Roy Ayers poses for a portrait in 1970.
Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images
Roy Ayers, the vibraphonist, composer and jazz-funk pioneer behind “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” has died at the age of 84.
He died Tuesday in New York City after a long illness, according to a statement shared on his Facebook page.
Ayers was born in Los Angeles on Sept. 10, 1940, to a musical family. Like a scene out of a movie, a 5-year-old Ayers boogie’d so hard at a Lionel Hampton concert that the vibraphonist handed Ayers his first pair of mallets.
“At the time, my mother and father told me he laid some spiritual vibes on me,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2011.
While he cut his teeth on the 1960s hard-bop scene of LA, Ayers came into his signature sound with 1970’s Ubiquity, an album title that he’d soon take as the name of his band for the remaining decade. With Roy Ayers Ubiquity, the group soundtracked streetwise music by mixing funk grooves, soulful horns and vocals with jazz improvisation. By jumping off Miles Davis’ electric period and leaning into a sun-kissed funk, they met a music movement already in motion, most notably on albums like 1971’s He’s Coming and 1973’s Red, Black & Green, not to mention Ayers’ score for Coffy, the blaxploitation flick featuring Pam Grier.
But it’s the 1976 release of Everybody Loves the Sunshine that sent a ripple throughout funk space; a staple of his live set for decades, the album’s title track has since been sampled over 100 times.
“It was so spontaneous. It felt wonderful,” Ayers told The Guardian in 2017 of the song’s creation. “And I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound: a mix of vibraphone, piano and a synthesiser.”
With some additional congas, drums and a hazy nostalgia for long summer nights, the song inspired legions of crate-diggers to chop, warp and speed-up samples for the likes of Dr. Dre (“My Life”), Mary J. Blige (“My Life”) and The-Dream (“Outkast”).
“It’s wonderful, the desire young people express for my music,” Ayers told Dummy in 2016. “It’s wonderful because I’m still growing in popularity.”
Roy Ayers performs a Tiny Desk Concert on Jan. 24, 2018 (Jenna Sterner/NPR).
That lifeline continued through samples, but also studio collaborations with new generations of R&B and hip-hop musicians like Alicia Keys, The Roots, Gang Starr’s Guru and Tyler, The Creator.
Roy Ayers also appeared on Erykah Badu’s 2000 album Mama’s Gun, his vibraphone softly skating across “Cleva.” His touch is light and decorative, but never showy — he responds to a song about natural beauty with his own. Badu herself has called Ayers the king of neo-soul, crediting him with the soft-focus, yet meticulous, fusion of mellow sounds.
But five decades later, over several albums that included collaborations with Fela Kuti and Rick James, through samples in A Tribe Called Quest and Pharrell Williams songs, across several styles of music, the pianist Robert Glasper best sums up Ayers’ career in a 2011 interview: “It just has a Roy Ayers sound. There’s nothing you can describe. It’s just Roy Ayers.”
