Freedom Sound/Lookin’ Ahead (Fresh Sound FSR CD 751) and At The Lighthouse ’62 (Fresh Sound FSR CD 807)
The Jazz Crusaders

THEY were high school classmates in Houston, Texas when they first started grooving together. Tenor saxophonist Welton Fielder, pianist Joe Sample and drummer Nesbert “Stix” Hooper, soon to be joined by trombonist Wayne Henderson.

Thirsty for a life in music, they moved to the much more jazz-inclined Los Angeles in 1960, and with changing bass-men they took on the name of the Jazz Crusaders.

In May 1961 they made their first album, Freedom Sound, for Pacific Jazz, and became pioneers in an early version of fusion.

Mixing hard bop with elements of rhythm and blues, funk and Memphis soul, they created new, enthusiastic and youthful audiences for their music and widened the scope for jazz with a series of popular albums and regular club sessions.

By 1971 they had dropped the “Jazz” from their name and moved much further towards pop, and in 1975 they were the openers for Rolling Stones’s concerts in California. They made several hit singles such as Street Life, waxed in 1979.

But the reissue of some of their early albums on the Fresh Sound label as “twofers” reminds us of the strength of the sounds they made, the music which was mostly composed by them, and how far and with what intensity it reached out to their generation along the west coast.

1961 was a year when the civil rights movement in the South was at its apex — a year of freedom rides — and the focus of the struggle was among the 26,000-strong black community of Albany, Georgia.

So the title Freedom Sound has a particular resonance, chosen by four young black Texans, barely out of their teens and joined by veteran bassman Jimmy Bond, formerly of Chet Baker’s band, who first met the Crusaders in the studio on the day of the recording.

Off they stride with their first number, The Geek, a lilting swinger where blues-based guest guitarist Roy Gaines takes the first solo, Henderson grumps in and Felder sounds out the gruff Texan tenor tradition of David Newman and Arnett Cobb, from Dallas and Houston respectively.

That’s It! has a Jazz Messengers timbre to it. Composed by Felder, his tenor rips into the theme and Henderson sounds as if he has borrowed Messenger Curtis’s slides. The title tune has Hopper’s parade drums crackling and composer Sample marching up and down his keys, as if inside the swing there is an assertion and protest, heightened by Felder’s horn testimony.

The final track is the ambiguously titled Coon, sounding emphatic and in-your-face, with some powerful drums from hooper.

January 1962 brought the Crusaders’ second album Lookin’ Ahead, which was sparked by Sample’s arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Song of India with a virtual adenoidal solo from Felder.

Big Hunk of Funk is as it says, its pulse compulsive and earthy, reaching right into the heart of the next track, a brief stomping version of Bernstein’s Tonight.

Henderson and Felder blow a blue reverie on the trombonist’s tune In A Dream and the fivesome whip up a Horace Silver groove on the bouncing Sinnin’ Sam.

This was Africa’s era. Ghana had been decolonised under Nkrumah in 1957 (Louis Armstrong’s horn had featured in the independence celebrations) and, tragically, Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent Congo, had been murdered in Katanga in January 1961, with the full connivance of the Belgian and US governments.

Both events are reflected within the choice of tunes on the Crusaders’ album At The Lighthouse ’62, recorded live at the Hermosa Beach nightclub to a very responsive audience.

The session begins with Henderson’s Congolese Sermon, as if the Crusaders are laying a marker for their listeners. It’s a boppish, pacey theme with Sample comping stridently and vigorous solos from the two horns.

Altosaxophonist Jackie McLean first recorded Appointment in Ghana on his Jackie’s Bag album in 1959. But here with the Crusaders it goes back overland and over ocean from Los Angeles to Accra to an Africa of faraway history and present solidarity, with jazz making its message as the black star flies with the music in an ancestral homeland. Truly epochal sounds.