American jazz and funk musician Roy Ayers has died. Photo / Getty Images
American jazz and funk musician Roy Ayers has died. Photo / Getty Images
The vibraphonist, producer and composer played on some of the hardest-grooving soul jazz of the 1960s before becoming a crossover jazz-funk hitmaker in the 70s.
Here’s a kind of hip, laid-back, feel-good mood that we call “vibing.”
The vibraphone isn’t the source of that slang term, but the instrument has a strong claim on epitomising it anyway.
Its metallic, resonant sound is so inherently cool and mellow that even its lightning-fast virtuosos — mainly in jazz, where the vibes most often appear — sound more chilled-out than they really are.
Roy Ayers, who died March 4 at 84 after a long illness, understood this perhaps better than any other vibraphonist.
Roy Ayers perfroms onstage during the Bayfront Miami Jazz Festival in 2021. Photo / Getty Images
You can hear it in his breakthrough record, the soundtrack to the 1973 blaxploitation classic Coffy.
All the requirements for blazing-hot funk to break out are there in the movie’s theme: energetic drums, slippery bass, percussive guitar and horns.
Yet there sits Ayers, putting tranquil chords into the rhythmic accents, keeping the whole thing at a simmer rather than a boil. (Even his solo, which carries a lot of oomph, goes down with the cool sensation of a rainfall.)
As Ayers’s star rose, so did the cool in his music; the simmer went down.
By the time of his signature hit, 1976’s Everybody Loves the Sunshine, he had mastered it so thoroughly that the song didn’t need a vibraphone solo: Even the instrument’s accents are barely noticeable, washed out in the mix by guitar and Fender Rhodes.
Yet the mellowness they brought to Ayers’s music is the whole ballgame.
And look how Ayers described the atmosphere surrounding the tune’s creation: “The sun was down, but the vibe in the studio was really nice,” he told the Guardian in 2017. “Pure vibes.” He knew what he and his instrument represented when they came together.
It translated easily to Ayers’s other landmark tunes, such as 1976’s Searching — which even restored the burning horns that Sunshine stripped out but achieved a similarly chill result.
The next year’s Running Away brought Ayers a genuine dance club hit, the kind that merited a longer version on a 12-inch record.
Roy Ayers (left) with film director Spike Lee. Photo / Getty Images
Those are the versions where we expect the song’s kinetic energy to throttle up to 11. Instead, though, the big feature of Running Away’s extended mix is … a vibraphone solo.
It plays right into the groove, offering a lyrical complement to the propulsive rhythm. But make no mistake: it’s a coolant, and it feels like one.
Ayers tapped into a tremendous power when he put the chill-out into funk and dance music. There’s a reason that version of him became a musical and cultural force.
His recordings are part of the foundation of contemporary R&B and hip-hop. The likes of Jay-Z, a Tribe Called Quest, Mary J. Blige and Jill Scott have all woven samples of Ayers’s tracks into their own. Sunshine alone is a cottage industry; Searching isn’t far behind.
When the jazz-rap pioneer Guru wanted to create that vibe, he bypassed the samples and got the man himself. Ayers appeared on the seminal 1993 hip-hop album Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 and subsequently toured with Guru.
In all cases, Ayers’s presence comes with a mission to turn the temperature of the music down — to create a vibe.
Ayers’s vibe was one that never ceased to be relevant. In 2018, he even landed the gig that’s become the signifier of musical-cultural relevance in the United States: an NPR Tiny Desk concert.
