Nabil Ayers is a musician, a podcaster, the president of the record label Beggars Group, an independent record label owner, and the co-founder of Seattle’s Sonic Boom Records store. He also happens to be the biological son of legendary jazz musician Roy Ayers and the nephew of American jazz saxophonist, flutist, and composer Alan Braufman. His book “My Life in the Sunshine” details his journey of navigating life as a biracial person, finding his roots, and grappling with the relationship or lack thereof, with Roy. He sat down with OPB’s Lisa Wood for this conversation and to share the latest album from Braufman, which Nabil released on his label, The Control Group.
Wood: You come from a very unique situation. For those who haven’t read the book yet, can you shed some light on the arrangement your mom had with Roy?
Ayers: The arrangement you speak of is that she met Roy when she was 20 or 21 at, I think, The Village Gate in New York. He wasn’t playing, but he was there, and Alan, my uncle, knew him a little bit and introduced him to my mother, and my mother said at that moment, “this is the person I’m gonna have my child with.” Not “this is the person I’m gonna marry” or “the person I’m gonna be with.“ She was very focused on “I want to have a kid and be a young single mother.” She wasn’t out there looking for someone, and when she met Roy, that’s what she felt, and so they dated a few times, but were never a couple, never really together. She said “I want to have a child, I want you to be the father. You don’t have to be part of our lives,” and he agreed. I always knew that. Beyond that, the even weirder thing to me is how positive it was because of the way it was arranged. There was never anything negative said about him. If he ever came up, it wasn’t like, “oh, your deadbeat dad, he left us, he never sends us money,” nothing like that. It was always “a wonderful, talented guy who gave us you.” So it was really so unique.
Wood: What was it like seeing Roy or running into him?
Ayers: My mother has a great story about the first time I met him when I was about 2 years old. She said we were walking down the street in New York and walked right into him and she introduced us and it was great, but it was never like, “how do you feel? You just met your father,” which is so funny because my mother would ask me those questions after eating an apple. Like, “how do you feel? You just ate an apple.” But then meeting my father was always just like, “cool, what do you want to do now?” Because I don’t think the point was to make me miss something or to realize something was missing. I think the point was simply exposure to this person that she still thought highly of.
Wood: It sounds like you’ve had a tumultuous relationship with the song “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” but you wound up walking down the aisle to it when you got married. How was that?
Ayers: Yeah, when my wife and I were thinking about songs, I was like, “what a great way to like, sort of infuse it with something positive.” It’s almost a way to force something that didn’t make me feel good, to make me feel good. The risk, of course, was, “what if I think about my wedding and get sick every time?” But that’s not what happened. I think I knew it would work and it did work. I don’t want to say it felt like he was there ‘cause that’s not what it felt like, but like it felt powerful. It did feel like I sort of took the song back. And when that song came on, there was a noticeable cheer, and it was a really intense, cool feeling, and I think that flipped it for me.
Wood: Are you pretty familiar with his catalog? Do you genuinely enjoy listening to his music?
Ayers: I know a lot of it. I mean, I’m really into 1970s through 1978 stuff, the kind of funk, jazz, soul stuff. So yeah, I have a “my favorite Roy Ayers songs” playlist. I definitely like listening to him.
Wood: We’re going to play a few of the songs that you’ve selected while we chat. First, we’re going to hear from Roy. You chose memory. Why?
Ayers: There’s just something about that groove in that song that I really love and the melody. It feels really smoky and late night and clubby.
Wood: You also chose “Contusion” from Stevie Wonder. What is it about that song specifically?
Ayers: It’s called the classic period, those five albums in the early 70s, and that’s when it was sort of, I don’t know, a bit proggy. Like, that’s an instrumental song, and it’s music nerds just killing it.
Wood: Do you know if Roy ever read the book?
