Ben LaMar Gay Yowzers

Yowzers is a new album by Chicago composer, improvisor, and musical folklorist Ben LaMar Gay. Gay's de facto debut album—the 2018 compilation Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun—properly introduced him to the world by placing fifteen stylistically diverse tracks from seven then-unreleased albums next to one another. His critically-acclaimed 2021 song cycle Open Arms To Open Us followed. In addition to being featured on a staggering number of International Anthem releases (including albums by Makaya McCraven, jaimie branch, and Damon Locks), Gay is one of the most prolific collaborators in creative music today, making active contributions to Mike Reed’s Separatist Party, Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society, Bitchin Bajas, Theaster Gates’s Black Monks of Mississippi, and more. A uniting factor in Gay's deep, multi-faceted discography is a never-ending commitment to taking the stories of the past and pushing them outward, filtered through a sense of self, to keep that information moving. Information moves through Yowzers via the intuitive physicality of Gay’s creative polyrhythmic constructions, as he covertly delivers familiar folk melodies. “It’s the most natural thing,” says Gay. “That’s how the world is. There are overlapping rhythms all around us, and so it reminds you of the reality of the world when you hear them. It’s a loop and the loop is always changing.” The album recalls the high-minded freedom of Liberation Music Orchestra, the glitched-out electronic webs of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, the unbridled rhythms and sandpaper bellows of Bukka White, and the harmolodic cartoon glory of Arthur Blythe’s Illusions. It’s all there, filtered through an improvisational approach and a lifetime of secrets embodied. For a man who has inhabited and traveled these continents so extensively, it’s safe to call this work true “Americana,” despite what that word might mean to the average person in the United States.