Joseph Leslie "Joe" Sample (1939-2014)

    Joe Sample was born on Feb. 1, 1939, in Houston, the fourth of five siblings, and began playing piano when he was 5. In the mid-1950s, he saw Ray Charles playing an electric piano on television and bought one for himself in 1963. While at Texas Southern University, Sample, trombonist Wayne Henderson, bassist Henry Wilson and flutist Hubert Laws to the hard bop group, which named itself the Modern Jazz Sextet. Adding tenor saxophonist Wilton Felder and drummer Nesbert Hooper, the band worked in the Houston area for several years but did not have much success until most of the group moved to Los Angeles and changed their name to the Jazz Crusaders, a reference to the drummer Art Blakey’s seminal hard-bop ensemble, the Jazz Messengers. Their first album, Freedom Sound, released on the Pacific Jazz label in 1961, sold well, and they recorded prolifically for the rest of the decade, with all four members contributing compositions, while performing to enthusiastic audiences and critical praise. 

    In the 70s, as the audience for jazz declined, the band underwent yet another name change, this one signifying a change in musical direction. Augmenting their sound with electric guitar and electric bass, with Sample playing mostly electric keyboards, the Jazz Crusaders became the Crusaders. Their first album under that name, Crusaders 1, featuring four compositions by Sample, was released on the Blue Thumb label in 1972. The group had numerous hit albums and one Top 40 single, Street Life, which reached No. 36 on the Billboard pop chart in 1979. Sample wrote the music and Will Jennings wrote the lyrics, which were sung by Randy Crawford. 

    By the late 1980s Mr. Sample was focusing on his solo career, which had begun with the 1969 trio album Fancy Dance and included mellow pop-jazz records like Carmel (1979). He also maintained a busy career as a studio musician. Among the albums on which his keyboard work can be heard are Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, Steely Dan’s Aja and Gaucho, and several recordings by B. B. King. His music has been sampled on numerous hip-hop records, most notably Tupac Shakur’s Dear Mama. His later albums included the unaccompanied Soul Shadows (2004) and his last album, Children of the Sun, released in 2014 posthumously. In his last years, he worked with a reunited version of the Crusaders and led an ensemble called the Creole Joe Band, whose music was steeped in zydeco. At his death he had been collaborating with Jonathan Brooke and Marc Mantell on a musical, Quadroon, which had a reading in July at the Ensemble Theater in Houston. Source

Paradise North Cemetery
Houston

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