The Colored Waiting Room—Presents Dr. Guy’s MusiQology

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African American History, Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, Dr. Guy's MusiQology, Elizabeth Alexander, Jazz, Segregation, The Colored Waiting Room

The following comprises an overview about my new album, The Colored Waiting Room, which will be released next month. In the coming weeks, we’ll release a series of film vignettes about the project and some of the musicians and production crew involved in the project on various social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Tumblr.       

Dr. Guthrie Ramsey being interviewed for “The Colored Waiting Room” project.

During the Jim Crow Era, the practice of the colored waiting room was a custom that segregated black passengers from the general population as they waited to board various modes of public transportation. They represented in the public sphere a space of containment and even the presumption of contamination. Yet on the flip side, it was also a place where one was free to be one’s self, where one could express things beyond the scrutiny of a broader, suspicious, though voraciously consuming public.

The apparently unforgiving, real, and metaphorical boundary encircling “colored-ness” at this time, then, was not all that it was intended to be nor all that it seemed.  Cultural forms and fascinations flourished behind the veil for which the colored waiting room stood. And the sensibilities embedded in these expressions could never, in fact, be “pure,” or free from the cross-contamination so feared in a racially nervous society. 

Everyone and everything, you see, was present inside the colored waiting room, especially in its music. Music is, indeed, a space where people can join together in creative, communal exchange and transformation—where musicians create sounds that embody their own musical voices and aspirations and forge them with others.

This recording expresses the eclectic vibe that was the spirit of the colored waiting room. It is clearly ironic that black citizens who were “fixin’ to get up” or travel to their various destinations would be forced to launch from spaces of restriction.  But they made these rooms something else: they became places pregnant with possibilities.

Indeed, they were transformed into something akin to what the poet Elizabeth Alexander has called the “black interior” or “dream space.”  For her, this is “the great hopeful space of African American creativity. . . . [one] outside of the parameters of how we are seen in this culture . . . .‘The black interior’ is not an inscrutable zone, nor colonial fantasy. Rather, I see it as an inner space in which black artists have found selves that go far, far beyond the limited expectations and definitions of what black is, isn’t or should be.

The music here, like any identity in the colored waiting rooms, is not restricted and refuses to pin itself down to a specific genre. Each song’s message of life, love, desire, and joy are the result, in part, of providing talented individuals from different backgrounds and musical dispositions material through which they could dream, interpret, and execute. Ranging over various themes and inspired by sundry experiences, it tries to move beyond aesthetic containment and toward the freedom spirit that those former inhabitants of colored waiting rooms imagined for themselves, their descendants, and for us all.

Step into the experience of The Colored Waiting Room. Enjoy and imagine together with us.

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Thickness in the Square-yah: That’s the Joint! Reader Updates Its Status at the Hiphop Archive

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9th Wonder, Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, Hip hop music, Hiphop Archive, Joycelyn Wilson, Marcyliena Morgan, Mark Anthony Neal, Murray Forman, Music History, Nicole Hodges Persley, That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader 2nd Edition, Vijay Prashad, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute

Professor Marcyliena Morgan, the infectious and effectual Director of Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute seemed as excited as anyone as her staff buzzed around preparing for the event to celebrate the publication of the new and expanded edition of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2^nd Edition.  It’s not lost on the book’s editors, Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, that hip hop studies has come a long way since That’s the Joint!’s first appearance.

The remix of this project serves as a measuring stick for the growing sophistication, theoretical rigor, international purview, and commitment of “the hip-hop generation” to the highest standards of scholarship.  The two-part event, Author Meets the Critics: That’s The Joint 2^nd Edition at the Hiphop Archive, featured the editors in pubic dialogue with a group of scholars or “critics,” was punctuated with a showing of a independent film titled The Wonder Year, a critically acclaimed work about the producer 9^th Wonder (Patrick Douthit).

The Wonder Year – Trailer from LRG on Vimeo.

The conversation was shaped by the multi-disciplinary stances of Trinity College’s Vijay Prashad, Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive Fellow Joycelyn Wilson, University of Kansas’s Nicole Hodges Persley, and myself.  Observations ranged from the authors addressing our various “wish lists” for inclusion to ruminations on what we appreciated about the volume.  For all the talk about its contribution to the field of hip hop studies, a more appropriate assessment in my view is that this compilation has been central to the formation of the field, second to perhaps only Tricia Roses’ opening salvo, Black Noise.  (Her work might be thought of as the theme upon which the symphony of voices in That’s the Joint! riff, ride, and respond).

