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. 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.

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