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 at age 75.
Sample died of complications due to lung cancer on Friday evening at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, his manager Patrick Rains said. Sample's family was at his bedside.
Sample was "a seminal figure in the transition from acoustic to electronic music in the jazz field in the late '60s and early '70s" 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 single and album Street Life. A few years before that, they became the first instrumental band to tour with the Rolling Stones.
Samples' songs were also sampled by hip-hop artists, including Tupac Shakur, who used In All My Wildest Dreams on his Dear Mama.
He was a session player, too, working with artists including Marvin Gaye, BB King, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan and Quincy Jones, according to a 2011 profile in the Houston Chronicle.
A native of Houston's Fifth Ward, he told the newspaper for a story two years later that music and the jazz tradition were different in Texas than anywhere else.
"Blues is like the white dust in the neighbourhood 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."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article