Sergio Ramirez

Sergio Ramirez is a Bronx-born guitarist, bandleader, and composer who defies what a Mexican-American artist is supposed to be. He came up assembled from worlds, raised on his parents’ records and the rock his uncles played him in Mexico, trained first in Mexican music because the lessons were free, and drawn to classical and jazz only later. He was multiple things at once before anyone told him to choose, and the refusal to assimilate was never a question, just the truth of how he grew up.

He claims a Mexican-American space in contemporary jazz from inside the lineage rather than through folkloric framing, heritage as a lens, with Afro-Mexican and Afro-Caribbean rhythm woven through his music rather than worn as a caricature. He found his own voice in improvisation, where he could say something that was actually his instead of performing someone else’s notes. 

Ramirez is featured on Arturo O’Farrill’s Mundoagua: Celebrating Carla Bley, a 2026 Grammy nominee for Best Latin Jazz Album, and has played David Geffen Hall, SFJAZZ, and the Perelman Center. With his quartet the music is built on push and pull, intimate and conversational one moment, explosive the next, resolving in peace or in chaos. It is the uncomfortably beautiful, made with some of New York’s finest players, unafraid to go wherever it needs to. Everything he was told to leave behind is in the music now, all of it, unapologetically, out in the open.