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Asked about his legacy, Ayers replied, “I’d like it to be that I was one of the greatest vibists that ever lived. Seventy-five years later, those vibes remain.
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“I was five-years-old, and my mother said he laid some spiritual vibes on me.” “As he came past me, he handed me a pair of vibraphone mallets and I grabbed them,” Ayers recalled in 2014. During the concert, Hampton left the stage to interact with the crowd. Both of his parents played instruments, and when he was little they took him to see jazz vibraphone player Lionel Hampton at the Paramount Theatre in Boyle Heights. Or perhaps it’s Ayers’ vibraphone tone, which across nearly 70 years of playing has become a pure, unimpeded extension of his voice. “Perhaps because it is sunny and lovely out on the West Coast, that came through.” “I wrote the song because I felt it,” Ayers explained via email when asked about its place in Southern California culture. Who could argue with a psalm for sunshine and a life filled with “just bees and things and flowers?” With a spirit that could interrupt even the darkest days, the song’s optimism, and logic, was undeniable. “We used to see the sun disappear,” Ayers told an interviewer in 2013 of the inspiration for “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” adding that “the smog and the fog would come through the Los Angeles basin. The nine studio albums Roy Ayers Ubiquity made from 1972-77 are considered his most crucial work. He moved to New York as funk music morphed into fusion in the early 1970s, formed Ubiquity and signed to Polydor Records.
ALL OF ROY AYERS ALBUMS SERIES
His 1963 debut solo album, “West Coast Vibes,” was produced by the late Downbeat editor and Times jazz critic Leonard Feather, and across the 1960s Ayers released a series of albums for labels including Pacific Jazz and Atlantic. In the interim, his legacy had only grown.īorn and raised on East Vernon a few blocks from the then-thriving Central Avenue jazz and R&B scene, Ayers started playing music in the mid-1940s and earned his earliest credits as part of the city’s cool jazz movement. Younge and Muhammad’s own band, the Midnight Hour, rounded out the compilation.Īyers hadn’t issued a full-length album in nearly a decade. It teased the Ayers album and forthcoming new work from other veteran jazz, soul and Latin artists: saxophonist Gary Bartz, keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith, Brazilian jazz-funk band Azymuth, multi-instrumentalist and Gil Scott-Heron collaborator Brian Jackson, bossa nova outlier Joao Donato, singer and songwriter Marcos Valle and saxophonist Doug Carn. The session and gigs were part of a project called “ Jazz Is Dead,” which in early 2020 dropped its first collection. Younge and Muhammad were part of that performance, and ahead of time they’d invited the New York-based Ayers to record at Linear Labs.
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In front of a hometown crowd, during four sold-out sets over two evenings, Ayers stood center-stage, knit scarf wrapped on his head as a cap and a pair of mallets in each hand, tapping the keys of his instrument and leading a band through a set of expansive, highly percussive jazz-funk. A few great tracks aren't here (including "Kiss" and "Is It Too Late to Try"), but The Best of Roy Ayers: Love Fantasy goes the extra mile to include not only the best of Roy Ayers' work but also key non-hits such as "Gotta Find a Lover" and "You Send Me."Ġ1.Last year at the Lodge Room in Highland Park, Ayers’ vibraphone playing was assured and confident. The definitive early-'70s songs "Red Black and Green" and "We Live in Brooklyn Baby" both retain their snap and visceral charm.
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The dichotomy between Ayers as a jazz act and an R&B/jazz quiet storm presence is all but kicked off by this album. During that time, Roy Ayers was one of the leading acts on Polydor Records and solidified his R&B/disco success with "Running Away," included here. This greatest-hits title was the first of its kind upon its release in 1979.