Roy Ayers, the pioneering jazz-funk composer, producer, and vibraphonist, died Tuesday, March 4, in New York after a protracted sickness, his household mentioned in a put up from his Facebook account. “He lived an attractive 84 years and shall be sorely missed,” the assertion learn.
Ayers was born in Los Angeles to folks who labored as a schoolteacher and parking attendant however performed music of their spare time—his mom a piano teacher, his father a trombonist. Ayers studied piano and vibraphone and sang within the college choir earlier than making the rounds of the Los Angeles bebop scene within the early Sixties, releasing his solo debut, West Coast Vibes, in 1963, and accompanying a number of jazz greats, together with Herbie Mann, all through the last decade. He signed to Atlantic in 1967 and Polydor in 1970, releasing multiple album a 12 months for the following a number of many years.
His foremost success got here with Roy Ayers Ubiquity, fashioned within the early Nineteen Seventies. Their music splayed Ayers’ pillowy vibraphone tones throughout languid jazz-funk grooves that fashioned the bedrock for neo-soul—and, by way of sampling, a lot of West Coast hip-hop—to return. Their 1976 hits “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” and “Looking out” and the next 12 months’s “Working Away” grew to become Sunday-afternoon staples that have been amongst a trove of supply materials raided by Dr. Dre, Mos Def, Mary J. Blige, A Tribe Known as Quest, Widespread, J Dilla, Madlib, 2pac, the Infamous B.I.G., and dozens extra hip-hop and R&B lynchpins.
Alongside his solo success, Ayers remained a prolific collaborator. He produced, within the disco period, for singers together with Sylvia Striplin, and recorded an album with someday tourmate Fela Kuti. As his affect grew, he bought into the studio with a brand new wave of artists together with Guru, the Roots, Erykah Badu, Tyler, the Creator, and, on his final album, Adrian Younge and A Tribe Known as Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad. He additionally grew to become a fixture of the silver display, scoring the Blaxploitation movie Coffy, getting prominently synced in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and showing as a performer in Questlove’s Summer season of Soul documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Pageant.
The assertion from Ayers’ household famous that “a celebration of Roy’s life shall be forthcoming.”
