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Everybody Loves the Sunshine is just one point of perfection in Roy Ayers’ truly ubiquitous legacy | Alexis Petridis
Ayers’ genre-bending jazz-funk sound produced one fantastic album after another – and then found a new lease of life in hip-hop sampling
On their 1972 debut He’s Coming, their music appeared to go everywhere: constantly switching from jazz to soft soul to hard funk to Gil Scott-Heron-ish proto rap, displaying both extraordinarily catholic taste in covers – the Hollies’ He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother, I Don’t Know How to Love Him from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar – and Ayers’ increasing talent as a songwriter, most notably on the superb, dramatically orchestrated We Live in Brooklyn, Baby. For the rest of the 70s, Ayers produced one fantastic album after another – Red, Black and Green, Vibrations, his incredible soundtrack to the Blaxploitation film Coffy – gradually honing and homogenising his style until it reached a point of perfection on 1976’s Everybody Loves the Sunshine. His embrace of disco offered Ayers’ detractors further ammunition: so did the glossy sound, although, frankly, it’s a pretty miserable individual who can’t grasp the glory of Fever’s ice-cool but supremely funky opening track Love Will Bring Us Back Together.
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