The great jazz-funk vibraphonist, singer, songwriter and producer Roy Ayers passed last week at the age of 84. In his honour, we’re taking a look at his best-known song, from his 1976 album of the same name.
Before we dig into the technicalities, let’s take a minute to immerse ourselves in the track’s impeccable vibe. You can hear Ayers perform the tune at age 77 with an absolutely killer backing band in one of the best Tiny Desk performances of all time.
Here’s another sweet live version backed only by a keyboard player and a second singer.
Ayers reminisces about the writing of the song in this Guardian interview. "It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day and I just got this phrase in my head: 'Everybody loves the sunshine.' I started singing: 'Feel what I feel, when I feel what I feel, what I’m feeling.' Then I started thinking about summer imagery: 'Folks get down in the sunshine, folks get brown in the sunshine, just bees and things and flowers.'
"It was so spontaneous. It felt wonderful. And I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound: a mix of vibraphone, piano and a synthesiser. We recorded it at night, so the sun was down, but the vibe in the studio was really nice. Pure vibes."
In the same interview, Ayers’ keyboard player Philip Woo explains: "It’s typical of how he worked. He’d come in with an idea and just sing it or play it to us. There was no written music, scores or charts. He had one chord, which he would move around all over the place, very intuitively. The band’s job was to flesh it out. He was always looking for spontaneity."
Woo doesn’t specify what that one chord is, but my best guess is that it’s a minor eleventh chord voiced in fourths. The formal term for this is a quartal voicing, but I know it as the “fourths chord”. On a C root, the chord is C, F, B-flat and E-flat. You could call this Cm11, or F7sus4/C, or a rootless form of Ab6/9. Because the chord doesn’t have any thirds in it, its harmonic identity is inherently ambiguous.
The fourths chord is great for adventurous chromatic chord progressions. No matter how you slide it around, it keeps a feeling of stability from the symmetry of all those fourths. Planing fourths chords around unpredictably was an important technique for 1960s jazz pianists, especially McCoy Tyner. You can hear fourths chords at work in his beautiful solo on Lonnie’s Lament by John Coltrane.
Fourths chords are also easy to play on guitar; just slap your index finger down anywhere on the fretboard and put your middle finger a fret higher on the B string. Try sliding the shape up and down to play melodies with the top note, it sounds amazing.
In Everybody Loves The Sunshine, Roy Ayers uses six of the seven notes in F# Dorian mode as roots for fourths chords: F-sharp, A, B, C-sharp, D-sharp and E. Three of the resulting minor 11th chords are from within F# minor: F#m11, Bm11 and C#m11.
The other three minor 11th chords are from outside the key: Am11, D#m11 and Em11. Those outside chords are dissonant against the song’s bluesy F# minor pentatonic melody, which gives the song its feeling of intellectual sophistication.
You can see my transcription of the intro and the first chorus here. The intro chords are a loop of F#m11, D#m11 and Em11. I hear them voiced as E6/9 over F-sharp in the bass, C#6/9 over D-sharp in the bass, and D6/9 over E in the bass. Those are some dense and crunchy voicings!
The riff reminds me of the beginning of the theme song from Star Trek
The transition to the chorus is Em9, A13, Dmaj9, C#7(#9). The first three chords are a standard ii-V-I progression in D major. The last one is the V7 chord in F# minor. You could understand the Dmaj9 to be the bVI chord in F# minor as well. This is a nifty pivot modulation, a move from the key of D major to the key of F# minor via a chord that is common to both keys.
The chorus is a loop of F#m11, C#m11, Am11 and Bm11. Remember that the Am11 is from outside the key, and its third C clashes excitingly with the C-sharp in the piano riff on top. That piano riff is two stacks of fourths: F-sharp to B to E, then C-sharp to F-sharp to B, in a highly syncopated rhythm. The riff reminds me of the beginning of the theme song from Star Trek.
Against all this harmonic complexity, the vocal melody seems simple, just F# minor pentatonic with some bluesy pitch inflection. But this simplicity has depths of its own. The melody centers around B, the fourth, which is not usually considered to be a stable pitch. The synth strings also drone B throughout the chorus, a wildly counterintuitive choice.
Beyond its colourful chords and melody, the track has some distinctive production touches too. The most conspicuous sonic feature is the Solina String Ensemble, that retrofuturistic string synth. The synth is mixed loud, and the high B drone in particular is piercingly intense.
An audio engineer friend hears that synth drone as way too loud, an example of “bad” mixing. But he also thinks that the “bad” mix is key to the track’s enjoyment. Roy Ayers had a weird idea and he ran with it, and whether it was a “good” idea or not, he executed it confidently and unhesitatingly. My friend and I both find the drone’s loudness to be annoying, but we respect the commitment it represents. That mixing choice communicates confidence, and it feels good to be in the hands of such a confident artist.
Another aspect of the track’s unique sound is the way that Ayers doubles the melody parts in octaves. He and Debbie Darby sing an octave apart, and while their voices are very different, they mirror each others’ phrasing exactly. The piano riff that answers them is also doubled in octaves, and it sounds like a futuristic church bell.
The drums, played by Doug Rhodes, prefigure hip-hop and neo-soul. Rhodes plays crisply and unhurriedly, with hi-hats ticking away steadily on eighth notes and rim clicks on the backbeats. The kick is less predictable, absent on downbeats where you expect it and filling in offbeats where you don’t.
Between the colourful timbres, the relatable lyrics and the unshakeable beat, it is no wonder that Everybody Loves The Sunshine has been sampled and quoted by so many rap and dance music producers.
Mary J Blige used it as the basis for her song My Life, Björk samples the piano riff in the Sunshine Mix of I Miss You, and Mos Def interpolates the line “my life” for Life Is Real.
While I was working on this piece, I rewatched Ayers’ Tiny Desk performance, and my daughter sat down to watch with me. Jazz is not really her thing, but she was immediately drawn in anyway, less by the music than by Ayers’ overall vibe. She is not the only one. In the Washington Post, Mike West explains the relationship between Ayers’ vibraphone playing and his vibe.
"There’s a kind of hip, laid-back, feel-good mood that we call 'vibing.' The vibraphone isn’t the source of that slang term, but the instrument has a strong claim on epitomizing it anyway. Its metallic, resonant sound is so inherently cool and mellow that even its lightning-fast virtuosos — mainly in jazz, where the vibes most often appear — sound more chilled-out than they really are."
Ayers’ vibraphone is a barely audible background layer in Everybody Loves The Sunshine, but his vibe jumps out of the speakers at you. By all accounts, he was a self-assured and warm-hearted person, and while I never had the pleasure of meeting him, I can feel his personality clearly through the music.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
