Published in The Islander Magazine August 2013
Joe Sample
“The real gift of music comes from the heavens.”
- Joe Sample
Resonance is something jazz legend, Joe Sample, is familiar with. As a jazz, funk, soul and pop composer, arranger, piano player and producer, Sample has been making music that has resonated around the world since the 1950’s. Most notably as a founding member of the Jazz Crusaders (later known as The Crusaders) but also through an equally impressive solo career, releasing almost an album a year since the 1980’s.
Growing up in Houston’s 5th Ward in the 1940’s yielded another form of resonance that is still with Sample today. While listening to the family radio one day, a very young Joe Sample heard a blatantly racist political campaign ad that spoke against African Americans. The brutally hurtful moment was immediately etched in Sample’s mind and set him on a life-long path to reflect on, understand and release the pain of those haunting words through music and education, along with a ferocious fight against the suppression of history. It’s in his continued desire, at 74 years of age, to express his passions, and tell the world what’s on his mind that Joe Sample comes to Galveston’s Grand Opera House on September 28th.
It was eight years ago when Sample first performed at a benefit for St. Mary’s Catholic Church and School in Houston’s Third Ward. The benefit was organized by Sample and was, in Sample’s words, more like a “jam session”. It was a jam session, held in the cafeteria of the church, that attracted over 700 people and raised more than $16,000 to buy playground equipment for the school.
After doing the benefit for St. Mary’s, Sample says he was approached by four other black churches and schools. “They said, ‘Well if you did a concert for St. Mary’s, when are you going to do one for us?’” Sample laughs when reflecting on having to tell them he simply couldn’t do five concerts a year. “I said, ‘Why don’t we just try to organize one major concert a year?’” In 2011 the benefit, for three different black Catholic Schools, held at The Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, raised more than $60,000.
Although Sample was unable to hold the benefit in 2012 he is back in 2013 on September 28th with the original members of the Jazz Crusaders, featuring Sample on piano and keyboards, Wayne Henderson on trombone, saxophonist Wilton Felder and flutist Hubert Laws. In addition, the show will feature the Joe Sample Jazz Orchestra with help from Texas Southern University. “We are using alumni as well as students from Texas Southern.”
The chosen work to be performed during the TSU portion of the show is titled, Children Of The Sun and was composed in 1995 after Sample visited the island of St. Croix where he had an epiphany. “For the first time in my life I felt what a slave must have felt. When I got to the top of St. Croix (Mount Eagle) I did a 360. I knew that the site where I was standing was where the slaves had processed sugar cane. I realized there was no underground railroad on those islands. Those people were doomed to be slaves for their entire lives. When I got back to Los Angeles (where Sample lived at the time), I kept wondering what spiritual values could a slave have? What drive could a slave have? There were a lot of suicides… Melodies began to flow out of me.”
The work has been performed only two times before in Houston but will be part of the Opera House program. Sample is also bringing in Houston blues legend, Jewel Brown. Like Sample, Brown is in her 70’s and still performing. “We worked the Ebony, the Club Matinee (once known as the Cotton Club of the South), the Tropicana, Whispering Pines, in Houston in the mid-fifties. She’s one of the last of a living kind. Someone who can really sing the blues. After we’re done with all the music of the big band and the familiar work of The Crusaders we’re going to take it back to the 5th Ward. I want the audience to know exactly what the 5th Ward sounded like in the mid-nineteen-fifties!”
On choosing the Galveston Opera House, Sample responds warmly, “I like the way I feel when I’m on that stage at The Galveston Opera House! I love the way the Opera House looks. I’m sure that during the beginnings of blues and jazz it was surroundings like these that helped to produce some of the moods of blues and jazz.”
The way he feels is something that has always driven Sample’s music. And he demands “feeling”, more than anything, from the people he plays with. “I’m a feeling-man. I’m from Southeast Texas. You can become a proficient technical musician with a lot of hard work. If you were not born with a groove factor, I don’t think you’ll ever get it. You can’t buy that, you can’t train for that. The real gift of music comes from the heavens, given to you when you were born.”
Joe Sample admits to being comfortable with his ‘legend’ status, proving himself worthy, selling millions of albums with The Jazz Crusaders, The Crusaders and as a solo artist. Few musicians have endured the span of time or covered the broad range of styles. Sample is a respected studio musician, composer, and producer for everyone from Miles Davis and Quincy Jones to Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan and B.B. King. Sample may be best known for co-writing (with Will Jennings) the 1978 Top 40 pop single, Street Life, featuring singer Randy Crawford. On recent European tour with Eric Clapton, David Sanborn, Marcus Miller and Steve Gadd, Sample demanded the group be billed as “legends”. “Writers would ask me, ‘Why are you calling yourselves legends?’ And I would tell them, ‘It gets right to the point - because we are!’”
Zach Tate is a writer, photographer and musician. (www.ZachTate.com)
Click the play button below and watch the video interview with Joe Sample followed by a perfomance of The Crusaders hit, 'Street Life'.
