‘Coffy Is The Color’: the underappreciated genius of Roy Ayers’ blaxploitation soundtrack
Once in a generation, an artist will come along who changes everything, somebody that not only changes the artistic landscape but perceptions of what art can achieve. Roy Ayers was one such artist. Emerging during the early 1960s as a sideman in a bebop outfit, the Californian musician would go on to pioneer jazz-funk and the acid jazz scene, forever altering the history of the genre. It is easy to heap praise onto groundbreaking songs like ‘Everybody Loves The Sunshine’, but some of Ayers’ greatest work is far too often overlooked.
Ayers lived and breathed jazz music in every aspect of his existence, going right back to his childhood in South Central Los Angeles, the focal point of the city’s Black music scene that soon gave way to the Central Avenue jazz movement. During the 1960s, when Ayers was only in his 20s, he cut his teeth performing alongside jazz and bebop artists around LA, releasing his debut album in 1963. While these early efforts showed clear promise for the future of Ayers, he had not yet landed upon his distinctive sounds and forward-thinking approach to jazz.
Within the jazz world, Ayers gained some degree of notoriety during the mid-1960s, recording with the likes of Herbie Mann. However, the musical mainstream wouldn’t take note of Ayers until over a decade later, when Everybody Loves the Sunshine became a top-ten album on the R&B charts. So, what had Ayers been up to in between his bebop beginnings and the mainstream success of his sun-soaked soul masterpiece?
Alongside creating trailblazing jazz-funk records like Stoned Soul Picnic, Ayers was also tasked with constructing a soundtrack for Jack Hill’s blaxploitation film Coffy. Emerging during the early 1970s, the landscape of blaxploitation films was vital in building upon the cultural impact of the civil rights and Black Power movement, placing Black stories, actors, and artists at the centre of cult cinema. It was an incredible period in American underground cinema, and Coffy remains one of the most iconic works of the era.
Pam Grier’s legendary performance as the titular Coffy helped to make the film a cult classic, but Roy Ayers’ funk-ridden soundtrack was also a key part of its success. Awash with an enduring sense of cool which perfectly complimented Grier’s character, the soundtrack is a woefully underrated part of Ayers’ discography, which captures the songwriter at an utterly pivotal moment in his development as an artist.
Not only does the Coffy soundtrack speak to the inventive nature of Ayers as an artist and songwriter, but it also reflects his lasting ability to capture a feeling, an atmosphere, within his work. Throughout his discography, the musician was always adept at capturing a certain atmosphere within his music, and Coffy is a prime example of this fact, encapsulating the dark concrete jungles of 1970s America in addition to the self-determination and defiance of the Black Power movement.
You only need to look at the title track, ‘Coffy Is The Color’ to get a sense of the lush, compelling funk at the heart of Ayers’ work on the soundtrack. Very few other artists could construct a theme song which so perfectly reflects the film, which also standing on its own two feet as a masterpiece of jazz-funk.
His work on the song, and the soundtrack as a whole, predicted his later efforts in jazz-funk and acid jazz, in addition to the big-hitting tracks which made the songwriter an unavoidable figure within the realm of American jazz and R&B music. Ayers was always uncompromising in his approach to music, and the soundtrack for Coffy perhaps reflects that fact better than any part of his extensive discography.
