he is also the leader of the ensemble AACM Now Generation, so he stands in the tradition of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Lester Bowie and Roscoe Mitchell. So: Great Black Music 2.0? Then, in November 2021, the second (or eighth) album "Open Arms to Open Us" was released, making it clear that Ben LaMar Gay was continuing at the level he had reached. Again a wild ride through the styles and genres, sometimes sketchy, sometimes so brute collaged that one imagines on a Zappa album anno 1970. But Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Gaetano Veloso are also on the imaginary guest list. What was already formulated in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" about the debut album held true: From the multitude of creative ideas on this album, other musicians would build an entire career. Or several. "Music at a time of which we will one day hope in our wildest dreams that it really once existed." There's no better way to put it.