Time & Perspective Quote by Roy Ayers

There is a quiet brag embedded in Roy Ayers' matter-of-fact math: 20 hours a day, "and that was all of the time". It's exaggerated in the way musicians exaggerate to tell the truth. He is not itemizing a schedule so much as describing a totalizing relationship to the craft, the kind where the studio becomes a home, a church, a bunker. The repetition - "day", "time", "still" - gives the line a looping groove, like a vamp: work, sleep, repeat, except sleep is barely implied.

The intent is partly to establish credibility in the most musician way possible: not through awards or charts, but through hours logged. For an artist whose sound helped define jazz-funk's warmth and propulsion, the subtext is that the feel people associate with him came from relentless refinement. Inspiration is treated as something you summon by showing up long enough for it to get bored and arrive.

There's also an aging artist's diplomacy here. Ayers admits to slowing down without surrendering the identity. "I still record a lot" is a small act of defiance against the industry's obsession with novelty and youth. He is reframing longevity not as fading relevance but as sustainable devotion: the same impulse, a more humane pace. In a culture that romanticizes burnout as proof of greatness, he offers a different flex - discipline that survives the decades.