OUT NOW on all platforms: YOWZERS, by Ben LaMar Gay
Ben LaMar Gay
Yowzers
Out NOW in full on all streaming platforms.
Available on LP/CD/Digital via our Bandcamp page.
“Achingly beautiful.”
The Observer
"A gift of an album, Yowzers is Gay's most cohesive work to date, while losing none of its predecessors' spirit of adventure."
The Wire
“His solo work is much stranger and more intimate than almost anything else he’s involved in.”
Stereogum
“The cuts on Yowzers feel as if they truly belong together, connected by an intangible thread – a sensibility which eclipses pure aesthetics and bridges concepts, worlds, and compositions across boundaries.”
The Quietus
“Even in the instrumental passages, there’s an emotional gust of wind that guides the listener through themes of defiance, determination, and resilience.”
Raven Sings The Blues
Ben LaMar Gay
"I am (bells)" [Live in Berlin]
Also out today... this live video of "I am (bells)," filmed by Enid Valu at the Zig Zag Club in Berlin in 2023, vividly captures the physicality of Gay's performances in person. In what has become somewhat of a signature of his live show, Gay and his quartet stand and improvise with hand bells (the kind you may have seen/heard in church) in between acapella call and response vocals, then lock into a cascading, canonized melody played in formation on the hand bells by three of the four musicians, just moments before drummer Tommaso Moretti catches the audience by surprise with a heavy backbeat under the looping bell line. Still on the bells, Gay leads his musicians in a few more lines of call and response, before tuba from Matthew Davis jumps in with Moretti on a fat brass bassline, fit for the club.
In the growing tradition of Ben LaMar Gay’s recorded output – including his 2018 greatest-hits-meets-debut album Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun and 2021’s critically-acclaimed Open Arms to Open Us, which have both become legendary for enveloping myriad sounds, stories, and dimensions of music into potent bodies of work – Yowzers is an utterly unique, joyfully irreverent psychedelic fantasia of folklore, free jazz, and avant-garde Blues.
At the heart of the album is Gay’s working quartet with Tommaso Moretti (drums, percussion, voice), Matthew Davis (tuba, piano, bells, voice), and Will Faber (guitar, ngoni, bells, voice). The group’s chemistry is palpable, cultivated over years of touring and performing together.
“A big part of the language this quartet has developed is spatial,” says Gay. “It’s seeing and hearing it live. You’re dealing with a thing that is older than the industry that sells it, and if you’ve never experienced those bodies in the room, there can be a disconnect.”
Striving to capture that raw, unfiltered energy on Yowzers, Gay tracked his quartet live at Palisade Studios in Chicago, with all four musicians sitting in a small circle, channeling and documenting their collective vibrations in real-time.
To expand the sonic spectrum of the album, Gay also composed and recorded a series of pieces in-studio at International Anthem HQ in Chicago. Working alongside engineer Dave Vettraino, Gay augmented his studio constructions with contributions from his bandmates, woodwind player Rob Frye, and a mini-choir comprising vocalists Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu.
“for Breezy,” today’s focus track and a staggering album standout, is a gorgeously poignant tribute to an old comrade, the late trumpeter jaimie branch. It calls to mind a New Orleans dirge, straddling the deep sigh of a heavy sadness and the sweet lift of a fond look back, echoing the most contemplative moments of Duke Ellington’s small group arrangements.
As a whole, Yowzers recalls the high-minded freedom of Liberation Music Orchestra, the abstract boom-bap balladry of Georgia Anne Muldrow, the unbridled rhythms and sandpaper bellows of Bukka White, the harmolodic cartoon glory of Arthur Blythe’s Illusions, or the oft-copped but rarely distilled patterns of Naná Vasconcelos. It’s a fresh thought made up of old ideas, filtered through an improvisational approach and a lifetime of stories and secrets embodied.
BLG Live
(with Quartet)
September 11th-14th - Sonic Transmissions - Austin, TX - tickets
(( photo by Alejandro Ayala ))
...about Ben LaMar Gay…
Ben LaMar Gay is a genuine original. An imbued composer, conjurer, and channeler of cosmopolitan Blues, a 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 Muyaneza’s “Inconditionelles.”
In June 2025, Gay releases Yowzers via International Anthem.
Deluxe Vinyl Package
Yowzers comes on a 140g color LP in heavyweight reverse-board jacket, with insert sheet, IARC 2025 obi strip & poly-lined inner sleeve. Pressed at Pallas in Germany, with lacquers cut by Daniel K @ SST.
Available on Limited Edition *Ipomoea Jalapa* color vinyl for $29 USD.
Also available on Classic Black vinyl for $24 USD.
