Ayers & Graces

 

Roy Ayers - Red, Black & Green


As promised, we'll start to get to some of the passings of recent weeks.

When I do this stuff, there's always a preliminary phase at the end of every month where I start to hammer out whatever I might be into working on that coincides with whatever birthdays and anniversaries are imminent.

With the deaths, I try to wait for the person's next birthday, unless it just happened and I don't wanna wait the 11 months for it to come back around.

Or unless the deceased is a person of such seismic, globally impactful significance that I feel obligated to play undertaker and assist, in some tiny way, in the grieving process people are feeling, by providing a vibrant representation of what whoever just died meant whilst they were alive and doing whatever it was they did to become someone people would mourn upon their departure.

There have been a whole chunk of those type of farewells of late, not least of which was Roy Ayers -- known for just this sort of cultural Ubiquity -- this past March 4th.

As we know he first came to prominence in the second half of the 1960s in the band of flautist Herbie Mann, a few of those years spent in the front line alongside volcanic guitar shaman Sonny Sharrock.

Both of these immeasurably influential artists -- each regarded in the highest echelon by millions of music lovers and players, and in totally divergent, singular ways almost entirely distinct from each other -- branched off and out of Herbie Mann's orbit as the Sixties flowed, lava-lamp-like, into the musically fulsome, ultra-diverse and very bell-bottomed Seventies.

Whilst Sonny Sharrock went on to inspire countless guitarists as a player somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and horn melters like Pharoah Sanders, Roy Ayers went on to a whole career as a musician capable of fusing the Jazz and Rock worlds in a wholly different -- and way more popular, in terms of the charts and the dancefloor -- vibe. Yeah that's right, vibe! You didn't think I would go a whole one of these things without breaking out at least one cringeworthy pun, did you?

He also scored a few films, including perhaps the best of the Blaxploitation genre flicks, Coffy. Which featured a title song so catchy, there surely must have been coffee commercials that use it, although I don't think I've ever seen one. Sure a whole lot funkier than that one where the best part of waking up is Folger's in your cup, anyways. Plus, it had Pam Grier to get you out of the bedroom, at least metaphorically.

So as I was saying, when I am working these things up and going through the phase where I decide what of the b'days and concert anniversaries that are coming up feature music I can stand to hear over and over again while I'm tediously fixing (and hopefully improving, lol) the sound of them, I sometimes notice who and which have milestone ones ending in 0s and 5s, and make a mental note to try and get to those if I can.

I remember last September, telling myself oh yeah, he'll make it to 85 next year, no problem! So no need. See me for Lotto numbers later on, I guess.

He may not have gotten to 85, but man! He sure trod those boards until he fell over... I remember watching a concert of his from not that long ago, so he toured well into his 80s.

Here is one from just 9 years ago, where he and his ultra tight band put it on some enthusiastic Serbians maybe not used to something this funky.

I turned down the drums a little -- and turned up the occasionally indistinct vocals -- using the handy dandy AI stem separator in Audacity, to correct the drum-heaviness of the mix. Which was caused, I thought when watching the video from which this comes, by the placement of the drummer's vocal mic -- he sings almost the whole time -- picking up too much of the guy's actual drums. You can see it in the thumbnail cover I made for it, now that I'm high enough to notice!

Roy Ayers
Terminal Music & Arts Festival
Letnja Scena Kabare
Sombor, Serbia
8.4.2016

01 introduction
02 Searchin'
03 Running Away
04 Red, Black & Green
05 Everybody Loves the Sunshine
06 Spirit of Doo-Doo
07 We Live In Brooklyn Baby
08 I Wanna Touch You Baby
09 The Black Family
10 Life Is Just a Moment
11 Don't Stop the Feeling

Total time: 1:30:04
disc break goes after Track 06

Roy Ayers - MIDI vibraphone, percussion & vocals
John Pressley - vocals & percussion
Donald Nicks - bass & vocals
Bernard Davis - drums & vocals
Everett Freeman, Jr. - keyboards & vocals

320/48k audio extracted from an HD YouTube video
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, repaired, edited, tracked, demuxed, rebalanced and remastered by EN, March 2025
561 MB FLAC/direct link

I have a bunch of crunch lined up for the end of the munch as we vie, Olympian-like, for the much-coveted title of Best Old Dead Jazz Guys Blog, but I will try to spread out the memorials so we don't become crushed, like grapes of wrath, under the weight of our obsidian, immovable grief.

It's closer to the truth to say that when they alter the DNA of music with universal messages of positive, shared insight -- and then make it to old age, like Roy Ayers did -- we really shouldn't let ourselves get too hung up in the moment of loss at all. And that their passing -- inevitable as it is, as we all will shed these bodies and return to the Bardo Of Between at some point -- is cause for not so much the grief brought by tragedy, but for the celebration of life well lived. That may seem to trivialize the shock and immediacy of death, and minimize its trauma.... but like Red, Black and Green, if you think about it, you'll know what I mean.--J.

9.10.1940 - 3.4.2025
everybody loves the sunshine