Author Meets the Critics: That’s The Joint 2nd Edition panel at the Hiphop Archive. Pictured from left to right: Murray Forman, Mark Anthony Neal, Nicole Hodges Persley, Guthrie Ramsey, Joycelyn Wilson, Vijay Prashad

One of the interesting things about this observation is that from a black cultural studies standpoint, hip hop studies are ubiquitous, or at least, seemingly so.  Is it because hip-hop artists attract so much attention in the media?  Or, maybe because so many of the young scholars use it as a cultural reference—a frame that can at once serve as a philosophical platform, anecdotal evidence, and sites for both literary close readings, ethnographic field work, and social activism.

One of the more compelling points that was raised on the panel and revisited at dinner was the transportability of hip hop’s sonic conventions and political sensibilities around the world.  As Vijay pointed out this “thickness” has become one of the more compelling aspects of U.S.-based hip hop, one that demands greater attention.  Other ideas that were circulated dealt with the use of hip hop as a model for teaching acting technique, the need for more sound studies, as well as the fruitful on-the-ground uses of the music and scholarship among at-risk populations, particularly poor black males.

Students working in Harvard University’s Hiphop Archive

The take away for all of this is the vital and energetic quality of thought surrounding hip hop.  It can no longer claim a purely marginal status—an endowed archive at “the H,” a vetted and canonized bibliography and discography, and its status as the darling of social media traffic among other black popular forms, a plethora of course offerings in the academy, and more affirm its mainstream profile.  And if that isn’t enough I recently learned that the rapper Lupe Fiasco and I attended the same high school. He was inducted into our alma mater’s Hall of Fame a year before me, the Ivy League professor.

At the Hiphop Archive. Pictured from left to right: 9th Wonder, Marcyliena Morgan, Guthrie Ramsey, Emmett Price

Hip hop, to quote a cliché, must be here to stay.  And as hip hop’s avant-garde careens toward middle age, tenured professorships, Rogaine treatments, the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, and “where have they been?” episodes, a question looms. Will the time come when one has to trade in one’s hip-hop generation I.D. for an AARP card? Just asking.

Dr. Guthrie Ramsey 

Master Class: Ramsey Lewis, Jazz & The Chicago Scene

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Art Blakey, Buddy Rich, Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, Ramsey Lewis, The Chicago Project

Ramsey Lewis

It must be a Chicago thing. The rapport between Midwest natives Dr. Ramsey Lewis and Dr. Guthrie Ramsey flowed with the calm comfort of old friends reminiscing about the “good ol’ days.”  Launching the first night of the Center for Africana Studies Spring 2010 Artist-in-Residence Master Class series at University of Pennsylvania on March 17th, the enthusiastic audience was given an experience quite different from the norm. Often, we demand of our musicians to simply be musicians—performing, recording, and entertaining. However, it was on this night that the audience was given the rare opportunity to hear one of the world’s most important musicians discuss and analyze his own music through the candid interview-style of Prof. Ramsey.

The night began with a biographical navigation of the early career trajectory of Dr. Lewis, beginning with his first gig at the tender age of 9, in his father’s church.

“The worst words I’ve ever heard my mother say…My father would come home from work and she would say to him, ‘Lewis, sonny didn’t practice today, “  Lewis said, in discussing the early push his parents made on his music.

Beginning as a biographical discussion on the early career trajectory of Dr. Lewis, the conversation moved towards a more cerebral take on the life of the artist.

Throughout the event, Dr. Lewis showed a laid-back cool, devoid of any grandiosity—a trait which would be understood considering his stature. In the many captivating stories he told that night, colossal names such as Buddy Rich and Art Blakey were used with such an ease, it was evident that Dr. Lewis holds a humble understanding and recognition of the unique space in which he occupies. When questioned about this seemingly grounded approach to a life of stardom and celebrity, Dr. Lewis simply responded, “Music is my life.”

Art Blakey

Lewis went on to explain that he lives for music and grows within it every day. Everything that comes along with it is immaterial. It was this type of approach that drew the audience to the musician of over seventy years. The eager crowd often broke into applause and cheers as they truly felt connected to this musical journey. For a rare moment, artist and consumer became connected on a level unbeknown to many and enjoyed by few.

PAUL PENNINGTON