“Once my mother got home, she changed my middle name to Ahmal after an opera she saw,” Ayers said. While his mother was in the hospital after giving birth, her father had the middle name Sol put on Nabil’s birth certificate. He agreed, becoming Nabil Ayers as he prepared to attend college at the University of Pacific Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Ayers played drums in bands with friends from third grade through high school, expanding his musical repertoire and tastes along the way.Īs a rite of passage when graduating high school, Ayers’ mother suggested that he might want to change his surname from Braufman to something easier to spell and pronounce. He attended many concerts as a young boy, sometimes seeing his father perform, which stoked his young ambitions. Music remained a constant throughline in his life, courtesy of his father’s genes, his mother’s dance background and his Uncle Alan’s encouragement. “I had no idea what they looked like in real life and for that reason, I felt there was nothing that stopped me from looking like them.” Learning that Kiss members Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley “were two Jewish guys from New York, strengthened my sense of solidarity with them,” he said. “I found something attainable in Kiss,” he writes. The heavy makeup they wore obscured their features, enabling him to imagine new possibilities. Then, at age 5, he discovered the hard rock band Kiss. But as a biracial boy, he couldn’t fully identify with the appearances of white or Black stars like the Beatles and Stevie Wonder. Musical ambitionsĪyers longed to play music from an early age. While some kids asked where he was from, whether he was adopted, and wanted to touch his Afro, Ayers said his sense of identity was intact from having not been “the weird kid for the first 10 years of my life.” He recalls a synagogue and JCC in Salt Lake City and feeling a connection with some of the Jewish students in his school. When he was 10, his mother moved them to Salt Lake City, the mostly Mormon city where he stood out as different. “My exposure to Baha’i and Judaism was about good people and great food, things that kids like,” Ayers said. His mother and uncle were drawn to the Baha’i faith which emphasized peace and equality.
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