Notes on Roy Ayers and Sample Fodder As Legacy
Now Skip, you know I love the sunshine, BUT
I saw a headline1 eulogizing Roy Ayers2 that described him as the man who made “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” which it noted had been sampled “over 100 times”. This is a weird way to frame a man who was by any measure a jazz icon, whose long, influential career spanned five decades and like four genres.
I am not going to front like I am a huge Roy Ayers fan. I learned about him because I was a sample-hunting crate digger, as one of the artists whose music was the building blocks for countless hip-hop classics. But I have never been a huge jazz guy, and my digging always favored “dollar records with breaks” and, later on, “hits from 1983”. My understanding of a given jazz dude’s importance correlates pretty strongly with whether or not Quasimoto shouted them out in “Jazz Cats Pt. 13”. There are a lot of guys who I don’t know much about strictly because Q-Tip or whoever never got around to flipping their music.
That said, I don’t think that somehow invalidates my appreciation of Roy Ayers, or anyone else’s. Jazz is healthy as a genre, a still-evolving one with young artists and (more importantly) young fans. Jazz’s relationship with hip-hop has gone both directions, and the willingness of dudes (non-gendered) like me to work backwards and outwards from “Award "Tour” to Milt Jackson played a major role in saving jazz from full-on Wynton Marsalification. It’s very cool that Kamasi Washington and Thundercat are extremely popular, but it’s also very cool that I saw Cormega play at the Blue Note with a full band. It was great and weird and intimate, and it was not Nas at Carnegie Hall with a full orchestra4.
My issue with relegating Roy Ayers to sample fodder is that the close relationship between jazz and hip-hop means the jazz pantheon is pretty well-represented in rap. If you were a well-respected jazz artist, you were probably already in everyone’s crates, from the dudes who lifted records from their parents in the 90’s, to the thorough nerds of today. Being sampled is a natural outcome of a successful jazz career.
Framing Roy Ayers as “someone who was sampled a lot” makes him sound like an obscure or lower-tier artist who would be a footnote without DJ Premier’s blessing. Especially because that is definitely a thing that happens. Linda Lyndell had an interesting career, as a white woman who worked with Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown and Isaac Hayes. But she is best known for “What A Man” because Salt-N-Pepa flipped her minor hit into a Bar Mitzvah staple thirty years later, and rightly so. You know the drums from Melvin Bliss’s “Synthetic Substitution” because they have been sampled one zillion times, but I had to look up his name right now. Roy Ayers is not that! The drums from “When The Levee Breaks” got flipped a lot but nobody would describe Led Zeppelin as “often sampled”5.
This kind of rhymes with the ongoing cultural misconception about What Gets Sampled. There is still a lingering idea that Bad Boy pioneered the obvious sample as some kind of shortcut to pop success, and that “real hip-hop” producers have to be digging for, like, rare Thai R&B6. This has never been remotely true, either because “rap grew out of dancehall and reggae, which constantly recycles its own ideas by design” or “remember how the first rap hit was a Chic song” or “just because you don’t know the sample doesn’t mean millions of other people don’t” or “good producers can flip anything, remember when Dilla made “Dooinit” out of “Give It To Me Baby”7?” whatever, choose your fighter. Saying someone is known for being sampled comes with an implication that they are either niche, obscure, or both. Roy Ayers was neither by any measure.
There’s another angle here that bothers me a little bit. I was listening to Red, Black and Green today, you know, doing my homework, and when it ended Spotify threw on the corresponding AI-generated playlist. AI sucks, blah blah, but Spotify has been doing this forever (long before AI was (Common voice) AI), and their recommendation engines are a really interesting experiment in how well machine learning can capture cultural context. Which is to say, Roy Ayers radio is a lot of well-sampled jazz. As previously discussed, that’s totally valid. And it’s wasn’t just The Hits: Bobbi Humphries was in there, and I think of Blacks and Blues more as a “record store wall joint” than something that gets train-spotted off WhoSampled.
Still, the way samples influence the jazz cannon feels like retconning, where the past gets rewritten to conform to the present. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Any DJ playing old music should be relying on songs that register with their crowd. I am totally blanking on a good example here, but like in 2005 the biggest song of the night wouldn’t be “Kiss”, it would be the next song, Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich” which everyone knew but nobody was even thinking about. A more extreme version of this is when TikTok randomly pushes Kate Bush “Running Up That Hill” to the top of the charts.
Anyways, RIP to a legend. Back to work.
I can’t find the headline, nobody is paying me, it doesn’t matter.
Shout out DJ Ayres, I had to go through and fix the spelling lol.
Ironically, Ayers doesn’t get a shout!
IYKYK
I stole this from Johnny from Good Records but I don’t know where to link him.
Are there still “they don’t even play instruments!” cats out there?