Nabil Ayers, Author of My Life in the Sunshine, to Appear at the Wisconsin Book Festival on October 20th: In Pursuit of Self-Discovery
Nabil Ayers is the son of the famed jazz artist Roy Ayers who wrote Everybody Loves the Sunshine in the 1970s
By Jonathan Gramling
Back in the mid-1970s when I went to Alcorn State University, Roy Ayer’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” was a huge hit and gave all of us a nice warm feeling. So when the chance to interview his son, Nabil Ayers, who will be appearing at the Wisconsin Book Festival, I jumped at the chance. His book is titled “My Life in the Sunshine.” It took me on a different — but fascinating — journey than I had expected.
You have to remember what the early 1970s were all about — rebellion, free love and freedom — to put the beginnings of Ayers’ life into perspective.
“My mother was 20-years-old when she met my father, Roy Ayers, the famous jazz musician,” Ayers said. “She dated him a few times. They were definitely never a couple. And I think the third time, she said, ‘I want to have a child and I want you to be the father. And you don’t need to be a part of our lives.’ And he said, ‘Okay.’ It was the early 1970s in New York City. Everyone always knew the deal.”:
Because it was the 1970s, after all, Ayers had a wonderful, supportive childhood.
“I grew up alone with my mother,” Ayers said. “My uncle was an incredible influence on me and my father figure. But I never knew my father, but there was never any negative image of him. He never left us. There was no divorce. In fact, if anything, it was very positive. He was talked about as this great talented person who helped bring me into the world. It’s a very unique circumstance. For my first 10 years, I lived in New York City and Amherst, Massachusetts and a little bit in Cambridge. My father is Black and my mother is White. My mother had no money. She went back to college. She had no education. On paper, it sounds so terrible, but we’ve lived in these incredible idyllic, diverse communities where it wasn’t weird to be biracial. It wasn’t weird to have a single mother. I was a very, very normal kid during my childhood. Lots of my friends were very much like me.”
Whether it was the influence of his uncle who was a jazz saxophonist or in his DNA, Ayers became a musician. He even performed in Madison in the mid-2000s with the group “The Long Winter.’
Ayers went to the University of Puget Sound and essentially went through the motions of getting a college degree while pursuing his passion music.
“I got pretty poor grades as I recall,” Ayers said. “But I was really busy putting on concerts, playing in the band, working at the radio station and doing an internship at a record company, all these things that were very much connected to what my life later became.”
The only class he got was an A in creative writing because he later realized he enjoyed it. But Ayers continued to pursue his passion in music. He became immersed in the music scene.
“I am president of Beggars Group,” Nabil said. “It’s a group of independent record labels. 4AD is one of the labels, which I ran specifically for 13-14 years until January 2022. And then I moved into this position as the head of the group, which encompasses five separate labels. The shorter version is I put out records. Like a lot of jobs, my work was ID’d as a label, but it was much closer to artists and music and involved in the releasing of the record was now as the president of the overall organization. I’m still involved, just a bit more involved in finance, business and HR. Today, my biggest concern is the building and the storm, that kind of stuff.”
But the need to express himself beyond music kept beckoning him.
“Years later — I’m 51 now — probably six years ago, I wasn’t writing at all,” Ayers said. “I hadn’t written since college probably except for emails. I think it got to the point where I realized I had a lot of stories. I owned a record store. I played in bands. And I had some funny stories that I wanted to tell. I started writing then just for fun and published a couple of them. My wife was the one who said to me, ‘Nabil, this is great. This is fun and everything, but you should be writing about your father and your race because those are the things you really care about.’ When she said that, it really kind of hit me hard because I knew that she was right, but I was also, at that point, very afraid to do that.”
Ayers had crossed paths with his father during his life, no matter how briefly.
“There were a few times when I was a kid when I ran into him and had really brief interactions,” Ayers recalled. “One of those times, I didn’t even know who he was. My uncle had to tell me afterwards to whom we had just been talking.”
When Ayers was living in Seattle, he and his father had lunch together.
“We sat down at this restaurant for lunch,” Ayers said. “I didn’t feel nervous at all. He didn’t seem strange. So many great things happened. He didn’t apologize and I didn’t want him to because I didn’t think there was anything to apologize for. I think we were both pretty much on the same page. And that feels unlikely to me considering all the things that led up to it. But it really felt like it. It was very much in the moment. We were in the present. We talked about what was going on. I took notes the whole time. I wanted to know about family history and relatives and everything I could get in a couple of hours. I didn’t get nearly as much as I wanted. But it was really amazing. It was incredible to sit across from this person whom I had never spent time with and see him smile or see him laugh. I realized it was like looking in a mirror., how much we had in common even though. I had his DNA obviously.”
Ayers had thought that this was perhaps the beginning of a relationship with his biological father beyond the DNA.
“After the luncheon, we didn’t have any contact,” Ayers said. “I left the luncheon thinking, ‘This is great. I’m 35-years-old and he’s close to 70 and we’re past all of the stuff, all the times where things could have gone wrong. I don’t want anything. I’m not asking for money.’ All I thought was that it would be great to do this every six months or a year or when he was in Seattle or when I was in New York. I traveled a lot. We could just have lunch or coffee and hopefully he would tell me a little bit more about my family. But once I started to try to do that, that’s when it kind of fell apart for me. I would go to New York. I was there all the time. I would call him. He would either not pick up the phone or he would be really quick on the phone and say he had to go and we could never meet. After several times, it became very obvious. I had my one time with him and that was the first time that I felt the way I think people always assumed I felt my entire life. I was never angry with my father. Because it was never presented to me that way. I had a great life and a great childhood. And he wasn’t missing. But people always inserted their own story, I thin k. And because my story is unique, people would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry about your father.’ I would say, ‘Why? Everything is great.’ Finally at this point, at 35-36, I remember thinking, ‘Oh this is why people talk to me the way that they do when I mention my father because they thought this is how I felt, which is essentially rejected.’”
At this stage of his life, Ayers needed to know who he was from his father’s side since he had primarily only been in contact with his mother’s side of the family. Since his father, Roy Ayers, wasn’t going to tell him about his side of the family, Ayers resorted to another route. He explored his family roots through 23 and Me.
“I did 23 and Me not because I questioned anything about my father,” Ayers said. “My goal with him was to get to know him a bit more. But more than that, I wanted to know more about my ancestors and my extended family and all of the things that I knew nothing about. He couldn’t give me that because I couldn’t get in touch with him. But I hoped 23 and Me could. And it really did. It opened up an incredible world. What’s crazy is my father is alive and well and we live in the same city. But we still have no contact. But I know so much more about our family than he does. And I know so many people. It’s really crazy.”
Between 23 and Me and writing the book, it has opened up a whole new world — his world — that he couldn’t possibly know had existed. Tyhe week after the interview, Ayers was headed to Texasa to meet with the ancestor of the slave owner who had “owned” his ancestors.
“For me — of course I am promoting the book — it’s really about still connecting with people,” Ayers said. “And at least at 50 percent of the places I go, someone shows up who was in my father’s band in the 1970s or is an actual third cousin or something like that. It’s amazing how many people show up when you go someplace. I’ve had a lot of people contact me who grew up in similar circumstances. I love that and it is fascinating. I always thought because I didn’t know many people with a situation like mine when I was growing up that I was unique. But now I know more.”
Nabil Ayers has fulfilled his need to know who he is and what lies in his own personal history. On October 20, attend his Wisconsin Book Festival appearance to learn the rest of the story.