Everybody Loves the Sunshine is just one point of perfection in Roy Ayers' truly ubiquitous legacy

The Guardian

07-03-2025

There's a sense in which Roy Ayers was blessed from the start. Aged five, the son of two musicians – and by all accounts already showing talent as a pianist – he was famously presented with his first set of vibraphone mallets backstage at a gig by Lionel Hampton. If you wanted to take a romantic view, you could look on that as an act of benediction: the man who had more or less singlehandedly popularised an instrument that had previously been viewed as a novelty passing on the mantle along with his mallets. Hampton had broken racial barriers in the process: at a time when jazz bands were almost entirely segregated, Hampton and pianist Teddy Wilson's work with Benny Goodman's quartet was subtly acclaimed by one critic as 'the most beautiful example of men working together to be seen in public today'.
For a time, it looked as if Ayers was following in Hampton's footsteps. By the time of his debut album, 1963's West Coast Vibes, Ayers was clearly carving out a space for himself in the jazz world. Running through versions of Charlie Parker's Donna Lee or Thelonious Monk's Well You Needn't, he was already his own man: a little hotter in his approach to the vibraphone than Milt Jackson, less inclined towards the avant than his friend Bobby Hutcherson.
But, as it turned out, playing post-bop standards wasn't Ayers' destiny. You could already sense him looking beyond jazz by the late 60s. He started confidently essaying contemporary pop, and seemed to have a particular thing for Laura Nyro's album Eli and the 13th Confession: her Stoned Soul Picnic provided the title track of his 1968 album; Emmie turned up on 1969's Daddy Bug, in among bossa nova tunes, and a surprisingly funereal, noir-ish take on Bacharach and David's This Guy's in Love With You.
Ayers was just getting started: you could divine a lot from him naming first his 1970 album Ubiquity, then his new band. On their 1972 debut He's Coming, their music appeared to go everywhere: constantly switching from jazz to soft soul to hard funk to Gil Scott-Heron-ish proto rap, displaying both extraordinarily catholic taste in covers – the Hollies' He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother, I Don't Know How to Love Him from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar – and Ayers' increasing talent as a songwriter, most notably on the superb, dramatically orchestrated We Live in Brooklyn, Baby.
It was jazz-funk before anyone came up with the phrase – although infinitely tougher and less smooth than the music said phrase later came to encapsulate. What the kind of jazz purist who felt Miles Davis's Bitches Brew represented a craven capitulation to commerciality made of it can well be imagined, but that really didn't matter. For the rest of the 70s, Ayers produced one fantastic album after another – Red, Black and Green, Vibrations, his incredible soundtrack to the Blaxploitation film Coffy – gradually honing and homogenising his style until it reached a point of perfection on 1976's Everybody Loves the Sunshine.
If the utterly blissful title track understandably became Ayers' theme song, it's ultimately just one moment among many: Hey Uh-What You Say Come On, The Third Eye, Keep on Walking. Its sound was effectively reprised on Come Into Knowledge, the solitary album by RAMP, a sophisticated Cincinnati funk band whose name – an acronym for Roy Ayers Music Productions – told you everything about Ayers' level of involvement: ignored on release in 1977, its blend of silky, wide-eyed soul and hard-edged funk took on a new lease of life after A Tribe Called Quest sampled one track, Daylight, on their 1990 hit Bonita Applebum, adding their names to a faintly mind-boggling list of artists and producers who have plundered Ayers' back catalogue for beats: Dr Dre, Mary J Blige, J Cole, Tyler, the Creator, J Dilla, Kendrick Lamar, Public Enemy, Erykah Badu, Madlib and Tupac among them. Ayers' samples are the link between Deee-Lite's Groove Is in the Heart and NWA's Fuck tha Police; they're also probably the only thing that MF Doom had in common with the Backstreet Boys.
Ayers was a great bandleader in time-honoured jazz style, capable of attracting incredible musicians (David Bowie pinched both drummer Dennis Davis and guitarist Carlos Alomar from Ayers; after Davis's departure, Bernard 'Pretty' Purdie took over on drums), and spotting talent in its nascent state. He alighted on songwriter Edwin Birdsong when he was a recently demobbed soldier struggling to make his way in New York's jazz scene; he gave vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater a starring role on the Coffy soundtrack at the start of her career. He was also able to move nimbly with changing times: the sound of disco lurked in the background of Everybody Loves the Sunshine, but on the following year's Lifeline, he and Birdsong plunged wholeheartedly into the genre, producing one of its indelible classics, the sparkling Running Away.
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His embrace of disco offered Ayers' detractors further ammunition: so did the glossy sound, although, frankly, it's a pretty miserable individual who can't grasp the glory of Fever's ice-cool but supremely funky opening track Love Will Bring Us Back Together. But if said detractors thought the direction he was heading in was now obvious, they were in for a shock. Hot on the heels of 1980's slick Love Fantasy came Music of Many Colours, a collaboration with Fela Kuti consisting of two raw and implausibly thrilling side-long tracks recorded at the end of a joint tour in Africa that perfectly melded Kuti's Afrobeat and Ayers' jazz-funk. Its influence continued to course through Ayers' subsequent albums Africa: Center of the World and 1983's Lots of Love. He was concurrently producing slinky post-disco for Eighties Ladies and their singer Sylvia Striplin – the latter's debut solo album Give Me Your Love is a particular delight that, like the RAMP album before it, belatedly became a rare-groove classic. He might have stopped using the Ubiquity name, but his sound was still everywhere.
Ayers kept releasing new albums, but never quite regained the commercial form he had found at Ubiquity's peak, and his output began to slow as the 80s drew to a close. But by then, it scarcely seemed to matter: the attentions of crate-digging producers and DJs alike meant that Ayers' name was rightly revered by a new generation of artists. His influence hung very heavy indeed over both acid jazz and neo-soul – he worked with Badu and Alicia Keys – and, whatever twists and turns hip-hop took, Ayers' music always seemed to have a role within it: he turned up alongside Branford Marsalis and Donald Byrd on Guru's acclaimed solo album Jazzmatazz in 1993, then again 22 years later, in an entirely different rap era, on Tyler, the Creator's Cherry Bomb, dubbing the latter 'a lovely young man'. He toured relentlessly, claiming he wanted to be on stage 'until I die', a feat he very nearly achieved.
'Everybody is important,' he reasoned, 'so it is important I reach as many people as possible with my voice.' That seems the perfect explanation not just for his constant gigging, but Roy Ayers' whole, boundary-free musical approach.