Chris Jasper, Isley Brothers keyboardist and songwriter, dies at 73

Boston Globe

26-02-2025

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Mr. Jasper was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award as a member of the Isleys; found subsequent success with the breakaway band Isley-Jasper-Isley; and had a busy career as a solo artist and producer, putting out 17 albums and working with artists including singer Chaka Khan.
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In 1969, he began playing with the Isleys as a teenager, joining two other young musicians in helping usher in the '3+3' era of the band. After more than a decade of performing as a vocal trio, fusing rock, and gospel on hits such as 1959's 'Shout,' the Isley Brothers had grown to become a self-contained six-piece unit that wrote, produced, and performed its own songs.
The band came to embrace a funk-forward sound on acclaimed albums such as '3+3' (1973), which opened with the Top 10 hit 'That Lady,' and 'The Heat Is On' (1975), which featured 'Fight the Power,' an antiestablishment anthem that reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and influenced a Public Enemy song of the same name.
'Our music is about so much more now,' guitarist and drummer Ernie Isley said in a 1976 interview with Phonograph Record magazine, reflecting on the group's development. 'We've got a lot more to say musically and lyrically. I-IV-V chord changes and three guys jumping up and down, screaming and shouting 'wooo' just isn't where we're at.'
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'That's right,' Mr. Jasper added. 'We want our music to expand people's consciousness and take them onto a different musical plane.'
The band continued to release politically minded anthems such as 'The Pride,' a No. 1 R&B hit. It also broadened its audience through funk- and soul-inflected covers of rock hits including Stephen Stills's 'Love the One You're With' and Seals and Crofts's 'Summer Breeze.' The members also put out sultry ballads such as 'For the Love of You,' a quiet-storm classic that was covered by Whitney Houston, and 'Between the Sheets,' which found a new audience after Notorious B.I.G. sampled it in his song 'Big Poppa.'
Although the Isley Brothers released a string of million-selling albums in the 1970s, the group's commercial fortunes gradually declined, and the band split up in 1984 because of what Mr. Jasper described as 'financial inequities' between the three older musicians - brothers O'Kelly Isley Jr. and Rudolph and Ronald Isley - and the three younger band members, who left to form Isley-Jasper-Isley.
The new group, which included Ernie on guitar and drums and Marvin Isley on bass, took turns singing lead while recording R&B hits including 'Look the Other Way,' 'Insatiable Woman,' and 'Caravan of Love,' a spiritual ode to peace and harmony that topped the R&B chart in 1985.
'I had been looking at the world scene quite a bit and wasn't pleased with what I was seeing,' Mr. Jasper recalled in an interview for 'The Billboard Book of Number One Rhythm & Blues Hits,' looking back on 'Caravan's' origins. 'I just felt that we all needed a positive message.'
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Mr. Jasper, who sang lead, said he wrote the lyrics in 20 minutes: 'Are you ready for the time of your life?/ It's time to stand up and fight / … The place where mankind was born / Is so neglected and torn.' The song became an international hit after the Housemartins, a British indie rock band, recorded an a cappella cover in 1986.
Although Isley-Jasper-Isley soon disbanded, Mr. Jasper continued to record socially conscious songs as a solo artist, scoring another R&B chart-topper with 'Superbad,' the title track to his 1987 debut. The song was an improbably danceable call for children to stay in school and look out for their neighbors, and included a call-and-response section praising 'superbad' civil rights leaders: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
'I compose the same R&B, soul and funk music that I am known for, but I feel obligated to put positive messages in the music, whether it is a love song, a song about social issues, or a spiritual song,' Mr. Jasper told the French music website Yuzu Melodies in 2013.
As a solo artist, he still wanted 'to bring the funk,' he added, but 'with a positive message.'
The youngest of seven children, Christopher Howard Jasper
was born in Cincinnati on Dec. 30, 1951. His mother played the piano and arranged for him to start taking lessons when he was 7.
Mr. Jasper grew up in suburban Lincoln Heights, on the same street as the Isley family. When he was a boy, his sister Elaine married Rudolph Isley and moved to Teaneck, N.J.; Mr. Jasper lived there for a year as a teenager. During that period, he began performing with Marvin and Ernie Isley, playing at New Jersey churches and high schools in a group called the Jazzmen Trio.
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After graduating from high school in Ohio, Mr. Jasper studied for a year at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, where he learned the fundamentals of composition but bristled at the school's focus on atonal music. He transferred to C.W. Post College, now Long Island University Post, where he studied under jazz pianist and composer Billy Taylor and received a bachelor's degree in music composition.
After going solo, Mr. Jasper founded his own label, Gold City Records. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2022.
He leaves his wife of 42 years, Margie Jasper, a vice president at his record company; and three sons, Michael, Nicholas, and Christopher.