It's a cloudy and likely Rainy Southern California Sunday but I'm gettin' down with the Sunshine. Just Bees + Things + Flowers.
Roy Ayers was born on September 10, 1940 in Los Angeles. Thanks to his trombone playing father and piano teaching mother, he became immersed in music from day one and the story goes that he was given his first set of vibe mallets by his hero Lionel Hampton at the age of 5. Constantly performing and recording since the 1960s, he is the most well known jazz vibraphonists. He has produced some of the most loved modern soul-jazz records of all time such as, 'Everybody Loves The Sunshine', most influential afro-jazz with musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti ('Africa - Centre Of The World') and the most seminal jazz-funk, such as 'Running Away'. And that's just the surface. 2004 saw the release of 'Virgin Ubiquity: Unreleased Recordings 1976-1981' which were 'lost' sessions tapes that he had discarded. Gilles Peterson described this as the equivalent of finding a lost Beatles album. No doubt this helped him win the Gilles Peterson 2004 Worldwide Lifetime Achievement Award. Roy Ayers is ageless and evergreen and as per the title of another one of hits, remember 'We All Live In Brooklyn Baby'.
- discogs
- Review, Acid Jazz, 09.16.06"Bees + Things + Flowers" is an album with a difference. The album features new arrangements of four Incognito classics - Always There, Still a Friend of Mine, Everyday and Deep Waters - and covers of such great tunes as Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves the Sunshine, Earth Wind & Fire’s That's the Way of the World, Summer in the City as well as a stunning remake of America’s Tin Man. There are also three brand new Bluey compositions.
- The All-Time 100 Albums, Time Magazine, 11.12.06Purists complain that too many of these songs skate by on the familiarity of the R&B classics they sample. They have a point, but they also overlook the element that makes My Life both original and indelible: Blige's voice. It's never, ever perfect; sometimes Blige can barely stay on key such is the excess of feeling. Yet that careening-out-of-control sound gives My Life an instant intimacy that cleaner singers never approach. Producer Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs probably didn't twist too many dials, but he knew that he wanted to reinvent R&B, and by blending the wah-wah pedals and strings that signified romance to his parents' generation with the heavy breathing and beats that did it for the kids, Combs helped do just that.