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Joe Sample’s Jook Joint

Twelve tracks from a Houston pianist who co-founded one of the great jazz groups and spent his later years making duet records with two of the finest voices in soul.

Joe Sample

Joseph Leslie Sample was born in Houston in 1939 and, while still at high school, formed the group that became The Jazz Crusaders with Wilton Felder, Stix Hooper and Wayne Henderson. They moved to Los Angeles, dropped the "Jazz" in 1971, and as The Crusaders became one of the most commercially successful and musically serious jazz-funk groups ever.

Sample was also among the most-recorded session pianists of the era — his playing appears on records by Steely Dan, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Tina Turner and Miles Davis, among a great many others.

His later career produced a body of duet work with Randy Crawford and Lalah Hathaway that is among the most satisfying jazz-soul vocal music anyone has made. He died in 2014.

What to listen for

"Street Life" is the monument. The 1979 Crusaders record with Randy Crawford singing became a standard, and hearing Lalah Hathaway's version here — with Sample at the piano, decades later — is the whole story of his late career in one track.

"One Day I'll Fly Away" is the other: Sample co-wrote it, Randy Crawford made it famous, and Lalah sings it here.

"When Your Life Was Low" and "A Long Way from Home" with Lalah are the deepest things on the list, and "For All We Know" is the Donny Hathaway standard sung by his daughter, which carries its own weight.

"This Bitter Earth" with Randy Crawford takes on the Dinah Washington record and is devastating.

The instrumentals are where the playing is exposed. "Nica's Dream" is a Horace Silver composition — a serious bebop credential — and "In All My Wildest Dreams" is his own best-known piece.

"Summertime" and "With These Hands" close it out.

Go deeper

The Crusaders' Street Life (1979) is the album, and their earlier Jazz Crusaders records are considerably harder-edged than their later reputation suggests.

Feeling Good (2006) with Randy Crawford is the essential duet album.

Sample's playing on Steely Dan's Aja and Marvin Gaye's I Want You is worth listening for specifically — once you know his touch, you start hearing him everywhere.

A closing thought on the late-career duets. Instrumentalists who reach their sixties often coast on the catalogue; Sample did the opposite, building an entirely new body of work around two singers and a piano. There is very little ego in these records — he plays support for most of their length — and that generosity is why they hold up. It is a model more veteran musicians could usefully follow.

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