BIOGRAPHY
A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a music historian, pianist, composer, and Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2023, he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music at McGill University and the Inaugural Teaching Fellow at Express Newark, Rutgers University.
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As a producer, label head, and bandleader, Guthrie has released five recording projects, including A Spiritual Vibe, vol. 1 and Race Music 21: etudes/grooves/interludes. He has performed at The Blue Note, The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and Harlem Stage. He scored the 2019 prize-winning documentary Making Sweet Tea and his documentary Amazing: The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell (2015) was a selection of the BlackStar Film Festival. Ramsey co-curated the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s 2009 exhibition Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment and was a consultant and narrator in the 2020 Emmy Award winning HBO documentary Apollo: The Soul of American Culture. He scored Lisa B. Thompson’s new play, The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body in 2024.
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A widely-published writer, he’s the author of Who Hears Here: On Black Music Pasts and Present (2022), The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop (2013), and Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003). He edited and wrote a foreword for Rae Linda Brown’s The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (2020) and co-authored with Melanie Zeck, Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.’s The Transformation of Black Music (2017). Guthrie’s forthcoming book is titled Sound Proof: Black Music’s American Journey from the Civil War to Civil Rights (forthcoming).
Guthrie is the CEO of Musiqology Media Group, a production and consulting agency that helps artists from all communities produce their best work and to tell their story successfully. Ramsey recently received the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Music.
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VISIT MUSIQOLOGYMEDIA.COM TO LEARN MORE
Recent Projects
Beat Chick:
Tunes for Hettie Jones
for String Quartet & Jazz Vocalist
with Digital Beats
Race Music 21: etudes/grooves/interludes
a new album from Guthrie Ramsey & the Musiqology Media Group celebrating the 21st anniversary of the book Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop
Who Hears Here?: On Black Music Pasts and Present
Journey through Black musical expression from art, music and jazz to hip hop.