Roy Ayers was more than music. He was a frequency, a wavelength, a pulse embedded in the DNA of Black cool. And if you were a Black kid growing up in Detroit — where his sound was pushed and heavily promoted on Black radio — then Ayers was as much a part of your upbringing as coney dogs, Belle Isle summers, and Saturday morning car washes in the driveway.

His music was the soundtrack to a warm summer night. It hummed from open windows, spilled from boomboxes on front porches, and pulsed through Cadillac speakers rolling slow down Woodward. And now, the maestro has left the stage. Ayers died on Thursday in New York City at the age of 84 after battling a long illness.

The first time I heard Roy

I don’t remember the exact moment I first heard Roy Ayers — his music was just there, like sunlight or the hum of streetlights at dusk. But I do remember the first time I understood why his music mattered.

I was a kid, maybe 11 or 12, riding in my uncle’s Cutlass Supreme. He turned up WJZZ, and suddenly, those golden keys and cosmic chords filled the car: “Everybody loves the sunshine…”

The warmth of that song hit like a July afternoon, like fresh-cut grass and melted ice cream. It was Blackness distilled into sound. It was the sonic manifestation of our joy, our pain, our resilience. Ayers sang AND spoke to us, through shimmering vibraphone notes that floated like incense in the air.

The architect of vibes

Musically speaking, Ayers was a builder of worlds. In the 1960s, he stood at the crossroads of jazz, soaking in the brilliance of icons like Lionel Hampton and Herbie Mann. But he wasn’t content to stay in one lane. He saw the future of Black music before the rest of the world caught up.

With Roy Ayers Ubiquity, he stretched the boundaries of jazz — fusing it with funk, soul, R&B, and an unmistakable cosmic spirituality. He saw that jazz wasn’t just about technical mastery; it was about feel, about translating human experience into rhythm and melody.

His music had a pulse, a body-moving urgency. “Running Away,” “Searchin’,” “Love Will Bring Us Back Together” — these were anthemic jazz-funk grooves of liberation and blueprints for a new Black sound. Ayers gave jazz its hips and he made it dance.

Seeing him live — a revelation

If you grew up in Detroit during the ‘70s and ‘80s, you lived his music. WJZZ, the city’s legendary jazz station, kept him in heavy rotation and made sure that tracks like “Mystic Voyage,” “We Live in Brooklyn, Baby,” “You Send Me,” and other choice selects from his discography were part of our daily sonic diet.

But hearing him on the radio was one thing. Seeing him live? That was a completely different experience. I had the privilege of either catching him live or hosting and introducing him numerous times at various venues.

He loved performing in Detroit and felt at home here musically. And with every show, he would pull you into the music and make you a part of it. His stage presence and musicianship, especially during his Ubiquity days, were effortless and special. He had this way of making a venue — whether a packed amphitheater or an intimate jazz club — feel like a warm family reunion in your living room, and you had no option but to vibe with him.

“Roy Ayers was a frequency shifter, a man who understood that music is more than notes and chords, and at its core, is meant to move you. And now, he belongs to the ancestors.”

The hip-hop connection

Ayers’ genius didn’t fade with time. In fact, he became even more relevant as hip-hop ascended. His catalog became a treasure trove for producers and MCs who recognized the richness of his grooves.

A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock, Mary J. Blige, J Dilla, Digable Planets — so many architects of hip-hop’s golden age studied Roy Ayers, flipping his beats, chopping his melodies, breathing new life into his rhythms.

To this day, you can hear his DNA in the music of Kendrick Lamar, Flying Lotus, Robert Glasper and countless lo-fi producers who use his vibraphone-laced sound as a spiritual compass.

And here’s the thing — Roy never tripped about being sampled. He loved it. He wanted his music to live on, to mutate and evolve. He once told me after one of his shows that “music is supposed to be shared, that’s what keeps it alive.”

Vibes never die

Roy Ayers was a frequency shifter, a man who understood that music is more than notes and chords, and at its core, is meant to move you. And now, he belongs to the ancestors.

It’s hard to imagine a world without Roy Ayers, but then again, we don’t have to. His music will always be here, humming through late-night DJ sets, spilling from open windows, reverberating in the headphones of kids who weren’t even born when he first picked up the vibraphone.

Tonight, I’m doing what feels right — I’m pulling out his catalog. I’ll start with Mystic Voyage, let it wash over me like it always does. Then I’ll move forward, then move backward, let the music take me where it always has — because with Roy, time never moved in a straight line anyway.

Everything else can wait.

Because while we say goodbye to the man, the music? That’s eternal. Roy once told us that “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” And even now, even in the sadness of his passing, the light of his music continues to shine and refuses to dim. Rest in rhythm, legend.

NEW YORK (AP) — Roberta Flack, the Grammy-winning singer and pianist whose intimate vocal and musical style made her one of the top recordings artists of the 1970s and an influential performer long after, died Monday. She was 88.

She died at home surrounded by her family, publicist Elaine Schock said in a statement. Flack announced in 2022 she had ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing.

