These days I don’t normally review historical records, but this time it sure feels like it. Roy Ayers JID 002 sounds like an artifact of the early-mid 70s, around the time of this album’s namesake’s imperial, Polydor period. Roy Ayers is a jazz vibraphone player who gained a good measure of respect in the mainstream jazz realm through the 60s but as the decade drew to a close, Ayers did what a lot of his peers like Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard and — most notably — Miles Davis did and electrified his music. Ayers formed his Ubiquity band that moved away from jazz and toward contemporary R&B, disco and funk to forge a mixture that laid out the blueprints for the smooth jazz, acid jazz and neo-soul that came around a whole generation later.
Ayers and Ubiquity reeled off a steady succession of albums during the 70s that became classics of the R&B side of fusion…Ubiquity, Coffy, Mystic Voyage, and Everybody Loves The Sunshine to list a few. You may well have heard his music many times and not know it, as these seminal albums provided plenty of rich fodder for hip-hop sampling.
Producer, soundtrack composer and studio owner Adrian Younge and collaborator Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe Called Quest) make up the retro-soul act Midnight Hour but are fast becoming the Rick Rubin of soul-jazz, getting the old legends of the genre back in the studio to rekindle the magic of their salad days with new material played in the way that made them legend to begin with. Recently they kicked off a Jazz Is Dead series, an ironically named project, as they teamed up with funky fusion godfathers like Marcos Valle, Azymuth, Gary Bartz and Brian Jackson to put together analog-drenched groove jazz of eight tracks called Jazz Is Dead 001 that places the music during the time when these old guys were in their youthful prime.
One of those tracks, “Hey Lover,” was composed and performed by Younge and Muhmmad with Ayers, and the three got back in the wayback machine and crafted seven more songs together that follows up the compilation of JID 001 with one the is centered around just one historically important artist: Roy Ayers JID 002.
Vocals, especially background vocals, became a key element of those Ubiquity days, and Younge/Muhammad were keen on making it a central feature of most of their songs for their Ayers tribute. “Synchronized Vibration,” “Hey Lover,” “Soulful and Unique” with its sultry vocals, whining Moog, clavinet and rubbery bass, puts listeners in that wayback machine, too. Even the reverberating rim taps from drummer Greg Paul are unmistakable echoes of a past framed by bell bottoms, gas shortages and post-Watergate reckoning.
The instrumental “Shadows of the East” feature a couple of other soul jazz notables in trombonist Phil Ranelin and saxophonist Wendell Harrison in a groovilicious, psychedelic haze of a song, Mellotron and all. Although the chorus singing returns on “Sunflowers,” so do Ranelin and Harrison, and the vibes of Ayers himself resonate more than on other tracks. On here and on the tough groove “Solace”, Ayers just lets his vibraphone pulsate and glow behind the two horn players.
“Gravity” bounces along a Brazilian pulse and “African Sounds” with its proto-hip-hop rhythm features spoken word poetry celebrating Black pride in spiritually positive prose that sort of seems prescient giving the events of today.
Although Ayers’ classic music was very much rooted in its time, it, too was often prescient in so many ways in both style and words. Roy Ayers JID 002 does a great job of showing the timelessness of that music coming from the past with a message for people of the present.
Roy Ayers JID 002 becomes available June 19, 2020 from Jazz Is Dead.
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