Gay

The forest has always been an important place for Olivia Gay. She wanders through the woods alone, listening not only to its silence but also to its murmurs. It is a place of creation where her cellist’s instincts are awakened and where she can find peace and quiet outside the city. She joined forces with the Office national des forêts (ONF) in 2022 to raise public awareness of such spaces by inviting spectators to concerts given in the heart of the forest or in natural site. This album continues this project and includes works by Jacques Offenbach, Camille Pépin, Edward Elgar, John Luther Adams and Max Richter; the programme as a whole is under the aegis of Antonin Dvořák’s magnificent Silent Woods , which also lent its name to this initiative.

Ben LaMar Gay's Open Arms To Open Us was produced and recorded at International Anthem Studios in Chicago between March and June of 2021. Across sixteen tracks Gay fluently interweaves jazz, blues, ballads, R&B, raga, new music, nursery rhyme, tropicalia, two-step, hip-hop and beyond in a beaming expression of his signature omni-genre “Pan-Americana” brew. Alongside his own sizable toolkit of instruments (cornet, keyboards, synthesizers, flutes, percussions), Gay surrounds himself with steady bandmates (including Tommaso Moretti on drums, Matthew Davis on tuba, and Rob Frye on woodwinds), while also shining the spotlight on female artists from his cast of regular collaborators.