Ayers grew up in Los Angeles, where his mother played piano and a young Lionel Hampton reportedly gave him a pair of mallets as a kid. That detail feels almost too perfect, but it tracks — there's a directness and a physical joy in Ayers's playing that suggests someone who fell in love with the instrument early and never lost that feeling. By his late twenties he was recording hard bop sessions and working with Herbie Mann, sharpening his chops in a more conventional jazz context before he figured out exactly what he wanted to say.

What he wanted to say turned out to involve a lot of Rhodes piano, wah-wah guitar, and a groove that sat somewhere between a jazz club and a dance floor. His group Ubiquity, formed in the early 1970s, became the vehicle for this sound, and the records he made on Polydor during that decade — Mystic Voyage (1975), Everybody Loves the Sunshine (1976), Vibrations (1976) — are the ones that made him a legend. The vibraphone, which can sound icy or academic in the wrong hands, rings warm and almost vocal in his. He plays simply, melodically, with a light touch that never shows off.

The title track from Everybody Loves the Sunshine (1976) is probably his most famous composition, and it's a good entry point precisely because it asks so little of you. It's a short, gentle meditation — barely a song in the conventional sense — that just floats. That quality runs through a lot of his best work: he's not trying to dazzle you with complexity, he's trying to put you somewhere. Whether that somewhere counts as jazz is a question that bothered critics more than it ever seemed to bother him.

The hip-hop world discovered him in a big way during the late 1980s and 1990s. Producers from A Tribe Called Quest to Mary J. Blige to Foxy Brown dug into his catalog, and suddenly a generation of listeners who had never set foot in a jazz club knew his melodic signatures intimately without necessarily knowing his name. That's a strange kind of immortality, but it also reflects something genuine about his music — those loops work because the originals were already built around feel and repetition, not just chord changes.

Ayers continued performing and recording well into his later decades, a living connection between the soul-jazz era and everything it seeded. He's not a figure who revolutionized the vibraphone the way Gary Burton or Bobby Hutcherson pushed the instrument's harmonic possibilities — his contribution is more about mood, accessibility, and a specific Californian warmth that turned out to have very long legs. If you're coming to him fresh, start with the Polydor run. Give it time to settle. It rewards patience and a relaxed room.