For those unaware, DownJazz Records is thrilled to announce This Is Neo-Soul, a new album from keyboardist, composer, and longtime Roy Ayers music director Mark Adams, arriving March 20, 2026 — just over a year after Ayers’ passing at 84.

The 10-track release — available worldwide on limited-edition color vinyl, CD, and digital platforms — gathers fifteen all-star musicians from the working bands not only of Ayers, but also of Chic, Lonnie Liston Smith, Luther Vandross, Gloria Gaynor, Gil Scott Heron and Chaka Khan.

Adams spent more than twenty years as the musical center of Roy Ayers’ touring group Ubiquity — the long-running, ever-evolving band Ayers used to carry his sound around the world — serving as keyboardist, arranger, and onstage ballast throughout thousands of shows. True to its present-tense title, This Is Neo-Soul isn’t a gaze into the rearview mirror. It’s a continuation of a language Adams lived for more than two decades.

After the “Godfather of Neo-Soul” passed on, Adams and producer David Schwartz chose not to retreat into archival reverence; they understood that Ayers’ sound was never fixed to one moment. It was — and remains — a living vocabulary. Schwartz puts the lineage plainly: “There is a triad. There is Roy Ayers, Lonnie Liston Smith, and then Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson. That’s the triad that makes up this very cool neo-soul set.”

“It’s a Roy Ayers, ’70s sound, but we authenticated it with the people who played that music and the people trained by them,” Adams says. “I played with Roy for more than 20 years. He taught me everything. So we made this the real thing.”

“This is not a tribute band. This is the band. The true representatives,” Schwartz adds. “These guys grew up on this. Mark’s played this music in different formats over a thousand shows worldwide. This tutelage of mentor and mentee is evident in the album and in the band.”

1. Sweet Tears
2. Open Letter
3. Day Dreaming
4. Expansions
5. LLS Groove
6. Don’t Stop The Feeling
7. Talking Walls
8. Don’t Look Back
9. Vibrations
10. Dre’s World

With the ensemble channeling the neo-soul aesthetic into a modern framework — shaped by gospel harmony, jazz-fusion momentum, dance-music architecture, and global DJ culture - they open this new recording on a gently funk-a-lishus rendition of Roy Ayers’ Sweet Tears and the vibrantly soulful Open Letter and then we are graced with the polished Day Dreaming, a lushly sculpted cover of Lonnie Liston Smith’s Expansions and then comes a wondrous ode to that very same musician on the emotionally impactive LLS Groove.

Along next is their smooth grooved Ayers’ cover of Don’t Stop The Feeling which is in turn backed seamlessly by the expansive Talking Walls, the rhythmically melodious Don’t Look Back, the set rounding out on the stunning soundscape that is Vibrations, coming to an all-too-soon close on some emphatically driven funk lines within their homage to Dr Dre on Dre’s World.

The core band includes Chris DeCarmine (drums, Roy Ayers), Dave Mullins (saxophone, Gloria Gaynor, Gill Scott Heron), Monte Croft (vibraphone, Gladys Knight), Steve Kroon (percussion, Luther Vandross), and Kenyatta Beasley (trumpet, Mary J Blige).

Additional contributors include Chic vocalist Kimberly Davis; vocalists John Pressley (Roy Ayer), Jonathan Quash (Mark Adams), and Miya Bass (Broadway-Lion King); guitarists Bill White (Lonnie Liston Smith) and John Smith guitar, ( William Patterson); and bassists Roy Bennett (Bernard Perdie), Donald Nicks (Roy Ayers), and Emanuel “Chulo” Gatewood Diana Reeves) plus Brooklyn gospel singers.

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www.markadamsjazz.com