Ramp - 1977 - Come into Knowledge

Ramp

1977

Come into Knowledge

01. The American Promise 6:30

02. I Just Love You 4:55

03. Give It 4:40

04. Everybody Loves The Sunshine 3:42

05. Come Into Knowledge 4:37

06. Try, Try, Try 4:55

07. Daylight 4:12

08. Look Into The Sky 4:42

09. Deep Velvet 3:33

Bass – Nate White

Drums, Percussion – John Manuel

Guitar – Landy Shores

Lead Vocals – Sharon Matthews, Sibel Thrasher

Producer – Roy Ayers

In the mid-1970s, Cincinnati’s local R&B circuit was busy enough to keep a handful of sharp young musicians in regular work, but it was hardly the kind of place that expected to launch a quiet classic of cosmic soul. The group that would become RAMP started life as Saturday Night Special, a tight unit centered on former Spinners utility players John Manuel on drums and percussion and Landy Shores on guitar, with Cincinnati bass man Nate White locking down the bottom and two strong, distinctive vocalists—Sharon Matthews and Sibel Thrasher—up front. They specialized in reimagined covers of current R&B hits delivered with a sophisticated funk edge, the sort of set that could fill a club without ever threatening the Top 40. Then Roy Ayers walked in one Saturday night, heard something that clicked with the expansive, sun-drenched jazz-funk he had been refining with his Ubiquity ensemble, and decided these players belonged under his production umbrella. The name change to RAMP—widely understood as Roy Ayers Music Productions—was both a branding move and a statement of intent. Ayers would write, co-write, arrange, and produce; the band would supply the voices and the live chemistry. What emerged in 1977 was Come into Knowledge, a single album that somehow managed to sound both of its moment and entirely out of time.

The influences are impossible to miss and yet never feel derivative. Ayers’ own catalog—especially the luminous, spiritually inclined material on records like Everybody Loves the Sunshine—is the clearest touchstone, but the record also absorbs the elastic groove of Edwin Birdsong’s writing, the harmonic warmth of mid-seventies soul-jazz, and just enough hard-edged funk to keep the bliss from floating away completely. Sessions took place at Electric Lady Studios in New York and the Record Plant in Hollywood, with Ayers as primary producer, Birdsong and William Allen as co-producers and arrangers, and engineers James Green, Jerry Solomon, and Ron Johnson behind the board. Additional studio muscle included players of the caliber of Carol Kaye on bass and Steve Madaio on trumpet when needed, yet the core band’s chemistry remains the heart of the sound. The result is a production that feels airy and precise without ever turning clinical: drums that breathe, bass lines that pulse with quiet authority, guitar parts that scratch and shimmer, and those twin female voices weaving around the melodies like sunlight through leaves.

The album opens with the six-and-a-half-minute statement of purpose that is “The American Promise,” a nervy, guitar-driven funk workout that feels closer to early Pointer Sisters or Bohannon than to the floating vibes that dominate the rest of the record. From there the mood softens and expands. “I Just Love You” and “Give It” ride mid-tempo grooves that balance urgency with elegance, while the cover of Ayers’ own “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” arrives as a particularly radiant, almost weightless reading that rivals the original in sheer glow. The title track, “Come into Knowledge,” drifts on a bed of Rhodes and soft percussion, its lyrics inviting a kind of spiritual awakening that never tips into preachiness. “Try, Try, Try” keeps the energy simmering, then “Daylight” arrives—the track that would later become the album’s calling card, its circular guitar figure and hypnotic vocal refrain already sounding like a ready-made sample. “Look into the Sky” continues the upward gaze, and the closing “Deep Velvet” settles into a late-night, almost private intimacy that leaves the listener wanting more. Across these nine tracks the music never shouts; it simply opens a door and waits for you to walk through.

The artwork matches the music’s understated elegance. Art direction by Katsuji Abe and a cover illustration by Masaki Sato present a dreamy, slightly surreal visual that feels closer to a cosmic travel brochure than a standard soul-album sleeve. Soft colors, abstract forms, and a sense of quiet invitation set the tone before the needle even drops. In an era of increasingly bold, sometimes garish packaging, Come into Knowledge opted for restraint and atmosphere—exactly the right choice for a record that prefers to seduce rather than demand.Commercially the album barely registered. ABC Blue Thumb, already navigating corporate turbulence that would soon see the label folded into larger entities, gave it little promotional push. It sold modestly at best, vanished from catalogs, and became the sort of record that only the most dedicated collectors and DJs remembered. Critical attention at the time was sparse. Yet the music refused to stay buried. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, crate diggers and hip-hop producers began rediscovering it. A Tribe Called Quest’s sampling of “Daylight” on “Bonita Applebum” turned the track into a quiet anthem for a new generation. Erykah Badu later reworked “The American Promise” into “Amerykahn Promise,” while Common, Mary J. Blige, PM Dawn, and others continued to draw from the album’s deep well. Original vinyl copies climbed into the high hundreds of dollars; Japanese and American CD reissues in 2007, followed by later vinyl pressings, finally made the music widely available again. What had been a commercial footnote became a cornerstone of the rare-groove canon, a record that proved how much beauty and invention could live inside a single, overlooked album. RAMP never made a second record, and some of its members have since passed, but Come into Knowledge continues to do what the best music does: it opens a door, invites you in, and somehow still feels like the future.