Roy Ayers was a virtuoso jazz vibraphone player and multi-instrumentalist, but he was also able, in the 1970s, to bring jazz substance into R&B, funk and soul and later to inspire the style known as neo-soul. Everyone Loves The Sunshine, his 1976 pop hit, became a soundtrack to summer and the sampled hook to countless hip-hop records.
Roy Edward Ayers Jr passed away in a Manhattan hospital at the age of 84. A family statement, released on Facebook, said “It is with great sadness that the family of legendary vibraphonist, composer, and producer Roy Ayers announce his passing which occurred on March 4 2025 in New York City after a long illness.”
Ayers grew up in a musical family in Los Angeles – his father played the trombone and his mother taught piano, his first instrument. When he was five his parents took him to see vibist Lionel Hampton. So impressed was Hampton at the response to the concert by the five-year-old that he gifted him a set of vibe mallets. Ayers is quoted in a 2011 Los Angeles Times interview as saying “At the time, my mother and father told me he laid some spiritual vibes on me.”
Ayers sang in his local church choir and studied music at Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, which lays claim to Dexter Gordon and Charles Mingus among its distinguished jazz alumni. He formed his first band at high school, the Jefferson Combo, studied music theory at Los Angeles City College and was taught by jazz vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson.
He played clubs while at college, began working professionally as a sideman in 1961, and in 1963 released his first album, the straight-swinging modern jazz set West Coast Vibes. In 1966, he joined Herbie Mann’s band, going on to make 11 albums with the celebrated flautist as a sideman on vibes. Mann helped Ayers to get his first contract with Atlantic and produced four albums for Ayers on Atlantic and Columbia between 1967 and 1969.
It was in the 1970s that Roy Ayers found his unique artistic and commercial voice and cemented his place in music history. On the back of the success of Ubiquity, his first album with new label Polydor in 1970, he formed a band of the same name, fine tuning his sound on another 10 Polydor albums between 1970 and 1977 into a soulful and funky synthesis of vibraphone, keyboards and vocals. Disco-bound tracks such as Running Away, Sweet Tears, Can’t You See Me and Love Will Bring Us Back Together became dance classics while sneaking hip bebop and modal jazz lines and solos into the popular sphere. Everybody Loves The Sunshine, released in 1976, was his breakthrough commercial record. As Ayers told the Guardian, “It changed everything”.
In the UK, Ayers had already been picked up by the northern soul clubs in regional England. He was rapidly becoming a mainstay of London clubs and radio DJs, the latter attracted by his cool, mellow and grooveful tunes. Everybody Loves The Sunshine became the soundtrack to the rare English summer treasure of golden days and evenings. Ayers described the song as one of the most widely sampled in the music industry.
This extraordinary period of musical output in the 1970s helped define the evolution of jazz-funk, acid-jazz and neo-soul. Also during the 70s, Ayers composed the critically acclaimed soundtrack to the seminal 1973 blaxploitation film Coffy, and toured with Fela Kuti, founder of Afrobeat, in Nigeria. He went on to record the album Music Of Many Colors in Nigeria in 1980.
Ayers’ influence continued into the 21st century through artists such as Erykah Badu (who plays on Ayers’ 2004 album, Mahogany Vibes, and who describes him as the “King of Neo-Soul”), Betty Wright (also on Mahogany Vibes), Pharrel Williams, Jill Scott, d’Angelo, Tribe Called Quest, Dr Dre, Common, Mos Def, Mary J Blige and the Creator, among many others. The Roy Ayers Connection is a documentary in production about the influence of Roy Ayers, its status and release date unknown.
I met Roy Ayers in 1992, when he was performing at the Blackpool Jazz Festival. I found him a remarkably warm and generous person – a rare example of an artist living up to the expectations created by their music and lyrics. He made you comfortable and welcome in his presence, maintaining a laudable mix of professionalism and selflessness in the way he approached performance, media and fans. Despite hobbling around on a walking stick, having recently injured his knee, nothing was too much trouble. He was accommodating with studio-lit photographs backstage before the gig, and I was touched by the warmth and care he showed his wife, who accompanied him on tour. That set (from which the accompanying photograph was taken) was memorable – he played with style and verve, performing all his hit songs with a seemingly boundless energy, despite the requirement to remain seated at his vibraphone.
I last saw Roy Ayers in a small Australian jazz club in Melbourne in 2015. He was as soulful as he always has been, but perhaps even more funky than I had remembered. There was also a new element of the sage and prescient philosopher: “Let your mind be free,” he told a rapt crowd. “I’m just trying to give you music to let you look to the sky.”
Roy Edward Ayers Jr, 10 September 1940 – 4 March 2025
