Roy Ayers/Ubiquity: Red Black & Green [VAMPI SOUL]

Why you'll love it

This Vampi Soul reissue is pressed on 180g vinyl. Red Black & Green catches Ayers and Ubiquity right as they were turning jazz into funk, the sound that made him one of the most sampled musicians in hip hop.

This edition

• 180g vinyl

About the album

Lionel Hampton handed Roy Ayers his first pair of vibraphone mallets when he was five. By the early 1970s Ayers had taken the instrument somewhere Hampton never imagined, with Ubiquity, a band built to blur jazz, soul and funk into one long groove. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles, right in the heart of the city's Black music scene.

Producer Jerry Schoenbaum and engineer Eddie Kramer gave the band a rich, warm sound. Harry Whitaker's electric piano and Dennis Davis's drums anchor the rhythm section, Sonny Fortune, Charles Tolliver and Garnett Brown add horns, and a string section sweetens the edges. The title track, written with Edwin Birdsong, is a proud, slinky anthem, "Cocoa Butter" glides, and the band's takes on Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" and the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" show how far Ayers could stretch a soul hit.

Ayers, who passed in March 2025, went on to be called the godfather of neo soul, and producers have been mining records like this one for decades. Somewhere a beatmaker is sampling it as we type, and we wish them well.

Also at Kops: more Roy Ayers on vinyl · browse 70s Soul On Up

Tracklist

Listen

On Polydor / Vampi Soul (cat# VAMPI 323), a reissue of the 1973 album.