Roy Ayers Brings Toronto True Neo-Soul

Roy Ayers Brings Toronto True Neo-Soul

By Ryan B. Patrick
Pride Entertainment Writer
Dec 7 2005

It’s called “breakjazz”, and it’s a relatively new subgenre of jazz – a live improvisational mix of turntable loops and samples, trumpet, keyboard, sax and bass. It’s jazz for a new generation, and judging from the crowd response at the launch of the NuJazz Society’s JazzByGenre event at the Mod Club in Toronto recently, it’s here to stay.
According to the Toronto-based Nu Jazz Society, the JazzByGenre initiative is a new jazz series of events created to represent and showcase jazz through various genres of music.
Headlined by legendary jazz icon Roy Ayers, the show mixed a little of the old with the new.
The acid jazz and funk bandleader, and master of the vibraphone – descendent of the African xylophone instrument – is vastly underrated. The Los Angeles native’s innovative acid jazz grooves paved the way for funk artists like George Clinton and Parliament.
Ayer’s oft-sampled hits (he’s one of the most sampled music artists in history, with tracks such as “Running Away” and the classic, “Everybody Loves the Sunshine”) make him a founding father of today’s dance and hip hop generation. Even the “neo-soul” genre owes a debt to Ayers as fusing soul and jazz is Ayer’s forte. He’s worked with artists Diddy, A Tribe Called Quest, Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige.
“I’m very proud of it,” Ayers said of his body of work recently.
“I was talking to Erykah Badu, and she was telling me that I was the ‘neo-soul man’. She said people like herself, Jill Scott, Alicia Keys and The Roots, all consider me the one who created that sound, that ‘neo-soul’ sound. I was just like, ‘Wow’.
“You know, she’s so positive anyway, the way she says things. I was just like, ‘Wow, this is a compliment and a half’.”
And, although Ayers may be getting up there in age, he’s still got that funk.
He performed his signature blend of latin jazz, R&B, funk and soul, with a rousing and well-received performance of seminal hit, “Everybody Loves The Sunshine” at his Mod Club show.
Jazz may be unfairly known as a stodgy medium, but events like The Nu Jazz Society’s JazzByGenre may well dispel that theory.
With the JazzByGenre (www.jazzbygenre.com) launch, the newly-created NuJazz Society’s goal is twofold: 1) to introduce jazz to a younger demographic; and 2) to raise the profile of jazz music in Toronto.
To that end, the night featured spoken word artists Anne-Marie Woods and Al St. Louis, who set the mood with a poetic history of the jazz genre.
But the official introduction to breakjazz was through opening act Kush. The live DJ/turntablist and groove ensemble is an all-star line-up of musicians (featuring bandleader Etric Lyons, Eddie Bullen, Robert Sibony, with special guests Nick “The Brownman” Ali and world-renowned Barbadian saxophonist Arturo Tappin).
The group performed a blend of soul/funk/house/hip hop and R&B jazz with DJ J-Tec’s improvisational mixing and scratching being an integrated part of the band.
It’s something that must be experienced live to really appreciate. Picture your traditional jazz set – trumpet, bass, sax, keys – with a hip hop DJ in the mix, interspersing “traditional” hip hop, funk and house music loops and sample breaks.
It wasn’t flawless, and didn’t always blend, but the overall sound was never discordant. To the contrary – once you realize that the Kush collective essentially “play as they go”, (the band says they don’t pre-rehearse) and coordinate the rhythm, live on stage, one gets a great appreciation for the emerging subgenre. The end result is a frenetic jazzy-house and hip hop-jazz hybrid that the crowd ate up.
The JazzByGenre series will run, every three months, and then launch its annual jazz festival this coming summer. According to the organization, the next installment in the series is slated to put the spotlight on Caribbean jazz.