About

Sergio Ramirez is a Bronx-born guitarist and bandleader. He is featured on Arturo O'Farrill's Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley, a 2026 GRAMMY nominee for Best Latin Jazz Album, and has performed at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, Symphony Space, and Joe's Pub at The Public Theater.

Trained in classical guitar at the Manhattan School of Music with David Starobin and in jazz at Purchase College with Pasquale Grasso, he lets each practice inform the other. Tone, voicing and counterpoint carry into the improvising, while a jazz musician's sense of time and phrasing carries back into the interpretation.

Programs are built to the room, solo through small ensemble. An evening can run entirely classical, entirely jazz, or move between them, with originals and standards drawn from underrepresented voices in the jazz tradition.

Music

I came up in two trainings at once: classical guitar at the Manhattan School of Music with David Starobin, jazz at Purchase College with Pasquale Grasso.

My classical programs draw mostly from the Latin American and Spanish repertoire. Ponce, Villa-Lobos, Barrios, Brouwer, Piazzolla, Tárrega, Albéniz, De Falla, Roland Dyens, alongside Bach, Sor, Giuliani and Dowland.

On the jazz side, Grant Green, Pat Martino, Jim Hall, and Julian Lage are the pillars of my playing concept, and Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker have shaped the way I phrase things. I'm also heavily inspired by the harmonic concepts of Immanuel Wilkins, Robert Glasper and Aaron Parks. My sets put originals next to standards, with an interest in composers the repertoire passed over, like Sara Cassey and Tania Maria

Videos