Little known before her early 30s, Flack became an overnight star after Clint Eastwood used “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” as the soundtrack for one of cinema’s more memorable and explicit love scenes, between the actor and Donna Mills in his 1971 film “Play Misty for Me.” The hushed, hymn-like ballad, with Flack’s graceful soprano afloat on a bed of soft strings and piano, topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972 and received a Grammy for record of the year.

“The record label wanted to have it re-recorded with a faster tempo, but he said he wanted it exactly as it was,” Flack told The Associated Press in 2018. “With the song as a theme song for his movie, it gained a lot of popularity and then took off.”

In 1973, she matched both achievements with “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” becoming the first artist to win consecutive Grammys for best record.

She was a classically trained pianist discovered in the late 1960s by jazz musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known.” Versatile enough to summon the up-tempo gospel passion of Aretha Franklin, Flack often favored a more reflective and measured approach.

For Flack’s many admirers, she was a sophisticated and bold new presence in the music world and in the social and civil rights movements of the time, her friends including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis, whom Flack visited in prison while Davis faced charges — for which she was acquitted — for murder and kidnapping. Flack sang at the funeral of Jackie Robinson, major league baseball’s first Black player, and was among the many guest performers on the feminist children’s entertainment project created by Marlo Thomas, “Free to Be … You and Me.”

Roberta Cleopatra Flack, the daughter of musicians, was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. A gospel fan as a child, she was so talented a piano player that at age 15 she received a full scholarship to Howard, the historically Black university.

Flack’s other hits from the 1970s included the cozy “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and two duets with her close friend and former Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway, “Where Is the Love” and ”The Closer I Get to You” — a partnership that ended in tragedy. In 1979, she and Hathaway were working on an album of duets when he suffered a breakdown during recording and later that night fell to his death from his hotel room in Manhattan.

“We were deeply connected creatively,” Flack told Vibe in 2022, upon the 50th anniversary of the million-selling “Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway” album. “He could play anything, sing anything. Our musical synergy was unlike (anything) I’d had before or since.”

She never matched her first run of success, although she did have a hit in the 1980s with the Peabo Bryson duet “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” and in the 1990s with the Maxi Priest duet “Set the Night to Music.” In the mid-90s, Flack received new attention after the Fugees recorded a Grammy-winning cover of “Killing Me Softly,” which she eventually performed on stage with the hip-hop group.

Overall, she won five Grammys (three for “Killing Me Softly”), was nominated eight other times and was given a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2020, with John Legend and Ariana Grande among those praising her.

“I love that connection to other artists because we understand music, we live music, it’s our language,” Flack told songwriteruniverse.com in 2020. “Through music we understand what we are thinking and feeling. No matter what challenge life presents, I am at home with my piano, on a stage, with my band, in the studio, listening to music. I can find my way when I hear music.”

In 2022, Beyoncé placed Flack, Franklin and Diana Ross among others in a special pantheon of heroines name-checked in the Grammy-nominated “Queens Remix” of “Break My Soul.”

Flack was briefly married to Stephen Novosel, an interracial relationship that led to tension with each of their families, and earlier had a son, the singer and keyboardist Bernard Wright. For years, she lived in Manhattan’s Dakota apartment building, on the same floor as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who became a close friend and provided liner notes for a Flack album of Beatles covers, “Let It Be Roberta.” She also devoted extensive time to the Roberta Flack School of Music, based in New York and attended mostly by students between ages 6 to 14.

Flack had taught music in D.C.-area junior high schools for several years in her 20s, while performing after hours in clubs. She sometimes backed other singers, but her own shows at Washington’s renowned Mr. Henry’s attracted such celebrity patrons as Burt Bacharach, Ramsey Lewis and Johnny Mathis. The club’s owner, Henry Yaffe, converted an apartment directly above into a private studio, the Roberta Flack Room.

“I wanted to be successful, a serious all-round musician,” she told The Telegraph in 2015. “I listened to a lot of Aretha, the Drifters, trying to do some of that myself, playing, teaching.”

Flack was signed to Atlantic Records and her debut album, “First Take,” a blend of gospel, soul, flamenco and jazz, came out in 1969. One track was a love song by the English folk artist Ewan MacColl: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written in 1957 for his future wife, singer Peggy Seeger. Flack not only knew of the ballad, but used it while working with a glee club during her years as an educator.

“I was teaching at Banneker Junior High in Washington, D.C. It was part of the city where kids weren’t that privileged, but they were privileged enough to have music education. I really wanted them to read music. First, I’d get their attention. (Flack starts singing a Supremes hit) ‘Stop, in the name of love.’ Then I could teach them!” she told the Tampa Bay Times in 2012.

“You have to do all sorts of things when you’re dealing with kids in the inner-city,” she said. “I knew they’d like the part where (‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’) goes ‘The first time ever I kissed your mouth.’ Ooh, ‘Kissed your mouth!’ Once the kids got past the giggles, we were good.”

–Reporting by Hillel Italie, Associated Press