Crusaders’ Sample Tackles Tough Theme

Keyboardist/composer Joe Sample has long believed that music speaks louder than words.

So when Sample wanted to write a theme album about the demise of the black community in this country, he put hands to keys rather than pen to paper.

“It was an issue I wanted to address, rather than talk about,” Sample says of “Ashes to Ashes,” his new Warner Bros. album. “Music is the greatest of our languages. Spoken language often needs translation, but not music.”

A founding member of the Crusaders, Sample has recorded such well-received solo albums as “Rainbow Seeker” and “Spellbound” and has played cameos with artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to Al Jarreau. But can instrumental music deal with a subject as broad as the one he’s chosen?

“I’ve always felt that words just come and go fast,” the 51-year-old says, a gentle expression on his face that matches his soft, somewhat sandpapery voice. “We’ve heard the preaching of this leader and that one, the ‘War on Drugs’ and ‘Just Say No,’ but I don’t think anyone listens to that kind of thing. Music, I think, has a far-reaching ability to touch the conscience of man.”

“Ashes to Ashes” was released a little more than a month ago and is being played steadily on the radio. (Sample plays the Celebrity Theater in Anaheim, Saturday, the Raymond Theatre in Pasadena, next Sunday, the Ventura Theatre in Ventura, Dec. 13, and the Hop in Riverside, Dec. 15.)

The topic of decline in the black community had been on Sample’s mind for a number of years. “It would come up as I’d remember growing up in Houston under the segregation system and going to a rough, rough school (Phillis Wheatley High School, named after the American Negro poet),” he says, his face somber and sad at the memory.

“It was rough place,” he goes on, smoking a cigarette. “Forty percent of my friends from then are either in jail or they’re dead. Then, more recently, my nephew, my sister’s son, was a victim of a drive-by shooting in Houston. He was shot four times but not killed.”

All during the writing of “Ashes to Ashes,” which took place from the summer of 1989 to this past May, one question kept arising for Sample: “What are the descendants of the American slave doing today?

“The answer is they are destroying themselves,” he says in tender tones that give his remark added impact.

“And the truth is, no one is going to save us, no one is going to save this country; we have to save ourselves,” he goes on. “It has to come from within. So when I see people pulling together, saying they want their neighborhoods back, to me that means people are determined to do something about this crisis.”

As bad as Sample says things may be for blacks, he was determined to make his theme up--not down--beat.

“I didn’t want to write a horror story, either, so the thrust of my concept is hope and promise,” he says. “People have to learn how to love again.”

The album is typical of Sample’s contemporary jazz/R&B;/pop style, with tunes like “The Road Less Traveled,” “Born in Trouble” and “Phoenix” bearing brief, catchy melodies enhanced by use of space, and solid rhythmic underpinings from bass, drums and added instruments. As the tunes are set up with few harmonic complexities, another Sample trademark, the music on “Ashes to Ashes” serves equally well as foreground or background listening.

Keeping the tunes on a project like “Ashes to Ashes” fresh and different from those on past solo efforts is no simple task, Sample says.

“If I sit down and think about what I’m doing, then I’ll write music that’s similar to what I’ve done before. It’ll be a Joe Sample cliche, and I’ve got those,” he says smiling and smoking his cigarette. “But if I just go with the wonderful moments where things are coming through me, if I am ready and fine-tuned, I will know how to communicate to myself what I’m feeling musically.”

Sample began his professional career as a teen-ager in Houston and was soon a part of a band with trombonist Wayne Henderson, tenor saxophonist Wilton Felder and drummer Stix Hooper that was known variously as the Swingsters and the Modern Jazz Sextet. “Then when we moved to Los Angeles in 1958, we became ‘The Nighthawks,’ a dance band,” Sample recalls. Soon thereafter the band changed its name to the Jazz Crusaders and achieved fame with its particularly punchy brand of hard bop tinged with soul.

In 1968, the band changed its name to the Crusaders and embarked on a more contemporary style that contained healthy chunks of R&B; and blues. In the ensuing years, both Henderson and Hooper have left the aggregation, and though Felder and Sample are mostly solo artists these days, they still occasionally appear under the group’s banner.

Sample has come through a tough six-year fight with Epstein-Barr Syndrome--”I felt like I had the flu every day for six years,” he says--and some severe financial problems. A bad investment cost him more than $300,000 and he had to pay a healthy sum to buy Hooper’s share of the Crusaders.

“I see this as a time of great personal growth,” he says. “I see myself as a product of the Afro-American experience in the mid-to-late 20th Century and I feel now, with the release of ‘Ashes to Ashes,’ that I have only started.”