Ben LaMar Gay isn’t so mysterious after all. His 2018 debut, Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun, was a compilation drawn from seven unreleased albums recorded over the previous seven years. It was a brilliantly effective hook: Chicago’s best-kept secret, finally willing to emerge from the shadows. “We created that lore, like ‘Oh man, here’s this mysterious person.’ Which is true, it was mysterious, away from the eyes and the claws of this industry,” he told his friend Jeff Albert. “But it’s not my fault that the industry has wrapped around the person that I’ve been for ages, for centuries.” Gay is still who he’s always been—a kid from the South Side of Chicago who grew up with hip-hop, a student of the foundational jazz organization AACM, and a folklorist with deep roots in the American south.
Discovering Gay’s debut was like meeting someone eager to make a good first impression, hearing their repertoire of well-practiced anecdotes. The follow-up, 2021’s crowded, exuberant Open Arms to Open Us, was like being introduced to all of his friends at once. Yowzers is a tighter, more intimate affair, an invitation into the inner circle. Its core is a set of quartet compositions for his touring band: percussionist Tommaso Moretti, guitarist Will Faber, and multi-instrumentalist Matthew Davis. Though they are built on disarmingly simple melodies inspired by blues, gospel, and folk, these songs gain their raw power through Gay’s honest, plainspoken lyrics, the type of soul-baring that’s only possible after you’ve really gotten to know someone.
Gay’s primary influence is folklore, and his main task is to see that traditional tales and songs survive from the “ancient to the future,” in the formulation of AACM’s hallmark group the Art Ensemble of Chicago. During the process, they are bound to be altered by the harrowing present. Take his “John, John Henry,” about a contemporary version of the steel-driving man who protects Gay and his back-up singers from a hail of semi-automatic gunfire. “John Henry, the block is cavin’ in,” they cry, to which he replies, “Ain’t nothin’ but my hammer sucking wind.” The singers’ words are subtly backmasked and replayed over a roiling, stuttering beat, as if their hero’s temporality is not entirely stable—he is, after all, newly arrived from the 19th century. Album opener “yowzers” plays a similar time-bending trick with soulful gospel lyrics, sung by the choir of Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu over a slow piano build: “Ain’t gon snow no more/Rain gon pour and pour/Fire don’t stop no more.” They register as biblical prophecy, and then as topical news item, and then as both—a song sung about the apocalypse, during the apocalypse.
Folk heroes and end-times gospels evoke an Americana tied to Gay’s Southern background, but he isn’t limited by national borders. His years in Brazil in the early 2010s, where he was influenced by local legends like Hermeto Pascoal, gave rise to a “Pan-Americana” that roves from Rio to New Orleans, St. Louis, and Chicago, combining samba, blues, jazz, and hip-hop. He simply takes what he needs along the way, as in the Latin rhythm propelling the cheery synth of “damn you cute” or the sprightly ngoni on bittersweet love song “leave some for you.” It’s less genre agnosticism than genre archeology, recovering pieces of each tradition to contribute to a new global folk music.
The centerpiece of Yowzers, “I am (bells),” exemplifies this postmodern process. Gay begins with an a cappella call-and-response song, his repeated exclamations (“In the morning, when I’m alone/’Round noontime, when I’m alone”) met only with harmonic humming from his quartet. Eerie bells enter, inviting contemplation of his solitude. Then the bells begin to loop, and Moretti joins with a boom-bap rhythm. In a frantic, repetitive, untranscribable flow, Gay demands: “Why is it always you who tries to tell me who I am?” This time, he does get a response, with a shouted, “I am!” from his band. A tuba solo kicks in, and suddenly we’re in three places at once: New Orleans jazz, Alabama work songs, and Chicago hip-hop all converging around Gay. This is who he is, he seems to be saying. It was never that mysterious—you just had to listen closely.
