Ben LaMar Gay

Ben LaMar Gay is a genuine original. An imbued composer, conjurer, and channeler of cosmopolitan Blues, a patently eclectic polymath 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 – with International Anthem in 2018. Also in 2018 Gay composed an original score for the Tribeca award-winning short doc The Good Fight. Recently, Gay composed and released his new album Open Arms to Open Us, on International Anthem / Nonesuch 2021. 

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