Special to El Rrun-Rrun
Various Sources
It's hard to believe George Ramirez, whose name became synonymous with culture and the arts in Brownsville, died one year ago Oct. 12, 2019, at 73.
Jorge Alberto Ramirez Muñoz was born in in Mexico City in 1946 and emigrated with his family to Los Angeles in 1957. Ramirez came to Brownsville in the early 1980s to launch Polibrid Coatings Inc., a polyurethane industrial coating company that is still in operation.
District 4 City Commission Ben Neece – then a municipal judge – met Ramirez and they wound up serving together on the BSPA board. It was during that time that the jazz festival was born.
“Somehow I got into salsa,” Neece told the Brownsville Herald's Steve Clark. “I was listening to a lot of it. I said, ‘George, let’s do a salsa festival.’ He said, ‘Salsa’s kind of narrow. Let’s go with Latin jazz.’”
Ramirez managed to book “King of Latin Music” Tito Puente as headliner that first year. Ramirez was also instrumental in creating, with University of Texas at Brownsville-Texas Southmost College music professor Michael Quantz, the Brownsville Guitar Ensemble Festival and Competition in 2002.
“Actually, he invited me on to the board back in the early days when it was mostly physicians that were populating the BSPA,” Quantz said. He related a story of Ramirez’s response a few years ago when he discovered that none of the students in UTB’s opera workshop had ever seen a live opera performance.
“He just thought that that was completely unacceptable, so he bought tickets to the Houston Grand Opera and sponsored the whole trip for the entire opera workshop,” Quantz said.![]()
Ramirez’s musical tastes were wide-ranging to say the least, and continue to be broadcast automatically around the clock on KXIQ 105.1, a low-power radio station Ramirez launched in July 2017.
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Lone Star National Bank on Boca Chica Boulevard donated offices for the station and a roof on which to mount the antenna, though Ramirez supplied the tunes — hundreds if not thousands of songs from vintage rock and country to folk, blues, funk, jazz, Motown and of course Latin jazz, lots of it.
Tune in to KXIQ and it won’t be long before a Beatles or Bob Dylan song pops up. Ramirez loved Dylan and the Beatles, saw the Fab Four perform live at the Hollywood Bowl in 1965 as a teenager, and once told the Herald that the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was “one that changed us all, really.”
“Blues, rock ‘n’ roll, cumbia — there wasn’t an art form that he couldn’t appreciate, as long as it was an expression of the human condition,” Quantz said. “If it was from the heart, George could appreciate it.”
Quantz noted that Ramirez “loved watching people enjoy themselves” and also took a great interest in others’ well being, personally sponsoring a number of scholarships for music students.
“If there was a need and he heard about it, he did his best to take care of it,” Quantz said. “George brought joy to the place. He made everybody bigger and happier.”
Ramirez long championed the revitalization of downtown Brownsville, and in 2011 he bought the old Fernandez Hide Yard Building, where Neece was running the small live music venue Crescent Moon Café. The two collaborated in that business for a while before going in together on the Half Moon Saloon, which occupies more of the Fernandez Building, which Ramirez restored.
It's hard to believe George Ramirez, whose name became synonymous with culture and the arts in Brownsville, died one year ago Oct. 12, 2019, at 73.
Ramirez, with his ubiquitous black felt hat and cigarette, was tireless in his quest to uplift local musical tastes through the nonprofit Brownsville Society for the Performing Arts and eventually became its president. His death eerily coincided with the 23rd anniversary of the Brownsville Latin Jazz Festival, which he also founded.![]()
That is why it is so disappointing that fully one year since his passing, the crown of his accomplishments, the $5 million Brownsville Performing Arts Academy housed in the once-derelict Stegman Building at E. 11th and Washington street, lies partly unused and mostly empty.
Ramirez literally dedicated a handful of years midwifing it into reality.
For some unknown reason, former Asst. City Manager Michael Lopez inked a deal with the Brownsville nonprofit Revival of Cultural Arts and not Ramirez's Brownsville Society for the Performing Arts to operate the new academy. The RCA has been dedicated to provide free music and dance education to children from low- to moderate-income families in the city’s Buena Vida neighborhood.
An article in the Brownsville Herald after his death said that "Ramirez had envisioned the academy has a certified center for El Sistema, an education model created in Venezuela in the mid-1970s and today considered the world’s most advanced method for teaching classic music and dance to at-risk children in disadvantaged areas."
But so far, nothing.
District 4 City Commission Ben Neece – then a municipal judge – met Ramirez and they wound up serving together on the BSPA board. It was during that time that the jazz festival was born.
“Somehow I got into salsa,” Neece told the Brownsville Herald's Steve Clark. “I was listening to a lot of it. I said, ‘George, let’s do a salsa festival.’ He said, ‘Salsa’s kind of narrow. Let’s go with Latin jazz.’”
Ramirez managed to book “King of Latin Music” Tito Puente as headliner that first year. Ramirez was also instrumental in creating, with University of Texas at Brownsville-Texas Southmost College music professor Michael Quantz, the Brownsville Guitar Ensemble Festival and Competition in 2002.
“Actually, he invited me on to the board back in the early days when it was mostly physicians that were populating the BSPA,” Quantz said. He related a story of Ramirez’s response a few years ago when he discovered that none of the students in UTB’s opera workshop had ever seen a live opera performance.
“He just thought that that was completely unacceptable, so he bought tickets to the Houston Grand Opera and sponsored the whole trip for the entire opera workshop,” Quantz said.
Ramirez’s musical tastes were wide-ranging to say the least, and continue to be broadcast automatically around the clock on KXIQ 105.1, a low-power radio station Ramirez launched in July 2017.
Lone Star National Bank on Boca Chica Boulevard donated offices for the station and a roof on which to mount the antenna, though Ramirez supplied the tunes — hundreds if not thousands of songs from vintage rock and country to folk, blues, funk, jazz, Motown and of course Latin jazz, lots of it.Tune in to KXIQ and it won’t be long before a Beatles or Bob Dylan song pops up. Ramirez loved Dylan and the Beatles, saw the Fab Four perform live at the Hollywood Bowl in 1965 as a teenager, and once told the Herald that the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was “one that changed us all, really.”
“Blues, rock ‘n’ roll, cumbia — there wasn’t an art form that he couldn’t appreciate, as long as it was an expression of the human condition,” Quantz said. “If it was from the heart, George could appreciate it.”
Quantz noted that Ramirez “loved watching people enjoy themselves” and also took a great interest in others’ well being, personally sponsoring a number of scholarships for music students.
“If there was a need and he heard about it, he did his best to take care of it,” Quantz said. “George brought joy to the place. He made everybody bigger and happier.”
Ramirez long championed the revitalization of downtown Brownsville, and in 2011 he bought the old Fernandez Hide Yard Building, where Neece was running the small live music venue Crescent Moon Café. The two collaborated in that business for a while before going in together on the Half Moon Saloon, which occupies more of the Fernandez Building, which Ramirez restored.
That, unfortunately, is also for sale by his surviving family. And the music academy is still waiting to be thrown wide open and allowed to bring life to the downtown area as Ramirez had long planned. It's been a a year since George died. How long before it's fully utilized?