3 d. ago
Everybody Loves the Sunshine is just one point of perfection in Roy Ayers’ truly ubiquitous legacy | Alexis Petridis
Ayers’ genre-bending jazz-funk sound produced one fantastic album after another – and then found a new lease of life in hip-hop sampling• Roy Ayers, jazz-funk pioneer behind Everybody Loves the Sunshine, dies aged 84There’s a sense in which Roy Ayers was blessed from the start. Aged five, the son of two musicians – and by all accounts already showing talent as a pianist – he was famously presented with his first set of vibraphone mallets backstage at a gig by Lionel Hampton. If you wanted to take a romantic view, you could look on that as an act of benediction: the man who had more or less singlehandedly popularised an instrument that had previously been viewed as a novelty passing on the mantle along with his mallets. Hampton had broken racial barriers in the process: at a time when jazz bands were almost entirely segregated, Hampton and pianist Teddy Wilson’s work with Benny Goodman’s quartet was subtly acclaimed by one critic as “the most beautiful example of men working together...
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