Crusaders drummer performs Houston concert for jazz legend Joe Sample

Nesbert “Stix” Hooper is going home this week for the first time in maybe 20 years. He thinks the last time he was here was for a class reunion at Phillis Wheatley High School. The legendary Crusaders drummer won’t guess when he last performed in Houston.

Hooper, 85, will receive the mayoral proclamation treatment befitting a returning crusader. He will also perform with Jazz Houston on Thursday night, in a celebration of his late friend and bandmate Joe Sample. And during this show, Hooper – the last living member of the Crusaders – and Jazz Houston will present the first-ever performance of the last composition written by Sample, which was incomplete until Hooper completed it.

“This is an opportunity to pay tribute to my former partner and friend,” Hooper said. “We sat down and spent many hours in the moonlight working together. He created this new thing and I felt like I had to help finish it for the whole world to hear.

Hooper and Sample offer two very different experiences in Houston. They moved to Los Angeles together as members of the Modern Jazz Sextet more than 60 years ago. Sample eventually found his way back to Houston. He returned to the city and delved into the Creole culture that nurtured him as a child in the Fifth Ward. He still plays jazz, but also zydeco and blues.

“The blues is like the white dust in the oyster shell street neighborhood,” Sample told the Chronicle in 2011. “It’s a natural thing in this area. Some things I can play with musicians here…that I can’t play with other musicians from Chicago, Seattle, Boston or New York. They just don’t feel it.

“We’re in a unique situation here.”

Unlike Sample, Hooper didn’t really get his due in his hometown. He puts some on himself. “Joe had a lot more affinity for Houston than I did,” he says. While Sample romantically remembered the la-la dances his parents took him to as a child in the Fifth Ward, Hooper grew up in Clinton Park and says he felt like his part of town was neglected.

But he can’t wait to come back this week and see the familiar faces still there.

“As Ruth Brown said, ‘I’m still old, but I’m not cold,'” he said.

Vincent Gardner, co-founder of Jazz Houston with his wife Belinda Munro and also the organization’s artistic director, describes the show as the essence of what they hope to do in Houston: educate, entertain and reclaim history Houston Jazz.

“For some reason, I feel like no one was asking Stix to come home and do a show,” he says. “But the Crusaders have such a strong heritage at home. They are so influential.

The history of the Crusaders speaks to the importance of maintaining music programs in public schools.

Hooper, Sample and saxophonist Wilton Felder met in Wheatley, where Hooper says a teacher “brought us together to play. And it turns out we all enjoyed doing it.

The trio played R&B and went by the Swingsters. Soon the trio added trombonist Wayne Henderson and took a jazzier direction with the addition of flautist Hubert Laws and bassist Henry “La La” Wilson. They went through the Modern Jazz Sextet.

Several band members attended Texas Southern University and continued to perform together.

They knew they wanted to leave Houston. “So we took off,” Sample told the Chronicle. “It was D-Day, June 6, 1958.”

The group chose Los Angeles over New York. They would give different answers as to why. Hooper says, “We were used to having classes before and (expletive). »

Sample said they had family in the Los Angeles area, which provided a refuge for young musicians looking to settle down. He also said other Houstonians, like guitar genius Johnny Watson and saxophonist Curtis Amy, offered support and led their concerts.

Whatever the reason, the Modern Jazz Sextet found jazz concerts and R&B dancing almost immediately. They had established a foothold in Los Angeles, and by 1961 they also had a recording contract and a new name: the Jazz Crusaders.

The Jazz Crusaders recorded prolifically in the 1960s. The members had an ear for music outside of jazz. In 1968, they recorded an instrumental version of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.”

In 1971, the group introduced more electronic sounds. The atmosphere became funkier. They renamed the whole thing the Crusaders.

Here the story gets complicated. As the authors of the Penguin Guide to Jazz – a bible for those interested in recorded jazz – write: “removing the word ‘jazz’ from the name was, of course, a form of critical suicide.”

But criticism aside, the ’70s saw the Crusaders reach a musical peak. Individual instrumentalists made a lot of money playing for others. Felder’s credits include Marvin Gaye, Billy Joel, Jackson Browne, John Cale, Harry Nilsson. Henderson began producing albums. Sample performed with Joni Mitchell and dozens of others.

And in 1979, the Crusaders had a crossover pop hit with “Street Life.”

But Henderson left the group in the 1970s, followed by Hooper in 1983.

Sample reunited with Henderson and Felder for a show in Houston in 2011, but they failed to get Hooper on board.

Soon after, the history of the Crusaders turned dark. Henderson died in April 2014. Sample died five months later. A year later, Felder died.

The drummer remained active musically into his 80s. He paid tribute to British pianist and composer George Shearing in 2016 and recorded an orchestral album of his own compositions which he released in 2022.

Hooper also worked on unfinished business involving one of his former bandmates. Sample was working on a new composition at the time of his death. Hooper finished the song. He contacted Gardner of Jazz Houston to write an orchestration for the song.

“That was the last thing Joe wrote,” Hooper says. “So we had to finish it, for Joe.”

“Stix and Joe’s Gumbo Groove” will be performed in public for the first time Thursday evening.

“You can hear it when people have been working together as long as Joe and Stix have,” Gardner says. “You can hear a single thought in the way everything works together.

“I tried to expand and orchestrate the things that were there. They had worked on their musical cohesion for so many years. They didn’t need me to ruin this.

Gardner plans to make the Sample tribute an annual event for Jazz Houston, with different guests each year.

But he knew there was only one possible guest for the inaugural concert.

“Stix, Joe, Wilton, Wayne, that group did great things,” Gardner says. “And they’re barely celebrated.”

“They should be celebrated.”