Chicago’s Ben LaMar Gay is one of the most mercurial musicians in a city full of them. He’s a jazz cornetist who came up through the AACM and then spent several years living and working in Brazil earlier in the decade. He’s logged time in jazz groups such as Mike Reed’s Flesh & Bone and Greg Ward‘s 10 Tongues, but one of his most exciting projects, Bottle Tree, is a progressive R&B trio. He’s also worked with Joshua Abrams, Makaya McCraven, Theaster Gates, and Nicole Mitchell, as well as with underground weirdos El Is a Sound of Joy. He loves music and doesn’t care where it takes him.
Despite that seven-year span, the album’s 15 tracks hang together well. On “A Seasoning Called Primavera” Gay sing-talks over a lean, infectious electro groove that’s reminiscent of vintage Rio de Janeiro baile funk, and the lyrics reference his upbringing in Chicago—he name-checks Cajmere‘s techno hit “The Percolator.” Like everything else on the album, though, it resists simple categorization, especially after the entrance of M’rald Calhoun’s striated violin, which approximates a Brazilian fiddle called a rabeca.
