Joe Sample on Solo Crusade for New Sound

The first thing Joe Sample wants to talk about is the pianos--all those pianos of endless shapes and sounds and sizes at every stop on his concert tour with singer Al Jarreau. Too few of them left Sample completely satisfied.

Even some of the bigger concert halls lock up their best instruments when anyone resembling a jazz or pop artist is booked for the evening, he laments. Instead, they are reserved for touring classical performers. During the European leg of his tour, Sample had rented a piano he could trust, and will probably do so again on future trips.

He says the state of pianos is “the one reality in the piano world that is a complete drag.” But, he concedes, things were even worse in the late 1960s, when his gigs with the Crusaders at certain jazz clubs had him believing he was wasting his life playing pianos “that were totally impossible to play. Their keys were broken, and there were broken strings.”

He smiles, relaxing now in the West Hollywood apartment he shares with his 21-year-old bass-playing son, Nicklas, and a simple upright piano.

Nevertheless, he says, things should work out fine for his shows with Jarreau on Thursday and Friday at the Universal Amphitheatre, where he’ll be joined by percussionist Lenny Castro and bassist Anthony Jackson. The tour is only the latest event in Sample’s accelerating solo career after the official breakup of the Crusaders at the end of the ‘80s--the Chicago Tribune called him “one of jazz’s most underrated soloists.”

Next year, the pianist will release “Invitation,” a new album of reworked jazz standards that bathes a core acoustic unit in the sounds of strings, brass, woodwinds and synthesizers.

His solo career is relatively new. During earlier moves to establish an independent musical identity, he says, his former record company and management expressed “a lot of nervousness.”

The fear was that Sample would leave the Crusaders. “And I would never generate as much money as the Crusaders. I was told I can’t do that anymore, and I was a bad boy because I was upsetting the apple cart,” he says.

“My decision to do a solo album had nothing to do with me leaving the Crusaders. That was my life’s work. That’s why I had trained so hard all my life.”

Most of that life had been spent within the Crusaders, the act he had founded in the late ‘50s in Texas with saxophonist-bassist Wilton Felder, trombonist Wayne Henderson and drummer Stix Hooper. The band, which would later be joined by guitarist Larry Carlton and ultimately score such pop hits as “Put It Where You Want It,” built a long and successful career with an ever-changing weave of straight jazz, rhythm and blues and hard funk.

And it is the work of the Crusaders before Hooper’s 1982 departure that is celebrated on the new 32-track “The Golden Years” retrospective album. On the record is Sample’s own favorite composition, a tribute to Joe Louis, “A Ballad for Joe,” a song of smooth emotion that epitomizes the best of the Crusaders’ work.

“The mood on that thing was awesome,” Sample says. “It’s like a heart throbbing in a peaceful manner. It’s just emotion that turns me on. And that’s one thing about Miles Davis. Every single thing that he did had a mood to it, and it would suck you in. This thing was alive and breathing.”

Also on the new collection, released by GRP Records, is a warm live rendition of Felder’s “Way Back Home.” That song was so universally moving when first released that Patty Hearst kidnapers the Symbionese Liberation Army used it as background music for its ransom tapes, much as a variety of Black Panthers, communists and other American radicals developed a strange and unexplained devotion to the band.

“The FBI definitely contacted us, and wanted to know what was our connection to the Army or Patty Hearst,” Sample says. “I had no idea what they were talking about.”

The passion of Sample and the Crusaders’ work owes much to the sounds of the blues, country and other expressive styles that were floating through the Texas air where its members were growing up. Among Sample’s early favorites was country singer-songwriter Hank Williams Sr.

“I had no idea that this guy was a country artist,” Sample says. “He had songs that had everybody in the black neighborhood singing it. He would just write across the board with humanity, and it didn’t matter if it was country or not.”

Eventually, the young pianist was attracted to the jazz music of Stan Kenton, Oscar Peterson and Bud Powell. Sample’s early record collection was a rare cache of new jazz in his neighborhood.

As part of the Modern Jazz Sextet, the future Crusaders soon were imitating things they heard from Miles Davis and others. And they were starting to compose, between their gigs with traveling blues artists or at dance shows in a band called the Swingsters.

“The very first album was a hit album,” Sample says of their 1961 debut. “Right away it began to outsell some of the great albums that had been made in the ‘50s. Why? Because we had emotion in our playing. I go back to that and I hear the vitality. Even though I hear the fumbling and the stumbling, I also hear the progress as we became older. There was always a lot of emotion.”

But those early records also opened up the band to some hard criticism for its mix of genres, which came from the Crusaders’ conviction that jazz music could appeal to a mass audience, much as an earlier generation had made Count Basie and Duke Ellington broad popular successes.

The harshest critics, Sample says now, “are people that think time should stand still, like Wynton Marsalis. All these new musicians are coming up and imitating and dressing and talking like we did in the ‘50s and ‘60s. To me, they are out of their minds. That is gone, dead and gone.

“I try extremely hard not to play the same way that I did in the ‘70s. Once I start playing like that, I feel like I’m dealing with ghosts. I feel like I’m washed up, finished, and done, like I have no future at all. The future is always trying to figure out what I am going to do next.”

Pianist Joe Sample performs at 8:15 p.m. Thursday and Friday with Al Jarreau at the Universal Amphitheatre. Tickets are $22.50, $32 and $40. Call: (213) 480-3232.