It’s only a couple of months into 2025 and it’s already proving a brutal year for the musical community. Yesterday, I woke up to the news we had lost the great Roy Ayers. But as the artists that came to prominence in the glory days of the 70s inevitably age and the years take their toll perhaps its best to save our (sweet) tears for the moment and instead celebrate the legacy of these titans who’ve given us so much joy.

The things that unites so many of the recently lost legends is the sense of continuity – rock music thrives off the myth of revolution, that the world is tipped on its axis by Elvis or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Happy Mondays and Stone Roses appearing on the same episode of ‘Top of the Pops’. But the music of people like Roy Ayers and Gwen McCrae can have the same resonance and meaning to dancers who’ve discovered their music on a dancefloor at any point in the last 50 years. Artists who always rewarded anyone prepared to search back into their catalogues or take a chance on a random record fair find.

In the 1980s, Roy Ayers was already one of the definitive artists of the jazz funk era and was still making vital music in that electrified boogie period. Like so many other young clubbers who’d caught the bug with an early love of hip hop and electro, rare groove and acid jazz sent me digging back through his jazz funk classics: ‘Running Away’, ‘Love Will Bring Us Back Together’, the magic of ‘Everybody Loves the Sunshine’, his sought-after productions for his own Uno Melodic label. I can still remember seeing a copy of his early holy grail ‘He’s Coming’ on the wall of Music & Video Exchange in Camden. £35? Cheap at twice the price for an album that contains the frantic gospel funk of ‘He’s a Superstar’ and the timeless spaced-out hypnotic slink of ‘We Live in Brooklyn, Baby’, both regularly  poured into our ears at Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge’s Sunday afternoon sessions at Dingwalls. Even as a pretty skint kid obviously I bought it on sight.

As we moved into the 90s, acid jazz’s revivalism and a steady stream of hip hop samples meant the legendary vibraphone player’s career had a new lease of life and he continued to be a firm fixture on the UK’s club and festival circuit. I first saw him in real life blowing collective minds on Glastonbury’s Jazz World stage (now West Holts) in 1993. Throughout the 90s and into the new century collaborations with Masters At Work and London’s BBE label kept his music  as vital as ever.

Gwen McCrae was also a firm favourite with the soul boy crew thanks to early-80s  dancefloor hits ‘Keep the Fires Burning’ and ‘Funky Sensation’, before her earlier albums were unearthed by DJs who turned tracks such as 1974’s ‘90% Of Me Is You’ and of course ‘All This Love That I’m Givin’’ from 1979, into huge favourites on the rare groove scene. ‘All This Love…’ in particular is that rare thing; an old record where the production hits such a sweet spot that it sounds current in every era and circumstance no matter how many times you hear it, from warehouse parties in the 80s to weddings and birthdays now, it’s never ever too much.

Angie Stone’s untimely death in a car crash made me rush back to another timeless favourite. ‘Wish I Didn’t Miss You’ is an all-time soulful favourite, but its appeal is the bittersweet demolition of a faithless boyfriend rather than a utopian plea to put your hands in the air. Maybe it took her loss to realise we’d taken this three-times Grammy-nominated artist for granted. As founder of the original early female rap The Sequence she was a contemporary of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, going onto write and sing with artists such as Mantronix and Malcolm McClaren amongst many others, before working on her then partner D’Angelo’s now classic debut ‘Brown Sugar’ in 1994.

Roberta Flack’s career stretched from the 60s to the present day, with her ‘First Take’ a peerless debut album. Like Ayers, McCrae and Stone, she crossed decades and depending on your age or inclination, your favourites might be her angelic rendition of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, or her work with Donny Hathaway. She was still riding the cutting edge into the late-80s, when Steve Silk Hurley’s remix of ‘Uh-Uh Ooh-Ooh Look Out (Here It Comes)’ became an anthem of the orbital rave era. One of the greatest, smoothest, interpreters of song ever and someone whose music, like everyone else mentioned here, will live on long after all of us have gone.

As Ayers himself put it so well, ‘Life is Just a Moment’.