Guthrie Ramsey in Conversation with Stefon Harris

Guthrie Ramsey; Stefon Harris

doi:10.14713/jjs.v15i2.312

Vol. 15 No. 2 (2024)

The Bridge

Guthrie Ramsey in Conversation with Stefon Harris

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Guthrie Ramsey,
Stefon Harris

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Guthrie Ramsey
University of Pennsylvania
Bio

Author Biography

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a music historian, pianist, composer, and Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.

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).

As a producer, label head, and bandleader, Guthrie has released five recording projects, including A Spiritual Vibe, vol. 1 and 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 the play The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body. 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. Guthrie is the CEO of Musiqology Media Group, a production and consulting agency that helps artists produce their best work and to tell their story successfully.

Stefon Harris
Rutgers University
Bio

Author Biography

Stefon Harris is a four-time Grammy-nominated jazz vibraphonist, educator, app developer, and thought leader. He has been heralded as “one of the most important artists in jazz” (Los Angeles Times) and is a recipient of the prestigious Doris Duke Artist Award and the Martin E. Segal Award from Lincoln Center. He has been named Best Mallet Player eight times by the Jazz Journalist Association and Best Vibes Player in DownBeat Magazine’s Critics Poll. Harris currently tours with his Grammy-nominated band, Blackout, and has released eleven albums as a leader. He has also recorded and performed with The Classical Jazz Quartet, Kenny Barron, Ron Carter, Lewis Nash, the SFJAZZ Collective, Joe Henderson, Wynton Marsalis, Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Hutcherson, Cassandra Wilson, Diana Krall, Max Roach, Chaka Khan, Kurt Elling, Buster Williams, Dianne Reeves, Common, and Pablo Zeigler.

Along with performing, Harris has taught at universities throughout the world, led curriculum development at the Brubeck Institute, served as a part of the jazz faculty at New York University, and formerly served as the Associate Dean and Director of Jazz Arts at Manhattan School of Music. He is currently Artistic Advisor of Jazz Education at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), the Director of the Harmony Lab at Express Newark, and a tenured Associate Professor of Music at Rutgers University – Newark.

In 2013, he founded The Melodic Progression Institute (MPI) and created a revolutionary ear training app called Harmony Cloud which is widely used by musicians across multiple genres.

As a thought leader, Harris leads transformative presentations on corporate leadership and team empowerment for Fortune 100 companies using jazz as a metaphor. His 2012 TED Talk, “There Are No Mistakes on the Bandstand,” has gained nearly 900,000 views. Through these presentations, Harris is committed to the proliferation of empathy through the arts and empowering others with the necessary tools to articulate their authentic voices through music.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14713/jjs.v15i2.312

Published 2024-12-30

How to Cite

Ramsey, G., & Harris, S. (2024). Guthrie Ramsey in Conversation with Stefon Harris. Journal of Jazz Studies, 15(2), 157–164. https://doi.org/10.14713/jjs.v15i2.312

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Abstract

On December 14, 2023, Guthrie Ramsey conducted a master class and spoke with Rutgers-Newark faculty member Stefon Harris as part of Express Newark’s “Blues People” exhibition. Dr. Ramsey opened the afternoon with an excerpt of a film he produced “to tell part of the history of African American music.” For the balance of the lecture, Ramsey explored examples of and pedagogical processes related to a type of “vocalization and musicianship” central to Black musicking in America that “gets passed along through oral and aural culture.” Ramsey and Harris's wide ranging coversation returned to many of these themes while addressing Dr. Ramsey's scholarship--past, present and future.

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