When Roy Ayers was five, the bandleader Lionel Hampton gave him a pair of vibraphone mallets at a concert in Los Angeles. Ayers grew up to become one of the best-known vibraphonists in jazz, and his 1976 song “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” became one of the most sampled records in hip-hop and R&B. He died in New York City in early March 2025 after a long illness, his family said. He was 84.
From hard bop to Ubiquity
Ayers was born in Los Angeles in 1940 and took up the vibraphone seriously as a teenager. He began in hard bop and played with the flautist Herbie Mann in the 1960s. In the early 1970s he formed Roy Ayers Ubiquity, a band that mixed jazz with funk, soul and Latin rhythms, and he wrote the soundtrack for the 1973 blaxploitation film Coffy, starring Pam Grier.
Everybody Loves the Sunshine
“Everybody Loves the Sunshine”, a slow, hazy song about summer, became his signature. In the 1990s it found a second life when Mary J. Blige built “My Life” around it, and producers sampled it again and again; Ayers’s records have been used by artists including Dr. Dre, A Tribe Called Quest, Kanye West, Common, Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator. He also had R&B hits of his own, including “Running Away” in 1977, and twelve of his albums reached the Billboard 200.
The godfather of neo-soul
Because so many later artists borrowed from him, Ayers was often called the godfather of neo-soul and a pioneer of acid jazz. He kept touring into his eighties, and in 2020 recorded an album with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad for their label, Jazz Is Dead. He was survived by his wife, Argerie, and their children.
Ayers made dozens of albums, but one song from one summer in the 1970s became the sound that a generation of hip-hop producers reached for when they wanted warmth.