Ben Lamar Gay Ensemble

Cornet player, singer, composer, Ben LaMar Gay has been forging a personal, unclassifiable and deeply poetic musical language for over a decade. After years of collaborations between Chicago and Brazil, he appears under his own name in 2018 with music blending jazz, hip-hop, spoken word, electronic sounds and Afro-Brazilian rhythms. Trained at the legendary AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and active on the International Anthem label, he collaborates with Makaya McCraven, Jaimie Branch, Damon Locks and Mike Reed, major figures on the new Chicago scene.

His music, described as “pan-American”, transcends genres and tells the world through a free, generous and committed aesthetic. As a quartet, his ensemble unfurls a warm, shifting sonic material, shot through with improvisation, percussive grooves and collective trance. Ben LaMar Gay enriches the history of Afro-American music, while opening up new horizons.