Pianist and composer Joe Sample, a founding member of the genre-crossing Jazz Crusaders who helped pioneer the electronic jazz-funk fusion style, has died. He was 75.

Sample died of complications due to lung cancer Friday at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, his manager, Patrick Rains, said. Rains said Sample’s family was at his bedside.

Sample was “a seminal figure in the transition from acoustic to electronic music in the jazz field in the late ’60s and early ’70s” with his band, Rains said. The group, which later called itself The Crusaders, became a successful crossover act with such hits as the 1979 rhythm-and-blues-flavored single and album “Street Life” featuring singer Randy Crawford. A few years before that, they were the first instrumental band to open for the Rolling Stones on tour.

A prolific songwriter, his songs were sampled by hip-hop artists, including Tupac Shakur, who used “In All My Wildest Dreams” on his “Dear Mama.” Nicole Kidman sang Sample’s “One Day I’ll Fly Away” in the movie “Moulin Rouge.”

A Houston native, Sample teamed with high school friends, saxophonist-bassist Wilton Felder and drummer Stix Hooper, to form a band as teenagers in the mid-’50s. Trombonist Wayne Henderson, a classmate at Texas Southern University, later joined the group, which became known as The Jazz Crusaders when the group moved to Los Angeles. The band made its first recording, “Freedom Sounds,” in 1961.

Originally, the band played hard-bop, but later fused elements of R&B, soul and funk into its jazz.

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“We were mostly rebels, and when everyone was going in one direction, we deliberately went the other way,” Sample told Jazz Times magazine in 2003.

They placed 19 albums on the Billboard Top 200.

In the 1990s, Sample began focusing more on his solo career, often returning to acoustic piano.

In 2003, Sample, Felder and Hooper reunited as The Crusaders to record “Rural Renewal,” with guitarist Eric Clapton.

His final album, “Live,” featuring Crawford, drummer Steve Gadd, and his son, Nicklas, on bass, was released by PRA Records in 2012.

Sample was also an in-demand studio musician who worked with artists including Joni Mitchell, B.B. King, Marvin Gaye, Steely Dan and Quincy Jones.


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