★★★★★
Roy Ayers had a career before he had hit records, and this reissue proves the vibraphonist was both well-versed and eloquent within the realm of post-bop jazz. In the company largely of a cast including pianist Jack Wilson and Curtis Amy on tenor and soprano saxophones, Ayers works his way through the kind of programme of standards and originals that was pretty much the order of the day back in the early 1960s...
- www.allaboutjazz.com
2012-09-17
★★★★★
Hanging on the vibraphone In 1983, already two dozen albums into his career and having bashed vibes with everyone from Herbie Mann to Fela Kuti, Roy Ayers somehow found himself without a record deal. Having left Polydor behind and not yet started at Columbia, Lots Of Love became the only Ayers album to be released on his own Uno Melodic label...
- www.recordcollectormag.com
2010-12-21
★★★★★
A bit of a legendary tale surrounds Mr Ayers. Attending a concert by jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton at the age of five, the vibraphone virtuoso passed a set of vibe mallets and, it would seem, no small part of his talent to little Roy. The result? Jazz-funk legend, hip-hop icon and the greatest vibraphonist of the late 20th century...
- www.gigwise.com
2010-11-09
★★★★★
Smokey Robinson was, as Dylan delighted in saying, often thought of as America's greatest poet. One reason, if not THE reason, was his ability to carve soul that straddled so much. Soul that was powerful and aggressive and frank, but disguised as ballads and hummable tunes, gentle, lulling platitudes to loss. Perhaps this kind of soul, the Motown/pop/ballad side, opened up America's minds, opened up the world's minds, more than we give it credit for...
- www.gigwise.com
2010-11-09
★★★★★
Roy Ayers has over four decades in the music industry. He is known as a jazz vibraphonist, a composer of R&B;, funk and disco, and a prophet of acid jazz. At 64, he has an impressive volume of work that has never been released, until now. In 2004 BBE released Virgin Ubiquity, the first in a series of Roy Ayers. Virgin Ubiquity II represents over one year of restoring a huge quantity of two-inch reels...
- www.hour.ca
2010-11-02
★★★★★
Now available on vinyl, sweet. Wow, this one's a real surprise, because as much as we're fans of jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers' early to mid-seventies rare groove and jazz albums, his later output that we knew of, pretty much fell into cheesy disco and RnB. So when Universal Sounds re-issued this album from 1983 that we had never heard of, we were a bit wary but also highly intrigued...
- aquariusrecords.org
2010-09-20
★★★★★
You Send Me was US vibraphonist and bandleader Roy Ayers' 19th album. His remarkable productivity during the 70s has to be applauded. He had released not one, not two, but three albums between this and his career-defining Everybody Loves the Sunshine, which emerged just 24 months earlier. But his prolific output did not reflect in any loss of quality...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2010-09-16
★★★★★
After three weeks of hard freeze, of slipping on mutt-stained patches of frost and iced Brooklyn gutters, with December's cigarette butts still suspended in February's frozen amber puddles, the cold snap finally snapped, and thermometers inched above zero degrees. Just to feel the sun cut through the blustery wind promised the approach of spring, and it was then that I relied on vibraphonist Roy Ayers to help soundtrack and celebrate warm weather's imminent return...
- pitchfork.com
2010-09-11
★★★★★
Exact repro reissue of virtuoso vibraphonist Roy Ayers' 1967 pre-Ubiquity solo album. More in a straight ahead jazz style than his earlier work, this record features Herbie Hancock, Sonny Sharrock and Ron Carter. A perfect introduction to the early work of one of the "prophets of acid jazz.
- www.forcedexposure.com
2010-08-27