Pianist Joe Sample, shown at the 2006 Montreux Jazz festival in Switzerland, was a pioneer of electric piano in jazz.ARC/DOMINIC FAVRE/Reuters
Pianist and composer Joe Sample, a founding member of the genre-crossing Jazz Crusaders who helped pioneer the electronic jazz-funk fusion style, has died. He was 75.
Mr. Sample died of complications due to lung cancer Friday evening at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, with his family at his beside, said his manager, Patrick Rains.
A prolific songwriter, Mr. Sample's tunes were sampled by hip-hop artists, including Tupac Shakur, who used In All My Wildest Dreams on his Dear Mama. Nicole Kidman sang Mr. Sample's One Day I'll Fly Away in director Baz Luhrmann's 2001 film Moulin Rouge.
Mr. Sample also maintained a long, 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.
Mr. Sample was "a seminal figure in the transition from acoustic to electronic music in the jazz field in the late sixties and early seventies" with his band, Mr. Rains said. The group, which later called itself the Crusaders, became a successful crossover act with such hits as the 1979 rhythm-and-blues-flavoured single and album Street Life, featuring singer Randy Crawford.
A few years before that, they were the first instrumental band to open for the Rolling Stones on tour.
Joseph Leslie Sample was born on Feb. 1, 1939, in Houston, the fourth of five children, and began playing piano when he was five years old. In high school in the mid-1950s, he teamed with two friends, saxophonist-bassist Wilton Felder and drummer Stix Hooper, to form a band called the Swingsters.
Trombonist Wayne Henderson, a classmate at Texas Southern University, later joined the group, which became known as the Jazz Crusaders when the band later moved to Los Angeles. They made their first recording, Freedom Sounds, in 1961, the first in a series of albums for the Pacific Jazz label.
Originally, the band played hard bop, the most popular style of jazz at the time, and were influenced by Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey and Horace Silver. But the group, which featured an unusual lineup with a trombonist rather than a trumpeter in the front line and Mr. Sample's hard-swinging piano, began to fuse elements of R&B, soul and funk with their jazz.
"We were mostly rebels, and when everyone was going in one direction, we deliberately went the other way," Mr. Sample said in a 2003 interview with Jazz Times magazine.
In the early 1970s, he became one of the pioneers of the electric piano in jazz. The group, by then calling itself the Crusaders, turned from acoustic jazz to electric fusion, relying on catchy grooves and pop songs by the Beatles, Carole King and others to gain a crossover appeal on a series of albums for the Blue Thumb and MCA labels. The Crusaders placed 19 albums on the Billboard Top 200 chart.
For Mr. Sample, going electric wasn't a big step. He had been fascinated by the electric piano since he saw Ray Charles playing one on television in the mid-1950s, and he had owned one since 1963. Nor did he have any problem crossing musical boundaries: Growing up in Houston, he had listened to and enjoyed all kinds of music, including blues and country.
"Unfortunately, in this country, there's a lot of prejudice against the various forms of music," he told The Los Angeles Times in 1985. "The jazz people hate the blues, the blues people hate rock, and the rock people hate jazz. But how can anyone hate music? We tend to not hate any form of music, so we blend it all together. And consequently, we're always finding ourselves in big trouble with everybody."
The Crusaders recorded less frequently in the 1980s after Mr. Henderson and Mr. Hooper left the group, and it eventually disbanded. In the 1990s, Mr. Sample began focusing more on his solo career, often returning to acoustic piano. His later albums included Soul Shadows (2008) and Live (2012). His last album, Children of the Sun, is to be released this fall.
In 2003, Mr. Sample, Mr. Felder and Mr. Hooper reunited as the Crusaders to record the album Rural Renewal, with guitarist Eric Clapton making a guest appearance. In recent years, Mr. Sample also led an ensemble called the Creole Joe Band, whose music was steeped in the lively Louisiana style known as zydeco. Just before his death he had been collaborating with Jonatha Brooke and Marc Mantell on a musical, Quadroon.
Mr. Sample leaves his wife, Yolanda; his son, Nicklas, a jazz bassist with whom he occasionally performed; three stepsons, Jamerson III, Justin and Jordan Berry; and six grandchildren.
With files from the New York Times News Service
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