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| The time they really committed to the word association. |
I apologize in advance for this post on the grounds that, it’s pretty much: a handful of dudes put an actual shit-ton of music and over 30 years. They might have done it under a couple different names, some key members came and went (but only after 14 years), but this basic story here isn’t more complicated than talented professional musicians releasing a ton of material and landing a hit somewhere in the early middle. But, because I have a format.
The Hit
The Crusaders’ “Street Life” came out in late 1979 and, based on all the one-hit wonders I’ve heard around it and my general sense of the mainstream sound of the era, something close to out of nowhere. It’s less than it doesn’t sound like its time - between the vocal style (especially with the lonely opening), the entire rhythm underlay, the pulse of electric organ, the funk guitar, the “warmth” of the production, it very much does - but that fucker’s north of 11 minutes long and I never saw a radio edit (even the Youtube clip gets within a few tics of 10 minutes). That didn’t stop it from breaking into the Top 10 on the R&B charts and sneaking as high as No. 36 on Billboard’s Top 100. (Fans in the UK lifted as high as No. 5.) The album did all right too. No. 18 on the pop charts ain’t bad.
Well, that takes care of that.
The Rest of the Story
“This group took the blues-based saturation of Texas, and melded that with the gospel and soul from the church…”
- Jake Feinberg, in an interview with Wilton Felder (which puts it sometime before September 27, 2015)
The story begins with three friends who attended high school together - Joe Sample (piano), Wilton Felder (tenor sax, at least then), and Nesbert “Stix” Hooper forming a band they called The Swingsters in 1954. It continues with Sample checking out for a couple years to study piano at Texas Southern University - where he definitely met Wayne Henderson (trombone), and might have met Hubert Laws (flute) and Henry Wilson (bass). After taking a head-count, they updated their name to the Modern Jazz Sextet and continued to build their name as a hard bop act. After introducing some R&B influences to their sound, they updated their name to the Nighthawks and/or Nite Hawks, and, for those wondering at home, nearly all of these notes will be chronological and, yes, most of it comes from Wikipedia’s entry on The Crusaders. I had what I had to work with and…mostly lucid as Felder was through it, that Feinberg interview felt too much like the latter badgering the former for what he wanted to get out of him.
Sample dropped out before graduation and the entire group moved West to Los Angeles in 1960, in search of a bigger stage and better opportunities. Shortly after arriving, they changed the band’s name to the Jazz Crusaders and the opportunities followed. The Pacific Jazz label signed them in 1961 and they went on to release 16 albums on that label from 1961 to 1969. Curiously, the Jazz Crusaders expanded beyond the hard bop sound they’d picked up from Cannonball Adderly, Art Blakey and John Coltrane by introducing a little soul to their sound. For the record, I put in any time on the Jazz Crusaders, and for reasons that should be obvious below.
After getting through the 1960s and cycling through a couple bass players - e.g., first, Jimmy Bond, then Bobby Haynes - the Jazz Crusaders hit their first peak in their final album for Pacific Jazz with 1969’s Powerhouse (which just dipped into the Billboard Top 200). I’ve found nothing on what prompted it, but they switched labels after that, going first to Chisa for a couple albums - including 1970s Old Socks New Shoes, which reached No. 90 on the album charts - but the biggest switch came between their first and second albums for Chisa (the second was 1971’s Pass the Plate), when they clipped the band’s name to just plain, the Crusaders. The motivations seemed to follow from a desire to open up new horizons both musically and commercially (or, musically and therefore commercially), and that expressed in their music by folding funk into the formula. And well.
A bunch of further changes came during this period - e.g., they added guitarist Larry Clayton (who they’d played with before), Felder swapped to bass guitar (more later) with another guy named Max Bennett coming in now and then, Sample introduced electric piano and clavinet (well, I didn’t know what that was), and the moved to a new label, Blue Thumb, starting with 1972’s Crusaders 1 for most of the 1970s…though, it bears noting they checked out of Blue Thumb before they recorded Street Life (MCA Records handled the Crusaders through their commercial prime). The arguably more significant development came with several members of the Crusaders becoming “in-demand” session musicians. Most of it appeared to go to Sample and Felder, both of whom played for a handful or two the major mainstream artists of the day - e.g., (from Wikipedia’sentry on Sample) Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Tina Turner, B. B. King, Joe Cocker, Minnie Riperton, Anita Baker and The Supremes (may as well add Randy Newman and Steely Dan to the list) - but Felder cleans up when it comes to songs that stuck in the culture, e.g., the studio recording of the Jackson 5’s “ABC” and “I Want You Back,” as well as Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” For anyone who with 12 minutes’ worth of time and the interest, a Youtube channel called Soul Station posted a tribute to Felder shortly after his death and, if you want an education about this genre (or these genres) with a heavy emphasis on name-dropping, the hosts of that tribute can give you literal hours worth of music to explore. And a very, very cool tribute it is, seeing as they credit the Crusaders for creating the sound of the “so-called exploitation” movies. And, to give a short-list of how well that sound worked (and to drop some album names), here’s a taste:
“With a growing crossover appeal, the group's most commercially successful recordings included the single "Put It Where You Want It" (No.52 pop, 1972), and the albums The 2nd Crusade (No.45 album, 1973), Southern Comfort (No.31 album, 1974), Chain Reaction (No.26 album, 1975), Those Southern Knights (No.38 album, 1976), and Images (No.34 album, 1978).”
