Ayers\u2019 genre-bending jazz-funk sound produced one fantastic album after another \u2013 and then found a new lease of life in hip-hop sampling<\/p>\n
\u2022 Roy Ayers, jazz-funk pioneer behind Everybody Loves the Sunshine, dies aged 84<\/a><\/p>\n There\u2019s a sense in which Roy Ayers was blessed from the start. Aged five, the son of two musicians \u2013 and by all accounts already showing talent as a pianist \u2013 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\u2019s work with Benny Goodman\u2019s quartet was subtly acclaimed by one critic as \u201cthe most beautiful example of men working together to be seen in public today\u201d.<\/p>\n For a time, it looked as if Ayers was following in Hampton\u2019s footsteps. By the time of his debut album, 1963\u2019s West Coast Vibes, Ayers was clearly carving out a space for himself in the jazz world. Running through versions of Charlie Parker\u2019s Donna Lee<\/a> or Thelonious Monk\u2019s Well You Needn\u2019t<\/a>, he was already his own man: a little hotter in his approach to the vibraphone than Milt Jackson, less inclined towards the avant than his friend Bobby Hutcherson.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ayers\u2019 genre-bending jazz-funk sound produced one fantastic album after another \u2013 and then found a new lease of life in hip-hop sampling \u2022 Roy Ayers, jazz-funk pioneer behind Everybody Loves the Sunshine, dies aged 84 There\u2019s a sense in which Roy Ayers was blessed from the start. Aged five, the son of two musicians \u2013 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}