Ben LaMar Gay has spent years in Chicago's black bohemian underground, contributing cornet, synths, vocals and poetry to an evocative array of projects, including the AACM, and first came to relative prominence with a compilation of seven (then) unreleased albums, plus Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun (2018), and signed to Nonesuch in 2021.

This album is the audio portion of a multimedia livestream concert for 2020's lockdown London Jazz Festival, written in tribute to the late inventor and composer Eddie Harry, and performed in ominous, monkish shrouds. Certain Reveries’ physical cassette release suggests a low-key, samizdat transmission, but it offers a full array of Gay's field hollers, gospel and soul vocals, Afrofuturism and avant-garde electronics. His potent cornet sends it all back to Armstrong and, with Tommaso Moretti's percussion, African-America's fundamental roots in Congo Square's revolutionary, salving slave rhythms.

‘You Ain’t Never Lied’ begins with digitally stuttered words, a broken transmission beamed from somewhere out there in time and space, cohering into feral iterations of the title which further shape-shift from gospel to soul; Gay's electronic manipulations send his words dervish-spinning, till Moretti tumbles to a halt.

‘Parade Debris’ offers clarion New Orleans cornet over liquid, rattling percussion, ‘The Bioluminescence of Nakedness’ theremin-like sounds, and the burble of some overheating 1970s computer. ‘Lingering Orb No 11’ sees Gay's cornet take broken-winged, stumbling flight, as his lyrics pierce with gospel-soul love: “My prayer, is to linger, with you…” he says; ‘Warmth Be Unto You’ is a more explicit if chewed-up gospel ballad.

Gay's baroque, sensual titles show kinship with Ambrose Akinmusire's similarly-earthed seriousness, the abstracted yet soulful vocals with the floating sexuality of Moses Sumney. There are inevitable, disconnected longueurs. But on the climactic, epic ‘Água Futurism’, righteously mournful cornet cries rip through its sepulchral electronic throb. It's the sort of elegy, its racial causes endlessly familiar, which Max Roach and Archie Shepp would certainly easily understand.