Bottle Tree
Open Secret
Now Available
Bottle Tree โ Open Secret
What people Are Saying
โโฆone of the most interesting releases of this year.โ
โโฆA distinctively warped strain of cosmic R&B.โ
Announcing IARCS010: Bottle Tree - Open Secret
Released February 20, 2017
Available on LP/CD/Digital via our Bandcamp page
Bottle Tree is a new collaboration conjured from the Southside Chicago storefront chapel of singer/scholar A.M. Frison and composer/cornetist Ben LaMar Gay. With Italian expat Tommaso Moretti on traps, the sound-rendered folklore of Bottle Tree embodies a heart beating to West African mutated funk with the spirit of avant-garde jazz and a Motown-molded melodic mind โ like a futuristic fantasy of Stevie Wonder backed by Don Cherry and Novos Baianos in the early 1970s.
Notes
produced & arranged by Ben LaMar Gay
lyrics & vocals by A.M. Frison
drums by Tommaso Moretti
mixed by David Allen @ Decade Music Studios in Chicago, IL
mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk @ Stereophonic
Mastering artwork by A.M. Frison
All rights reserved.
About Bottle Tree
Since early 2016 Chicagoans have been getting to know A.M. Frison as the musician in residence at Theaster Gatesโs Stony Island Arts Bank, where weekly he leads improvised performances, choir practices, ceremonial drums and Incantations with the Sunset Society. In Spring 2017, Frison returns to his hometown of St. Louis for a creative writing fellowship with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
Ben LaMar Gay is a Southside Chicago-born composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist; an under-the-radar jazz scene staple known for his roots in the AACM, sideman steadies with Mike Reed, Ernest Dawkins, and Joshua Abrams, and as an organizer of a summer city program that teaches beat- making to kids in parks.