The Jazz Crusaders lost two co-founders in five months. Joe Sample, 75, pianist, keyboard player, composer, died Friday, Sept. 12 in Houston, Texas of heart failure. Trombonist Wayne Henderson, 74, died April 4 in Culver City, California. Sample had heart attacks in 1994 and 2009.

Flutist Hubert Laws and drummer Stix Hooper are all that’s left of the core reunion group, which went by the Modern Jazz Sextet while playing at Houston’s Wheatley High School.

Joseph Leslie Sample (February 1, 1939 – September 12, 2014) is one of the founding members of the Jazz Crusaders, the band which became simply The Crusaders in 1971, and remained a part of the group until its final album in 1991.

Since the early 1980s, he has enjoyed a successful solo career and has guested on many recordings by other performers and groups, including Miles Davis, George Benson, Jimmy Witherspoon, B. B. King, Eric Clapton, Steely Dan and The Supremes. Sample incorporates jazz, gospel, blues, Latin and classical forms into his music.

Sample began playing the piano when he was five years old. He was a student of the organist and pianist Curtis Mayo.

In high school in the 1950s, Sample teamed up with two friends, saxophonist Wilton Felder and drummer "Stix" Hooper, to form a group called the Swingsters. While studying piano at Texas Southern University, Sample met and added trombonist Wayne Henderson and several other players to the Swingsters, which became the Modern Jazz Sextet and then the Jazz Crusaders.

The group made its first recording, “Freedom Sounds,” in 1961.

In the 1970s, Sample as a Los Angeles studio musician appeared on recordings by Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Tina Turner, B. B. King, Joe Cocker, Minnie Riperton and Anita Baker.

The Crusaders, after losing several key members, broke up in 1987 but would join to record periodically over the years.

Some of Sample’s works are heard on The Weather Channel's "Local on the 8s" segments.
Sample’s bassist son, Nicklas, is a member of the Coryell Auger Sample Trio featuring Larry Coryell and Barry Auger.

Thoughts of death prompted Sample to bring his decades-dormant band, the Jazz Crusaders, back to life in 2011. Henderson had been listening to old Jazz Crusaders albums, Sample said. "He realized we were all at that age where any one of us could possibly go." 

Their old band, it seems, had at least one crusade left in it. Not any more.