So, no, clearly one-hit wonder does not apply, or at least not in any meaningful way. And yet it's mostly a chronology of carrying on and falling out from there. For instance, Henderson left the band in the mid-1970s to move into producing, though it looks like fairly niche stuff from a mainstream (which, here, somewhat obviously stands in for “white”) perspective. The Crusaders main (and hyper-productive period) probably ended with 1982’s live album, Royal Jam. They put out a few more albums over the rest of the 1980s, but they fun and freedom had drained out of the project by then. From a quote by Scott Yanow (who appears to have got cross about their step away from jazz):
“Sample later commented that the group was under commercial pressure from record companies to record jazzed-up versions of contemporary popular songs.”
It took a lot of reading between the lines, and maybe even too much, to flesh out the history of the Crusaders; I’m not sure I found even one telling anecdote, but I guess this went on as long as most of the other posts. It’s fairly easy to find later interviews with a couple members of the Crusaders, and the thing that came through most clearly was the strong collective sense of self as a band. To quote a pair of sections from a 2003 interview in Jazz Times, which came around the same time as their reunion album, Rural Renewal (both quotes come from Felder):
“The Crusaders have been the only band that I’ve loved playing in. I realized as I got older that nobody else played like them. The way that we played together, and the music that we made can only be played when we’re together. Before I leave the scene, I’d love to be able to create and play together with [Stix and Joe]. So, I’m real happy to do this album.”
And:
“I can call any group anything I want, but we know what the Crusaders are. I’ll play with Harold Land and Bobby Hutchinson, but I won’t go to them or anyone else with a Crusaders concept. We have a very distinctive concept of playing, and Wayne has chosen to do what he wants to do. That’s why he isn’t on [Rural Renewal].”
When I’m working on the music history side of this site, I often struggle to find material - and, there, I’m talking about absolute legends of American popular music (for some perspective, I’m talking Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, people on that plane). With them, I can take comfort knowing that I can find a book, or even several books, on any of those acts. I have a sneaking suspicion that I can’t say the same thing about the Crusaders. And that feels like a damn shame.
About the Sampler
The thing about this sampler, it’s just….REALLY fucking good. Out of simple self-preservation, I confined myself to the period between 1971 (again, Pass the Plate) and 1984’s Ghetto Blaster, which I consciously included to get to their 80s “commercial pressure” phase. To walk through them (again) chronologically:
Pass the Plate (1971, had a soft spot for this one): a straight jazz number called “Young Rabbits ’71 ’72,” “Listen and You’ll See,” that sounds like something you’d get from War, and “Treat Me Like Ya Treat Yaself,” which falls between those two. I rounded out the selection from Pass the Plate with “Greasy Spoon.” Damn good tune, fwiw.
Hollywood (1972, their one and only album on MoWest): “Spanish Harlem” and “Do Yourself a Favor,” both of which feel like a “jazz/funk” sound.
The 2nd Crusade (1973), which feels like a bigger move toward jazz/funk/War (sorry; that’s my main frame of reference), with songs like “Don’t Let It Get You Down,” “Gotta Get It On,” and “A Message from the Inner City” (though, for what it’s worth, the latter reaches back to their jazz influences).
It’s more of a grab-bag from there - e.g., I pulled “Keep that Same Old Feeling” from 1974’s Those Southern Knights, a pair of funk-heavy numbers from 1978’s Images in “Fairy Tales” and “Bayou Bottoms,” the big single from Street Life, along the jazz-throwback, but with the guitar/funk overlays they’d picked up through the 1970s, called “Carnival of the Night” from the same album. Finally, I added a pair from 1980’s Rhapsody and Blues - “Honky Tonk Struttin’” and a nice, but musically stale festival of name-dropping called “Soul Shadows” - and, as threatened, I included a pair from 1984’s Ghetto Blaster, “Dead End” and “New Moves.” And, yeah, those last two have a lot of 80s on 'em.
