Roy Ayers, Vibraphonist Who Injected Soul Into Jazz, Dies at 84

New York Times

06-03-2025

Roy Ayers, a vibraphonist who in the 1970s helped pioneer a new, funkier strain of jazz, becoming a touchstone for many artists who followed and one of the most sampled musicians by hip-hop artists, died on Tuesday in New York City. He was 84.
His death was announced on his Facebook page. The announcement said he died after a long illness but did not specify a cause or say where in New York he died.
In addition to being one of the acknowledged masters of the jazz vibraphone, Mr. Ayers was a leader in the movement that added electric instruments, rock and R&B rhythms, and a more soulful feel to jazz. He was also one of the more commercially successful jazz musicians of his generation.
He released nearly four dozen albums, most notably 22 during his 12 years with Polydor Records. Twelve of his Polydor albums spent a collective 149 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 chart. His composition 'Everybody Loves the Sunshine,' from a 1976 album of the same name, has been sampled nearly 200 times by artists including Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige and Snoop Dogg. The electric piano hook from 'Love,' on his first Polydor album, 'Ubiquity' — which introduced his group of the same name — was used in Deee-Lite's 1990 dance hit 'Groove Is in the Heart.'
'Roy Ayers is largely responsible for what we deem as 'neo-soul,'' the producer Adrian Younge, who collaborated with Mr. Ayers and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest in 2020 on the second album in the 'Jazz Is Dead' series, which showcases frequently sampled jazz musicians, told Clash magazine. 'His sound mixed with cosmic soul-jazz is really what created artists like Erykah Badu and Jill Scott. It was just that groove.
'That's not to say people around then weren't making music with a groove," he added, 'but he is definitely a pioneer.'
Roy Edward Ayers Jr. was born on Sep. 12, 1940, in Los Angeles, one of four children, and the only son, of Roy and Ruby Ayers. His father was a scrap dealer and an amateur trombonist; his mother, a schoolteacher and piano tutor, gave Roy lessons from an early age.
Speaking to the English newspaper The Nottingham Post in 2013, Mr. Ayers recalled that his first exposure to the vibraphone came via a giant of the instrument, when his parents took young Roy to see him perform:
'I got my first set of vibraphone mallets from Lionel Hampton when I was 5 years old, so I always wanted to be like Lionel Hampton. At one time, when I was very young, I was thinking I was going to be Lionel Hampton. My mother and father always played his music, so I was reared on Lionel Hampton.'
Mr. Ayers studied music and music history with the celebrated instructor Samuel R. Browne, whose other students included Dexter Gordon and Charles Mingus, while attending Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles.
He made his first records in the months after his 21st birthday, under the leadership of the saxophonists Curtis Amy and Vi Redd. He made his debut as a leader before he turned 23 with the aptly titled United Artists album 'West Coast Vibes.'
Mr. Ayers received his first national exposure in 1966, when he joined the band of the flutist Herbie Mann, one of the more successful musicians in jazz at the time. He would go on to make 11 albums as a member of Mr. Mann's group for Atlantic Records and Mr. Mann's own label, Embryo. Mr. Mann helped him get a contract with Atlantic and produced his four albums for the label and Columbia Japan between 1967 and 1969.
Those were instrumental albums very much in keeping with the post-bop style of the era, but the Laura Nyro-written title track of his 1968 album, 'Stoned Soul Picnic,' with its use of electric bass and a horn section emulating the sound of a church choir and electric bass, foretold Mr. Ayers's next period.
In 1970, he formed the Roy Ayers Ubiquity, the band with which he would become a soul-jazz star. The name was suggested by his manager, Myrna Williams — and, he explained in a 2016 oral interview for website The HistoryMakers, the choice 'was wonderful, because I can tell everybody I can be everywhere at the same time.'
After his contract with Atlantic ended, Mr. Ayers began a long and fruitful partnership with Polydor. He and his band released 11 albums from 1970 to 1977, with such evocative titles as 'Change Up the Groove' and 'Vibrations.' In addition to using electric instruments and producing grooves more suited to a dance floor than a jazz club, the Roy Ayers Ubiquity included vocals by Mr. Ayers. Some members of the group were featured on Mr. Ayers's soundtrack for the 1973 blaxploitation film 'Coffy,' starring Pam Grier.
While the group was popular and would ultimately prove highly influential, it received a mixed reaction from critics. Reviewing a performance at the Village Vanguard in New York in December 1970, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote, 'Even though Mr. Ayers gets a hard, heavy tone from his vibraphone, his playing is often buried under the eruptive power of his accompaniment or is absorbed by the very similar sound of the electric piano.'
Mr. Wilson went on to say that the fuzztone attachment Mr. Ayers had added to his vibes 'produces a rasping noise, which, in its amplified state, gives one an all too vivid idea of what it might be like to be locked in a closet with a troupe of demented bagpipers.'
Much as Mr. Ayers's career had been nurtured by Mr. Mann, he would nurture his younger charges in Ubiquity; he also produced an album by the group, without him, in 1978.
The keyboardist Philip Woo, who was part of the band in its later stages and continued to work with Mr. Ayers after Ubiquity's dissolution in the early 1980s, wrote in an email: 'Roy Ayers discovered me in Seattle in 1976 when I was 19. It is very unusual for an artist to pick up musicians while on tour, so I was very fortunate for this to happen. I was in local bands until then. I credit him for launching my career.'
Three of Mr. Ayers's most significant albums were collaborations: with the trombonist Wayne Henderson, a founder of The Jazz Crusaders, in 1978 and 1980, and with the Afrobeat trailblazer Fela Kuti in 1980. That album, 'Music of Many Colors,' was recorded in Mr. Kuti's native Nigeria.
Mr. Ayers was the inspiration for the 2022 memoir 'My Life in the Sunshine: Searching for My Father and Discovering My Family,' by the musician and record producer Nabil Ayers, who wrote of growing up as Mr. Ayers's son even though Mr. Ayers played no role in raising him.
Information on other survivors was not immediately available.
In the last decades of his career, Mr. Ayers recorded for several different labels while staying loyal to the genre he had helped create. He also made guest appearances on albums by Rick James, Whitney Houston, George Benson, the rapper Guru and others.
Discussing his legacy as an artist and entertainer with The HistoryMakers, Mr. Ayers said: 'There's an old saying, when you do what you do, you do it to others too. My legacy is that I can make everybody happy. Everybody, even the negative ones.'