RAMP formed in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a soul-jazz outfit in 1975. Vocalists Sharon Matthews and Sibel Thrasher had been singing backup in Cincinnati clubs; guitarist Landy Shores and drummer/percussionist John Manuel were former Spinners utility players who had honed their skills together in the local act Saturday Night Special; bassist Nate White came out of regional funk bands. The group came together through local R&B circuits and, under vibraphonist Roy Ayers's production guidance, released a single album, Come Into Knowledge, on ABC Blue Thumb in 1977. The band's name is an acronym for Roy Ayers Music Productions; Ayers himself was not a member of the group, though he wrote and produced the album. Roy Ayers's own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

Come Into Knowledge didn't make much commercial noise on release, but it became a revered rare-groove classic among crate-diggers and sample-hunters over the following decades. Its track "Daylight" was sampled by A Tribe Called Quest for "Bonita Applebaum," and the album includes a version of Ayers's own signature "Everybody Loves the Sunshine." Other artists who've drawn on the album include Erykah Badu, Mary J. Blige, Common, PM Dawn, and Tyler the Creator.

RAMP's sole album is a direct extension of Roy Ayers's own jazz-funk production style, applied to a genuinely separate group of Cincinnati musicians, and its afterlife as one of the most sampled soul-jazz records of the era shows how thoroughly that sound outlasted its own commercial moment.