Crusaders end 13-year hiatus with new album. (Jazz).

Joe Sample, Wilton Felder and Stix Hooper of veteran jazz-funkers The Crusaders have re-united for their first studio album since the band split in the early-Eighties. The initial break-up in itself came several years after the departure of Wayne Henderson, the fourth founding member of the Texan group, but even with only three-quarters of the original line-up on board, new album Rural Renewal, out now on Verve, is very much a return to the snappy, groove-heavy Seventies sound that peaked commercially with the chart smash Street Life.

What Rural Renewal lacks in innovation it makes up for in feeling with Sample's bulky, buttery rhodes and Felder's dry, muscular tenor imparting a bluesy charge to proceedings. According to Sample, Rural Renewal--which is produced by long-time Crusaders' collaborator Stewart Levine and features a stellar cast of sidemen including Arthur Adams and Ray Parker Jr--does not mark a reunion so much as a continuation. After several years of solo projects, the pianist was ready for a challenge.

"I suppose that I really wanted to feel the buzz of something new and it felt as if now was the time to get something back together," says sample. "The last time [the three of us] worked together as The Crusaders was in 1982 and shortly after, I guess, the bottom fell out of everything. I mean, in both our personal lives as well as the music industry. That was when ...