Ayers: You know, I do know. In January 2025, a guy named Mark reached out saying, “you know, I’m your father’s longtime keyboard player, I’ve been meaning to reach out. I read the book.” So I was like, “let’s meet tomorrow.” This is my father’s keyboard player who’s my age, but had been in the band since ’91 and had known him closely for 30-something years - like really, really close to him. Mark and I went and got drinks, I asked about the book, and he was able to answer. This is hot news. I haven’t told anyone this yet. He said that they were sitting in the airport when the pandemic was calming down enough that they’re playing shows again. Mark said that he pulled the book out of his bag and he started reading it, and Roy said, “what are you doing with that?” So I was like, “OK, he knew what it was.” And Mark said “you should read this, there’s a lot of really good stuff about you. And it’s not negative. This is your son, whether you like it or not - you should read this.” And Roy kind of shifted gears into this like, “uh, you know, he’s a record executive,” like, kind of bragging about me. But that was it. He said he never read it. But I am glad that he knew about it, I’m glad that someone he trusted told him that it said some good things about him and that it was good.
Wood: Did you ever connect with him beyond those brief run-ins?
Ayers: Yeah, I was like, maybe 35, which meant that he was probably close to 70, and I saw that he was coming to town and I just had the first ever feeling of “oh man, I feel like I need to try to meet him. What if this could be the last time? I don’t know anything about my medical history, I don’t know anything about his side of the family.” So I reached out to his booking agent because it was the only thing I could think of. Roy ended up calling me a couple weeks before the show, and it’s this super mellow, friendly, great call. It wasn’t awkward at all, and he just said, yeah, let’s go to lunch. So I picked him up and the lunch was incredible. It’s really wild to be with this guy who looked so much like me. I took notes, I’d asked him tons of questions, but also we just talked. He asked me questions, and it was so wild to look at this person and see the way he moved and the way he laughed and to think “that’s exactly how I do that,” and he was acknowledging it too, which was all very powerful and so cool. At the time, I was like, “look, I’m a grown person, I obviously don’t want anything from you, except to sort of maybe do things like this once or twice a year, if we’re in the same city. Would you be up for that?” And he’s like, “yeah, of course.’ And so I left there so thrilled and almost mad that I didn’t try to do it earlier, but I do think it was the right time. But that’s where things sort of took a turn, that’s where the book takes the big turn to me. I’m 35, I’m not trying to get anything from him except maybe just some more information and like, some more connective moments. But every time I went to New York over the next year, every time he was in Seattle, it was like, sometimes he wouldn’t pick up the phone, which happens. But the worst were the times where he’d be like, “what, who’s this?” And I’d have to explain who I was. It’s like, “oh my God, how did we end up here after that?” Like, I would remember what my stomach felt like or how much I dreaded calling, but I was like, “I have to try.” The swirl of psychological stuff that went with feeling pretty blown off and finally understanding how people thought I felt for my entire life, but I never felt until my mid-thirties. I never felt like that. I never felt blown off or ignored or any of that stuff, because that wasn’t the story. That’s not what happened. But now it was happening and it felt really terrible. I never saw him one time between when I moved to New York in 2008 and when he passed away. Not one time.
Wood: You told me that you heard from a long lost cousin who you found through 23 and Me when Roy passed, and that you were actually really glad you didn’t find out from the internet. Were you able to attend his memorial service?
Ayers: Yeah, I knew I wasn’t going to be invited obviously, but I wanted to find out about it and it ended up that I saw it on Instagram. There was an ad, like, an announcement of the funeral in May, and it’s like, “get your free tickets on Eventbrite.” And so I got a bunch of tickets and was like, “great, I don’t need to be invited, and I’m not even crashing it.” So my mom, her husband, me, Lauren who came over from London, and this woman Chicas, who’s the singer on “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” who I’ve become friends with, came up from North Carolina. It was this really incredible crew, and we were, of course, quite respectful knowing that there are people there who don’t want me and my sister to exist. And so we just went in, sat in the middle, watched it, and left, and it was really great. I’m really glad we went. And I was pretty nervous that whole time, like the the old feeling I hadn’t had in a while where I’m like, “oh man Is somebody gonna say something? Is somebody gonna tell us to leave?” or even, is someone gonna be like, “he needs to acknowledge his kids!” like anything that felt bad, positive or negative - just I hope nothing happens and right when we could kind of feel it ending, I went straight outside.