The one thing I’ll say about everything on the sampler: if some or all of it really hits you, and you’ve never heard the Crusaders, or even the Jazz Crusaders before, you have just looked at the tip of a beautiful iceberg, my friend.
Till the next one, which, as has been happening a lot lately, goes in a completely different direction.
The Hit
The Crusaders’ “Street Life” came out in late 1979 and, based on all the one-hit wonders I’ve heard around it and my general sense of the mainstream sound of the era, something close to out of nowhere. It’s less than it doesn’t sound like its time - between the vocal style (especially with the lonely opening), the entire rhythm underlay, the pulse of electric organ, the funk guitar, the “warmth” of the production, it very much does - but that fucker’s north of 11 minutes long and I never saw a radio edit (even the Youtube clip gets within a few tics of 10 minutes). That didn’t stop it from breaking into the Top 10 on the R&B charts and sneaking as high as No. 36 on Billboard’s Top 100. (Fans in the UK lifted as high as No. 5.) The album did all right too. No. 18 on the pop charts ain’t bad.
Well, that takes care of that.
The Rest of the Story
“This group took the blues-based saturation of Texas, and melded that with the gospel and soul from the church…”
- Jake Feinberg, in an interview with Wilton Felder (which puts it sometime before September 27, 2015)
The story begins with three friends who attended high school together - Joe Sample (piano), Wilton Felder (tenor sax, at least then), and Nesbert “Stix” Hooper forming a band they called The Swingsters in 1954. It continues with Sample checking out for a couple years to study piano at Texas Southern University - where he definitely met Wayne Henderson (trombone), and might have met Hubert Laws (flute) and Henry Wilson (bass). After taking a head-count, they updated their name to the Modern Jazz Sextet and continued to build their name as a hard bop act. After introducing some R&B influences to their sound, they updated their name to the Nighthawks and/or Nite Hawks, and, for those wondering at home, nearly all of these notes will be chronological and, yes, most of it comes from Wikipedia’s entry on The Crusaders. I had what I had to work with and…mostly lucid as Felder was through it, that Feinberg interview felt too much like the latter badgering the former for what he wanted to get out of him.
Sample dropped out before graduation and the entire group moved West to Los Angeles in 1960, in search of a bigger stage and better opportunities. Shortly after arriving, they changed the band’s name to the Jazz Crusaders and the opportunities followed. The Pacific Jazz label signed them in 1961 and they went on to release 16 albums on that label from 1961 to 1969. Curiously, the Jazz Crusaders expanded beyond the hard bop sound they’d picked up from Cannonball Adderly, Art Blakey and John Coltrane by introducing a little soul to their sound. For the record, I put in any time on the Jazz Crusaders, and for reasons that should be obvious below.
After getting through the 1960s and cycling through a couple bass players - e.g., first, Jimmy Bond, then Bobby Haynes - the Jazz Crusaders hit their first peak in their final album for Pacific Jazz with 1969’s Powerhouse (which just dipped into the Billboard Top 200). I’ve found nothing on what prompted it, but they switched labels after that, going first to Chisa for a couple albums - including 1970s Old Socks New Shoes, which reached No. 90 on the album charts - but the biggest switch came between their first and second albums for Chisa (the second was 1971’s Pass the Plate), when they clipped the band’s name to just plain, the Crusaders. The motivations seemed to follow from a desire to open up new horizons both musically and commercially (or, musically and therefore commercially), and that expressed in their music by folding funk into the formula. And well.
A bunch of further changes came during this period - e.g., they added guitarist Larry Clayton (who they’d played with before), Felder swapped to bass guitar (more later) with another guy named Max Bennett coming in now and then, Sample introduced electric piano and clavinet (well, I didn’t know what that was), and the moved to a new label, Blue Thumb, starting with 1972’s Crusaders 1 for most of the 1970s…though, it bears noting they checked out of Blue Thumb before they recorded Street Life (MCA Records handled the Crusaders through their commercial prime). The arguably more significant development came with several members of the Crusaders becoming “in-demand” session musicians. Most of it appeared to go to Sample and Felder, both of whom played for a handful or two the major mainstream artists of the day - e.g., (from Wikipedia’sentry on Sample) Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Tina Turner, B. B. King, Joe Cocker, Minnie Riperton, Anita Baker and The Supremes (may as well add Randy Newman and Steely Dan to the list) - but Felder cleans up when it comes to songs that stuck in the culture, e.g., the studio recording of the Jackson 5’s “ABC” and “I Want You Back,” as well as Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” For anyone who with 12 minutes’ worth of time and the interest, a Youtube channel called Soul Station posted a tribute to Felder shortly after his death and, if you want an education about this genre (or these genres) with a heavy emphasis on name-dropping, the hosts of that tribute can give you literal hours worth of music to explore. And a very, very cool tribute it is, seeing as they credit the Crusaders for creating the sound of the “so-called exploitation” movies. And, to give a short-list of how well that sound worked (and to drop some album names), here’s a taste:
“With a growing crossover appeal, the group's most commercially successful recordings included the single "Put It Where You Want It" (No.52 pop, 1972), and the albums The 2nd Crusade (No.45 album, 1973), Southern Comfort (No.31 album, 1974), Chain Reaction (No.26 album, 1975), Those Southern Knights (No.38 album, 1976), and Images (No.34 album, 1978).”
