# Everybody Loves the Sunshine is just one point of perfection in Roy Ayers’ astonishing catalogue

Ayers’ genre-bending jazz-funk sound produced one fantastic album after another – and then found a new lease of life in hip-hop sampling

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## Everybody Loves the Sunshine is just one point of perfection in Roy Ayers’ truly ubiquitous legacy | Alexis Petridis

### Fri 7 Mar 2025 10.49 EST
Last modified on Fri 7 Mar 2025 10.53 EST

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There’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 to be seen in public today”.

For a time, it looked as if Ayers was following in Hampton’s footsteps. By the time of his debut album, 1963’s West Coast Vibes, Ayers was clearly carving out a space for himself in the jazz world. Running through versions of Charlie Parker’s  or Thelonious Monk’s , 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.

Ayers was just getting started: you could already sense him looking beyond jazz by the late 60s. He started confidently essaying contemporary pop, and seemed to have a particular thing for Laura Nyro’s album Eli and the 13th Confession: her Stoned Soul Picnic provided the  of his 1968 album;  turned up on 1969’s Daddy Bug, in among bossa nova tunes, and a surprisingly funereal, noir-ish take on Bacharach and David’s .

Ayers was just getting started: you could already sense him looking beyond jazz by the late 60s. He started confidently essaying contemporary pop, and seemed to have a particular thing for Laura Nyro’s album Eli and the 13th Confession: her Stoned Soul Picnic provided the  of his 1968 album;  turned up on 1969’s Daddy Bug, in among bossa nova tunes, and a surprisingly funereal, noir-ish take on Bacharach and David’s .

Ayers was just getting started: you could already sense him looking beyond jazz by the late 60s. He started confidently essaying contemporary pop, and seemed to have a particular thing for Laura Nyro’s album Eli and the 13th Confession: her Stoned Soul Picnic provided the  of his 1968 album;  turned up on 1969’s Daddy Bug, in among bossa nova tunes, and a surprisingly funereal, noir-ish take on Bacharach and David’s .

Ayers 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 to be seen in public today”.

### Roy Ayers, jazz-funk pioneer behind Everybody Loves the Sunshine, dies aged 84

Ayers’ beats are the only thing that MF Doom had in common with the Backstreet Boys

Ayers was a great bandleader in time-honoured jazz style, capable of attracting incredible musicians (David Bowie pinched both drummer Dennis Davis and guitarist Carlos Alomar from Ayers; after Davis’s departure, Bernard “Pretty” Purdie took over on drums), and spotting talent in its nascent state. He alighted on songwriter Edwin Birdsong when he was a recently demobbed soldier struggling to make his way in New York’s jazz scene; he gave vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater a starring role on the Coffy soundtrack at the start of her career. He was also able to move nimbly with changing times: the sound of disco lurked in the background of Everybody Loves the Sunshine, but on the following year’s Lifeline, he and Birdsong plunged wholeheartedly into the genre, producing one of its indelible classics, the sparkling .

[](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/mar/07/roy-ayers-everybody-loves-the-sunshine?CMP=share_btn_url)



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