Wood: Let’s talk about your uncle, Alan Braufman, a jazz saxophonist, flutist, and composer. It’s obvious in the book that he played a huge role in your life.
Ayers: He chose my name. That was an important role, I would say. Um, but he was just really always around. He’s the person that got me into music. He’s always exposed me to music. He played with me so much - there are photos and recordings of us playing together when I’m a really small child. And we lived in New York when I was a kid. We moved around. When we lived in Amherst, I remember him visiting there all the time because it wasn’t that far. I moved to Salt Lake City where I was in 6th grade through high school, so a long time. He would come out there fairly often, and I would also spend, you know, a month at a time in New York. It was so interesting, I don’t feel like he ever treated me like a kid. He just took me everywhere. My mom did this too. I mean, I remember going to tons of recording sessions and sound checks and concerts and rehearsals. Anything musical he was doing, he would just drag me along and it was never like, “is it OK if this kid comes?” it was just assumed that it was fine. This is like a fly on the wall, which I’m sure contributed so much to my interest in music. It was a really, really fun childhood.
Wood: And now you’ve started releasing his albums on your Control Group label. How did that come about?
Ayers: He released an album in 1975 when I was 3 years old called “Valley of Search”, which is this pretty intense free jazz album. It’s a very improvisational, great, gnarly emotional record. He was always playing and always an incredible musician, but wasn’t making Alan Brafman jazz albums. But in 2016, he played with my godfather, a guy named Cooper-Moore. They played a duo show together. And, you know, this was at a small school with like, 50 people. It was no big deal. I posted something on Facebook and a few different people popped up saying “oh wow, you’re, you’re related to this person and this record, I had no idea.” And I was like, “what are you talking about? Why do you know about this?” Oh, wow, there’s a really bad sounding YouTube rip with 10,000 plays on it and there’s a one copy on Discogs for $200. I was like, let’s reissue it. You know, I run a big record label, I know how to put out records, but there’s no one that can tell this story better than I can.
I did get a huge feature in the New York Times that I got to write. And this became a chapter in the book - it was specifically about the apartment building where he lived on Canal Street in New York and where the record and my childhood memories of this space. It was such a fun thing to write. It wasn’t a music piece. It ended up in the metro section, which is sort of the stories about New York. And that record kind of had, you know, got a great pitchfork review, and there’s an NPR All Things Considered with me and Alan talking about it, like, it really did much more than it was meant to, and than we thought it would. So he was like, “I’ve been writing a lot of new music.” So, we recorded another one and I produced it and recorded it with him, and that came out in 2020. That was called “The Fire Still Burns”. And then we recorded “Infinite Love, Infinite Tears,” which came out in 2024.
And we just recorded a new album at the end of 2025. And it’s just so weird because this is the person who bought me drums and got me into music, and now I’m putting out his records.
Wood: Alright, well, we’re going to play a couple of tunes from Alan Braufman. First “Sunrise” from the reissue of that album so, so long ago. And then we’ll get into the title track of the new album, which is called “Anthem for Peace.”
Wood: Thank you for taking the time to chat with me today, Nabil.
Ayers: All right, have a good one, Lisa. Bye.
Nabil Ayers’ book, “My Life in the Sunshine” is available in stores and online. You can also listen to his podcast, which explores the complex world of family, race, culture, and identity. It is called “Identified,” and you can find it at identifiedpod.com. And to hear more from Alan Braufman, head to controlgroupco.com. This is KMHD.