Roy Ayers, the pioneering jazz-funk composer, producer, and vibraphonist, died Tuesday, March 4, in New York after an extended sickness, his household mentioned in a submit from his Facebook account. “He lived a gorgeous 84 years and will likely be sorely missed,” the assertion learn.
Ayers was born in Los Angeles to oldsters 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 Nineteen 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 a couple of album a 12 months for the subsequent 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 means of sampling, a lot of West Coast hip-hop—to come back. Their 1976 hits “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” and “Looking” and the next 12 months’s “Working Away” turned Sunday-afternoon staples that had been amongst a trove of supply materials raided by Dr. Dre, Mos Def, Mary J. Blige, A Tribe Referred to as Quest, Frequent, 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 Referred to as Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad. He additionally turned 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 time of Soul documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Competition.
The assertion from Ayers’ household famous that “a celebration of Roy’s life will likely be forthcoming.”
