Roy Ayers wrote the jazz-funk manual

With the passing of master musician Roy Ayers, you will read very early on in numerous obituaries about how his composition “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” from his 1976 album of the same name. It has been sampled nearly 200 times by artists such as 2Pac, Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige and Snoop Dogg. The question that needs to be answered, and in some respects points to the enigmatic six-decade career of Ayers, a jazz titan and, as some say, the father of neo-soul, who passed at the age of 84, is why?

Like his music, the answer seems easy, but it’s rather nuanced. Complex. But don’t question it. Just take a look at the younger musicians Thundercat and Kamasi Washington. Both L.A.-based musicians grew up studying jazz religiously and now have careers that span from Grammy-winning pop hits to unclassified jazz-fusion realms that reach across various areas of recorded music.

Ayers started in jazz and advanced the music as he traveled through several phases of his career. Like Quincy Jones, whom we just lost last year, these jazz musicians, genius-level mind you, are exquisite arrangers, and that talent translates to any genre of music without exception. But what made hip-hop producers, trip-hop producers, house producers, and neo-soul artists and electronic music producers gravitate to Ayers’ canon was his ability to put the right things in the right place at the right time. I know it sounds cute, but it’s the truth. He had more musicality in his voice than many had with an orchestra or any modern producer has today with a sampler or whatever program they are running on their computer.

Throughout that career, a compelling emotion of goodwill always manifests itself in the tapestry of whatever genre of music Roy Ayers is navigating. The L.A.-raised vibes sovereign, who was bestowed with a set of vibraphone mallets by the foremost master of the instrument, Lionel Hampton, at age five, erected several mini-careers by pushing the edges of jazz forward since the ’70s. His forming the group Ubiquity, which means the fact of being everywhere, allowed him to pursue all the connections that jazz has to soul, R&B, funk, and disco. Connectivity that later in the ’90s would give him proper credit as being the godfather of neo-soul, house, acid-jazz, and a canon that provided the building sample blocks for the boom bap era of hip-hop.

One of his vibey-est creations that forever goes on ad infinitum by those who reside there and others who still want to grasp that swingy, string-laden controlled intensity, “We Live In Brooklyn, Baby” from He’s Coming by Roy Ayers Ubiquity snatches something fierce out of the early ’70s air. This feeling is in contradiction to Ayers’ typical good, good emotion. Those strings are real close to falling out of structure, and that bass line, one that even the great Ron Carter could not figure out how to play — Ayers originally commissioned him for the track — is one of the best personifications, to me, of how the human condition can go in all directions, dark to light and back again, within a few mere seconds. He’s documenting a feeling with notes, and it’s oh so real. That’s power.

Ever since his passing, I’ve been straight up stuck on the Starbooty album by Roy Ayers Ubiquity from 1978; it just has all the great crushing hooks, that vibe of inclusivity, and love emanating honestly. “Midnight After Dark” possesses all the basslines, congas, and lyrics that make you wanna dance till the dry cleaners open at 5 am, and that heady phaser disco funk just motorboats this track to another realm. It’s an earworm of the highest love-love type.

Ayres is widely known for his disco-funk stretch, where he just kept on banging out record after record for Polydor, which his A&R department at the time kept berating him about. He would release three records in a year (sounds kind of like Prince, right?), and they all had joints of the highest regard. “Love Will Bring Us Back Together,” “Running Away,” and “Don’t Stop the Feeling” are all heavyweight disco joints that would move any dancefloor in their era, or for that fact, any boogie party today for sure. But as always, Ayers was advancing the music.

Silver Vibrations, a heavily sought-after 1983 album by Ayers, is thought of as his last great focused project in that era, which combined equal parts commercial viability and artistic complexity, commanding upwards of three figures on Discogs.

It stands as the truest chronicle, reporting where black music was at in the early ’80s and its trajectory to come. At the top of the decade, while browsing the landscape of a post-disco America, Ayers switched up his production list into a worksheet of boogie compositions and string-laden grooves. “Chicago,” the global classic that not only predates the term ‘house music’ but in turn lays out the structure and foundation the music would grow from, is featured in its extended seven-minute version. With its sample-like loop formation, minor-key chord structure, and kick drum. It elongates this slippery funk into something just a bit more than a catchy tune. We get genre. Still, there’s a HEAVY post-disco effect on this record, with that slippery boogie sound working its way into the zeitgeist, which cannot be ignored. This abridged version morphed into new R&B, and Ayers maneuvered through all these musical developments like he was parking a car. Focused on staying relevant to the kids, he created a teaching manual. 

Thirty years in advance.

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