SOUND

Samba, breakbeats, free jazz in Sun Ra style, easy-going yet excited plucking at the guitar like Django Reinhardt, along with choirs slowly floating above the soundscape. Amongst the protagonists of the current jazz revival, Ben LaMar Gay is the biggest eclectic. On his celebrated 2018 debut Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun the cornetist, composer, and band leader from Chicago travels around the world and through epochs at racing speed. But his music never comes across aimless or arbitrary, rather utopian, like from a world with no borders.