At 9:50pm (Houston,TX time), September 12, 2014, Joe Sample - TopicsExpress



          

At 9:50pm (Houston,TX time), September 12, 2014, Joe Sample passed. He leaves us with much music to remember him by, and for our continued life time! Yet, he will truly be missed! (R.I.P.!) May we all bless his family during this time, Joseph Leslie Sample was born on February 1, 1939 in Houston, TX. He found himself enamored shortly after being introduced to the piano at just five years of age, and stuck with the instrument throughout childhood. He eventually went on to study music performance at Texas Southern University, where he teamed up with his old friends saxophonist Wilton Felder, drummer Stix Hooper, trombonist Wayne Henderson, and several other musicians to form The Jazz Crusaders (later, just The Crusaders). The then-teenagers would travel across the Gulf states, playing dive bars and strip clubs trying to emulate music by the likes of John Coltrane. “There was nothing city-slick about what we did,” Sample told The Independent in 1995 about the group’s musical origins. The group never graduated from TSU. Instead, they moved from Houston to Los Angeles in the late ’50s to pursue their musical aspirations as a hard-bop group, which was the dominant style of jazz in that era. The group quickly stood out from the crowd for their unique sound, which included Henderson and Felder playing choruses in unison. This praise gave them the confidence to experiment much more with their music, until they eventually hit on a winning formula by incorporating elements of soul and funk into a unique fusion that effectively pioneered the styles and techniques we continue to hear in contemporary jazz, and other genres, to this day. “We are the fathers of jazz-funk-fusion,” Henderson told the LA Times in 1995. “We took pop tunes… and did them melodically with a groove, so people could dance if they wanted.” Read more: thejazzline/news/2014/09/joe-sample-dead-jazz-pianist/#ixzz3DD7Cus8s Follow us: @TheJazzLine on Twitter | TheJazzLine on Facebook
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 15:23:55 +0000

Trending Topics



Recently Viewed Topics




© 2015