In early March 2025, jazz-funk legend Roy Ayers died at the age of 84. The veteran vibraphonist is known as one of the original progenitors of acid-jazz and neo-soul, twinkling the keys on such classic jams as “Everybody Loves The Sunshine.” Along with being one of the most-sampled artists of all time (a factoid he often proudly brought up in interviews), the man influenced contemporary artists like Pharrell Williams, Tyler The Creator, and Leon Thomas. He left behind an acclaimed bounty of music, but one of his best works is his sole soundtrack, to the 1974 Blaxploitation hit (and one of Quentin Tarantino’s all-time faves) Coffy.
Like practically every popular Black artist of that era, Ayers was called on to add some grooves to another down-and-dirty, rude-but-righteous B-movie where a Black-and-proud protagonist takes out jive turkeys who are keeping the brothas and sistas down. This time around, the hero is a heroine: Flower Child “Coffy” Coffin (Blaxploitation queen Pam Grier), an emergency-room nurse on a secret mission to eradicate the drug dealers who sell junk to kids like her little sister, who’s detoxing at a rehabilitation center.
For someone who worked with everyone from fellow jazz legends (The Jazz Crusaders, Herbie Mann) to R&B divas (Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige) to hip-hop icons (Ghostface Killah, A Tribe Called Quest), Ayers was often, to his surprise, hit with questions about Coffy. In the decades following its release, Ayers learned that his score was just as influential as Isaac Hayes’ Shaft and Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly—the pioneering twin pillars of Blaxploitation soundtracks. “People still ask me about that soundtrack I did with that Pam Grier movie,” he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2014. “But I can’t believe how many times new people or people I’d never imagine will tell me I’ve influenced them.”
It’s no surprise that his work on Coffy had the impact it did; it literally gets the funk going right from the opening scene. Set in a nightclub buzzing with a kitschy Ayers groove titled “Aragon,” the sequence sees a junkie inform a pusher named Sugarman (Morris Buchanan) that he has a strung-out gal—an undercover Coffy—for him in the backseat of his car. As Coffy and Sugarman make out in the back seat, the junkie drives through the Los Angeles streets—and that’s the cue for the opening credits sequence and the theme song, “Coffy Is The Color,” composed by Ayers and New York theater vet Carl Clay. While Ayers, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Wayne Garfield collectively provide vocals that verge on the nonsensical (“Coffy is the color of your skin / Coffy is the world you live in”), the track is a bustling mix of wah-wah guitars, frenetic drums, and, of course, melodic vibes from Ayers.
But not everything is funky in Coffy’s world. The music gets icy (or cold-blooded, if you will) and macabre the moment Coffy pulls out a sawed-off shotgun and blows Sugarman’s head off. The guitar, the bass, and various percussion instruments go down a free-jazz spiral. Needless to say, that piece is titled “End Of Sugarman.”
The next couple of Ayers selections are more scintillating. The bouncy lounge number “Brawling Broads” plays at a topless club, as Coffy meets up with her city-councilman boyfriend (Booker Bradshaw) while a G-string-wearing white girl is shaking her bits behind them on stage. Coffy and her boo later make love at his beach house, as Ayers and a saucy horn section (which includes jazz legends Jon Faddis, Wayne Andre, Garnett Brown, and Dee Dee’s husband Cecil Bridgewater) serve up sensual, ’70s porn-sounding music. The name of the piece: “Making Love.”
Coffy isn’t the only one who has a theme song. With “King George,” Ayers and Clay give badass entrance music (“They call him Mr. Cool / Don’t play him for a fool,” coos Ayers) to the cane-wielding, jumpsuit-wearing pimp (Robert DoQui) whose stable of ladies Coffy infiltrates. “Brawling Broads” pops up again when we meet his stable, who are either butt-bald-nekkid or halfway there, at his apartment, as well as “Aragon,” when Coffy gets nude herself so George can “check her out.”
Coffy gets another theme, titled “Coffy Baby,” as she prepares to pull a sneak attack on the sadistic gangster/King George associate Arturo Vitroni (Allan Arbus). Bridgewater is all alone on the vocals here, tenderly singing about the main character’s dangerous double life (“Coffy baby, sweet as a chocolate bar / Coffy baby, no one knows who you are.”) It’s during the nocturnal climax of “Escape” where the bass and bongos go into overdrive, as a captive Coffy gets away from Vitroni’s goons, who try to off her after Coffy’s boyfriend, who is in cahoots with Vitroni, ordered the hit. Some may recognize the infamous cue from other movies that have used it, like Tarantino’s Grier vehicle Jackie Brown and (strangely enough) MCU blockbuster/heist flick Ant-Man.
Ayers once said in a 2016 interview how surprised he was when he heard “Escape” during Brown: “I said, ‘Oh my god, if they hadn’t done the right thing, I’d sue them!’ And when it got to the end of the film, it said ‘Roy Ayers, music.’ They did all the legal stuff, and they sent me a check, you know, it was cool.”
But while Ayers may have spoken about his Coffy tracks’ use in other films, it seems like nobody (including this writer) spoke to the musician about the making of the soundtrack. One gets the feeling that Ayers saw a workprint and immediately went to cracking on making cues for specific scenes. Although he already had his own band, Roy Ayers Ubiquity, the score’s musicians were a mix of Ayers’ longtime collaborators (Bridgewater, Garfield, keyboardist Harry Whitaker, drummer Dennis Davis) and seasoned session men (guitarist Billy Nichols, bassist Richard Davis).
But the soundtrack album also includes tracks that don’t appear in the movie, and director Jack Hill obviously placed musical cues in scenes where they don’t belong. The salacious track “Exotic Dance” is clearly supposed to be for the topless club scene, but “Brawling Broads” is in its place. Meanwhile, the scene where “broads”—Coffy and some of George’s girls—actually “brawl” doesn’t have any music at all. (This happens during a party with ambient mingling music from Ayers that doesn’t even appear on the album.) Ayers also composed a samba-sounding theme for Priscilla (Carol Locatell), an ex-hooker whom Coffy shakes down for details, as well as brief theme music for Vitroni, mostly played on the harpsichord by Whitaker. There’s even a track called “Coffy Sauna,” which implies there’s a deleted scene somewhere consisting of Grier sweating in a steamroom.
The movie ends with Coffy walking along the beach at sunrise after killing all the bad guys and shooting her boyfriend in the dick with a shotgun. (She caught him cheating on her with that white dancer—the ultimate betrayal!) During the end credits, Ayers gives the avenging angel one last, melancholic sendoff complete with sad strings and an emo electric piano. “It’s not the end, it’s the beginning,” sings Ayers, hinting at the proposed sequel—titled Burn Coffy Burn—that was squashed by the studio, because sequels didn’t do well at the time. Those were the days.
For one brief moment in the ’70s, though, the sun shone on Coffy. The man who made everybody love the sunshine was right there with her.
