Roy Ayers, the pioneering jazz-funk composer, producer, and vibraphonist, died Tuesday, March 4, in New York after a long illness, his family said in a post from his Facebook account. “He lived a beautiful 84 years and will be sorely missed,” the statement read.
Ayers was born in Los Angeles to parents who worked as a schoolteacher and parking attendant but played music in their spare time—his mother a piano instructor, his father a trombonist. Young Ayers studied piano and vibraphone and sang in the school choir before making the rounds of the Los Angeles bebop scene in the early 1960s, releasing his solo debut, West Coast Vibes, in 1963, and accompanying jazz greats like Herbie Mann throughout the decade. He signed to Atlantic in 1967 and Polydor in 1970, releasing at a rate of more than an album a year for the next several decades.
His foremost success came with Roy Ayers Ubiquity, formed in the early 1970s. Their music splayed Ayers’ pillowy vibraphone tones across languid jazz-funk grooves that formed the bedrock for neo-soul—and, through sampling, much of West Coast hip-hop—to come. Their 1976 hits “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” and “Searching” and the following year’s “Running Away” became Sunday-afternoon staples that were among a trove of source material raided by Dr. Dre, Mos Def, Mary J. Blige, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, J Dilla, Madlib, 2pac, the Notorious B.I.G., and dozens more hip-hop and R&B lynchpins.
Alongside his solo success, Ayers remained a prolific collaborator. He produced, in the disco era, for singers including Sylvia Striplin, and recorded an album with sometime tourmate Fela Kuti. As his influence grew, he got into the studio with a new wave of artists including Guru, the Roots, Erykah Badu, Tyler, the Creator, and, on his final album, Adrian Younge and A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad. He also became a fixture of the silver screen, scoring the Blaxploitation film Coffy, getting prominently synced in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and appearing as a performer in Questlove’s Summer of Soul documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.
The statement from Ayers’ family noted that “a celebration of Roy’s life will be forthcoming.”
