To get a better understanding of Roy Ayers as the soul-jazz crossover star he was in the ’70s, it’s helpful – and fairly fascinating – to hear him in the more traditional jazz setting he came into as a youngster. The influence his music has left has grown even broader than the influence of the music he took in, and these ten albums should give you a good notion of how that happened. Ayers became a revered icon in hip-hop and R&B circles across generations – from collaborating with Guru and The Roots in the early-mid ’90s to Erykah Badu and Marley Marl in the early ’00s to Tyler, the Creator just a few years back. Time, it turns out, had other ideas: all those Roy Ayers Ubiquity LPs that had fallen out of print by the ’90s had become hot commodities for producers and other crate diggers who found both heavy motion and nuanced beauty in those records. By the end of the decade his total disco immersion was greeted with apprehension at best by critics despite his flourishing commercially. Naturally, this was anathema to jazz traditionalists, who found the ’70s and its wave of jazzbos going funky a real rough patch. How Ayers pulled this off is a somewhat contentious matter: after forming Roy Ayers Ubiquity in 1970, he fearlessly explored the connections between jazz and R&B in all its forms, from singer-songwriter soul to deep funk to sweaty, hedonistic disco.

While his work in the 1960s was distinguished in itself – he became a vital part of Herbie Mann’s band late in the decade, and had a fine run of releases on Atlantic around the same time – it was in the ’70s that he really began to flourish, establishing the eclectic ear that would make him a commercial smash for much of the decade and an inspiration to house, hip-hop, and acid jazz artists for decades afterwards.

By his early twenties Ayers went from his recorded debut as a sideman to the headliner of his own album within a year.

A prodigious jazz talent raised in a musical Los Angeles household, he was literally handed a set of vibraphone mallets by great master of the instrument Lionel Hampton at age five. To call Roy Ayers a crossover artist is technically accurate, but at some point it’s worth asking where he wound up crossing to, and where the line he crossed even stood in the first place.

Roy ayers albums ranked