So, no, clearly one-hit wonder does not apply, or at least not in any meaningful way. And yet it's mostly a chronology of carrying on and falling out from there. For instance, Henderson left the band in the mid-1970s to move into producing, though it looks like fairly niche stuff from a mainstream (which, here, somewhat obviously stands in for “white”) perspective. The Crusaders main (and hyper-productive period) probably ended with 1982’s live album, Royal Jam. They put out a few more albums over the rest of the 1980s, but they fun and freedom had drained out of the project by then. From a quote by Scott Yanow (who appears to have got cross about their step away from jazz):
“Sample later commented that the group was under commercial pressure from record companies to record jazzed-up versions of contemporary popular songs.”
It took a lot of reading between the lines, and maybe even too much, to flesh out the history of the Crusaders; I’m not sure I found even one telling anecdote, but I guess this went on as long as most of the other posts. It’s fairly easy to find later interviews with a couple members of the Crusaders, and the thing that came through most clearly was the strong collective sense of self as a band. To quote a pair of sections from a 2003 interview in Jazz Times, which came around the same time as their reunion album, Rural Renewal (both quotes come from Felder):
“The Crusaders have been the only band that I’ve loved playing in. I realized as I got older that nobody else played like them. The way that we played together, and the music that we made can only be played when we’re together. Before I leave the scene, I’d love to be able to create and play together with [Stix and Joe]. So, I’m real happy to do this album.”
And:
“I can call any group anything I want, but we know what the Crusaders are. I’ll play with Harold Land and Bobby Hutchinson, but I won’t go to them or anyone else with a Crusaders concept. We have a very distinctive concept of playing, and Wayne has chosen to do what he wants to do. That’s why he isn’t on [Rural Renewal].”
When I’m working on the music history side of this site, I often struggle to find material - and, there, I’m talking about absolute legends of American popular music (for some perspective, I’m talking Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, people on that plane). With them, I can take comfort knowing that I can find a book, or even several books, on any of those acts. I have a sneaking suspicion that I can’t say the same thing about the Crusaders. And that feels like a damn shame.
About the Sampler
The thing about this sampler, it’s just….REALLY fucking good. Out of simple self-preservation, I confined myself to the period between 1971 (again, Pass the Plate) and 1984’s Ghetto Blaster, which I consciously included to get to their 80s “commercial pressure” phase. To walk through them (again) chronologically:
Pass the Plate (1971, had a soft spot for this one): a straight jazz number called “Young Rabbits ’71 ’72,” “Listen and You’ll See,” that sounds like something you’d get from War, and “Treat Me Like Ya Treat Yaself,” which falls between those two. I rounded out the selection from Pass the Plate with “Greasy Spoon.” Damn good tune, fwiw.
Hollywood (1972, their one and only album on MoWest): “Spanish Harlem” and “Do Yourself a Favor,” both of which feel like a “jazz/funk” sound.
The 2nd Crusade (1973), which feels like a bigger move toward jazz/funk/War (sorry; that’s my main frame of reference), with songs like “Don’t Let It Get You Down,” “Gotta Get It On,” and “A Message from the Inner City” (though, for what it’s worth, the latter reaches back to their jazz influences).
It’s more of a grab-bag from there - e.g., I pulled “Keep that Same Old Feeling” from 1974’s Those Southern Knights, a pair of funk-heavy numbers from 1978’s Images in “Fairy Tales” and “Bayou Bottoms,” the big single from Street Life, along the jazz-throwback, but with the guitar/funk overlays they’d picked up through the 1970s, called “Carnival of the Night” from the same album. Finally, I added a pair from 1980’s Rhapsody and Blues - “Honky Tonk Struttin’” and a nice, but musically stale festival of name-dropping called “Soul Shadows” - and, as threatened, I included a pair from 1984’s Ghetto Blaster, “Dead End” and “New Moves.” And, yeah, those last two have a lot of 80s on 'em.
The one thing I’ll say about everything on the sampler: if some or all of it really hits you, and you’ve never heard the Crusaders, or even the Jazz Crusaders before, you have just looked at the tip of a beautiful iceberg, my friend.
Till the next one, which, as has been happening a lot lately, goes in a completely different direction.
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