Next show: Sunday 7/22 “The Blues Journey” with Guthrie Ramsey

The next show will air on Sunday 7/22/2012 from 11:00pm – Monday at 1:00am on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org.

This installment will offer “The Blues Journey,” which is a WBAI Summer FUN Drive special, presented by Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, Professor of Music History at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ramsey will lay out his theory of this completely American music form known as The Blues. This theory is different from the standard 12-bar blues understanding. Listen to a 40-second preview:

Dr. Ramsey specializes in African-American and American music, jazz, cultural studies, popular music, film studies, and historiography. He lectures internationally on these topics. Ramsey is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop ( University of California Press, 2003), which was named outstanding book of the year by IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music). His current project, In Walked Bud: Earl “Bud ” Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge, is a study of jazz pianist Bud Powell and is forthcoming from the University of California Press. He has also begun a new book on singer/songwriter Curtis Mayfield. Ramsey was a Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellow at Dartmouth College in 1993, a DuBois Institute Fellow at Harvard University in 1996, and taught at Tufts University from 1994-1998. In 2001 he received the Irving Lowens Award for best article from the Society for American Music for “Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skintrade.” He has published in Black Music Research Journal, The Musical Quarterly, Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, American Music, American Quarterly, Journal of the American Musicological Society, The New York Times and The Village Voice. His band Dr. Guy’s MusiQologY has performed for audiences in South America, New York, Australia, the University of Pennsylvania, the Kimmel Center, and in Philadelphia venues such as Zanzibar Blue and Gloria’s Seafood House. Ramsey composes and arranges all of MusiQologY’s music, which moves beyond the traditional Jazz idiom, experimenting with R&B, Latin, Hip Hop fusions. The band’s first CD, “Y the Q?” The band’s most recent release is “The Colored Waiting Room.”

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