UC Press Blog

By Guthrie Ramsey, author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop

Sometimes dancing about architecture makes sense. Or, in this case, making an album about a non-fiction book can be an appropriate response in this age of multi-modal presentation. 

By releasing my new album, Race Music 21: etudes/grooves/interludes, I’m thanking the many readers who have engaged my book, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop., which published in 2003.  Primarily a study of popular music from 1945 to the 1990s, it focuses on the social life and contexts of various musical styles that emerged during these years. In the book, I experimented with blending different modes of writing: memoir, oral histories mapping my family’s migration, historiography, and musical analysis. My life as a musician informed my choices and interpretations every step of the way. 

Like the book, this album project is experimental. It’s a sound experience that engages some of the themes that organize the book, like the importance of history and memory in the creation of contemporary music. Race Music 21 comprises tracks that embrace a bundle of styles: bops, fusions, neo-soul, hip-hop, jazz, gospel, and more. It highlights digital music-making as a site of intergenerational exchange and tradition building, two additional themes from Race Music, the book. 

The album contains brief sound studies, grooves, and interludes taken from developing song ideas, archival sound fragments, conversations, rehearsal tapes, and other sonic traces of living a musical life. It has originals, sample-based-chop-ups of songs from my previous albums, and a cover. Within this eclectic mix, you’ll also hear spoken word, poetry, commentary, and more. 

Produced by Musiqology Media Group, an outgrowth of my blog Musiqology.com, Race Music 21 demonstrates that there’s musical power in collaboration, family, and community, core values I focused on in the book. One of the featured musicians is my granddaughter, a cellist; and my daughter also joins me on this recording. Expertly directed by Philadelphia-based producer and guitarist, Phillip Pearce of the Sound Village collective (and assisted by WAYV WILSON and myself), Race Music 21 is a “singing book”—a sonic response to a literary study that sought to describe how meaning and community are made in musical traditions.    

The personnel are multi-generational. Teron Prioleau, a Baltimore-based singer, rapper, songwriter, and keyboardist makes his debut on a Musiqology production with both singing and co-writing credits. The album also features team members Bridge and ALYH ABOVE on vocals, together with ethnomusicologist and guitarist Tim Rommen, and trumpeters Rod McGaha and Paul Geiss, all making great contributions to the mix, adding soulful bluesy-ness to the hip-hop orientation of the project. Highlights include, the poem “Blue Note” by the esteemed poet, pianist and scholar Tsitsi Jaji, and a spoken word performance by poet Jalessa Savage, a former undergraduate student, who read Race Music in college.

I learned many musical lessons from working on these songs, etudes, grooves, and interludes, including learning to value the spontaneous when recording.  In other words, the younger generation of artists I worked with on this project taught me to trust some of the improvisational first passes that all musicians make when exploring a musical thought. My engaging and honoring the memories contained in my digital sound archives was also a key factor in this project. 

The album combines the soul-blues foundations of my Chicago roots with the eclecticism of jazz and hip-hop experimentations from the East Coast. These

gestures and auras are essential elements to achieving a sound that departed from my previous recordings. The sound—driven by my ventures into digital musicmaking and guided by producers Pearce and Wilson—comprises mastery over loops, layering, adventurous approaches to EQ, compression, reverb and delay, editing, and all manner of spatial and time manipulations. 

These techniques gave me new ways to tell my story in a digital (i.e., machine) environment, a story that I began in Race Music. I believe this reaching back to embrace the sound worlds of a younger generation to help me move forward is a model for artistic revitalization and the musical adventure that I discussed in the book.  Indeed, the funk of the 1970’s, the avant-garde melodies of modern jazz, and the chopped samples of hip hop, poetry, spoken word, and other gestures bring the culture I documented in Race Music full circle.