The nine studio albums Roy Ayers Ubiquity made from 1972-77 are considered his most crucial work. He moved to New York as funk music morphed into fusion in the early 1970s, formed Ubiquity and signed to Polydor Records.
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His 1963 debut solo album, “West Coast Vibes,” was produced by the late Downbeat editor and Times jazz critic Leonard Feather, and across the 1960s Ayers released a series of albums for labels including Pacific Jazz and Atlantic. In the interim, his legacy had only grown.īorn and raised on East Vernon a few blocks from the then-thriving Central Avenue jazz and R&B scene, Ayers started playing music in the mid-1940s and earned his earliest credits as part of the city’s cool jazz movement. Younge and Muhammad’s own band, the Midnight Hour, rounded out the compilation.Īyers hadn’t issued a full-length album in nearly a decade. It teased the Ayers album and forthcoming new work from other veteran jazz, soul and Latin artists: saxophonist Gary Bartz, keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith, Brazilian jazz-funk band Azymuth, multi-instrumentalist and Gil Scott-Heron collaborator Brian Jackson, bossa nova outlier Joao Donato, singer and songwriter Marcos Valle and saxophonist Doug Carn. The session and gigs were part of a project called “ Jazz Is Dead,” which in early 2020 dropped its first collection. Younge and Muhammad were part of that performance, and ahead of time they’d invited the New York-based Ayers to record at Linear Labs. In front of a hometown crowd, during four sold-out sets over two evenings, Ayers stood center-stage, knit scarf wrapped on his head as a cap and a pair of mallets in each hand, tapping the keys of his instrument and leading a band through a set of expansive, highly percussive jazz-funk. Last year at the Lodge Room in Highland Park, Ayers’ vibraphone playing was assured and confident.