The rolling piano vamp that opens "The Groove" turned a Berkeley teenager into an unlikely pop chart fixture on two continents. Rodney Franklin, the jazz pianist and composer who wrote and played it, died peacefully on July 8, 2026, according to a statement from his family. He was 67.

Franklin was born September 16, 1958, in Berkeley, California, and started playing piano around age six. He came up through the jazz curriculum built into Washington Elementary School by educator Dr. Herb Wong, one of a run of talented young Berkeley musicians who performed original compositions around the Bay Area as students, according to Berkeleyside.

By his teens Franklin was already working alongside professionals, playing with saxophonist John Handy in San Francisco and touring behind trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, vocalist Marlena Shaw, and percussionist Bill Summers. In 1978, at 19, he was signed to Columbia Records by jazz A&R executive George Butler after Butler encountered him at a cocktail party, and Franklin's debut album, "In the Center," followed that same year, according to The Second Disc.

His second album, "You'll Never Know," arrived in 1980 and carried the single that defined him. "The Groove" reached number seven on the UK Singles Chart that April and spent nine weeks on the chart, according to the Official Charts Company, crossing Franklin's jazz piano into pop radio at a moment when few instrumental jazz records made that leap.

He kept working through the decade, releasing six more albums for Columbia between 1980 and 1986: "Rodney Franklin," "Endless Flight," "Learning to Love," "Marathon," "Skydance," and "It Takes Two." "Skydance" held "Song for You," a 1985 ballad that found a second life as a Quiet Storm radio staple and, per SoulTracks, kept drawing airplay decades after its release. Franklin moved to Novus/BMG in 1988 for "Diamond Inside of You," which featured vocalist Jennifer Holliday, and closed out his run as a recording leader with "Love Dancin'" on Nova Records in 1992.

His recording career as a bandleader wound down by the turn of the century, but Franklin kept playing, becoming a regular draw in Bay Area jazz clubs for another two decades, per SoulTracks. In 2019, the reissue labels Cherry Red and Robinsongs gathered his complete Columbia catalog, putting his 1980s work back in front of listeners who had never caught him the first time, per The Second Disc.

His niece, Jamaica Hughes, announced his passing in a family statement, calling him "a beloved father, grandfather, brother, uncle and friend."

Franklin's catalog outlasted his run on the charts. "The Groove" remains a touchstone of the jazz funk crossover sound he helped popularize in the early 1980s, still spun on jazz and soul radio and still turning up for listeners discovering him for the first time. "Song for You" continues to surface on Quiet Storm playlists more than four decades after it was recorded, and the 2019 reissue of his Columbia albums kept his 1980s catalog in print. In the Bay Area clubs where he kept performing long after his major label years ended, he remained, to the end, the pianist who once turned childhood piano lessons in a Berkeley classroom into a song that crossed an ocean.