Jazz-funk pioneer Joe Sample dies at 75
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Version 0 of 1. Pianist and composer Joe Sample, a founding member of the genre-crossing Jazz Crusaders who helped pioneer the electronic jazz-funk fusion style, died Sept. 12 at a hospital in Houston. He was 75. The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his manager, Patrick Rains. The group, which later called itself the Crusaders, became a successful crossover act with such hits as the 1979 single and album “Street Life.” A few years before, it became the first instrumental band to tour with the Rolling Stones. Mr. Sample’s songs were also sampled by hip-hop artists, including Tupac Shakur, who used “In All My Wildest Dreams” on his “Dear Mama” album. He was a session player, too, working with artists including Marvin Gaye, B.B. King, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan and Quincy Jones, according to a 2011 profile in the Houston Chronicle. A native of Houston, Mr. Sample told the newspaper for an article two years later that music and the jazz tradition were different in Texas than anywhere else. “Blues is like the white dust in the neighborhood from the oyster-shell streets,” he told the Chronicle. “It’s a natural thing in this region. Certain things I can play with musicians from here that I cannot play with other musicians from Chicago or Seattle or Boston or New York. They simply do not feel it.” |