Race Music 21: Etudes/Grooves/Interludes
2025
A new album project from Guthrie Ramsey and the Musiqology Media Group
RACE MUSIC 21: Etudes/Grooves/Interludes celebrates Guthrie Ramsey’s first book Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop, which was published twenty-one years ago. This album project is an experimental sound experience that engages some of the themes that organize the book. These include 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. The album highlights digital music-making as a site of intergenerational exchange and tradition building, two themes that I explored in the book. It features brief sound studies, grooves, and interludes taken from developing song ideas, archival sound fragments, conversations, rehearsal tapes, and other sonic traces of living. It contains originals, sample-based-chop-ups of songs from my previous albums, and covers. Within this eclectic mix, you’ll also hear spoken word, poetry, commentary, and more.
Released by the Musiqology Media Group, RACE MUSIC 21 demonstrates one of our maxims: there’s power in collaboration, family, and community. One of the featured musicians is my granddaughter, a cellist. Expertly directed by Philadelphia-based producer and guitarist, Phillip Pearce of the Sound Village collective (and assisted by WAYV WILSON and Guthrie Ramsey), 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.