LeRoi Moore, 46, Saxophone Player, Dies

LeRoi Moore, a saxophonist whose fevered riffs embroidered the distinctive music of the Dave Matthews Band with florets of jazz and funk, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 46 and had a home in Los Angeles and a farm outside of Charlottesville, Va.

Ambrosia Healy, the publicist for the band, confirmed his death. She said that Mr. Moore had been hospitalized when he had sudden complications in his recovery from an all-terrain-vehicle accident in late June.

The Dave Matthews Band has been touring with a substitute saxophonist. It performed at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday and was to play there Wednesday night.

The widely popular group now plays the nation’s largest arenas, but it had the humblest of origins.

Mr. Moore, a large man with a laconic nature who was wont to edge out of view on stage when he was not playing, was a founding member. The band began in Charlottesville in 1991 after Mr. Matthews, then working as a bartender, asked some local musicians to record songs with him for a demo tape. Mr. Moore, along with his childhood friend Carter Beauford, who became the band’s drummer, agreed to help him out, though Mr. Moore would later say he was not all that impressed when he first heard Mr. Matthews sing and play. Nonetheless, he became an integral part of the band’s signature sound, an eclectic pop that bolsters light melodies and Mr. Matthews’s acoustic guitar with the sinews and muscle characteristic of funk artists and jazzy fusion groups.

Mr. Moore did much of the arranging, and as a soloist, on flute occasionally as well as saxophone, he “could honk deep soul-band riffs or waft jazz lines,” as The New York Times music critic Jon Pareles wrote after a concert in 2003.

LeRoi Holloway Moore was born in Durham, N.C., on Sept. 7, 1961, and his family soon moved to Charlottesville, where his father was a teacher and a coach at Albemarle High School. A saxophonist throughout his school years, he attended James Madison University, where he studied tenor sax, but left after a year to become a professional musician. He was playing in the John D’earth Quintet at Miller’s, a bar in Charlottesville, when he met Mr. Matthews.

Mr. Moore, who was engaged to be married to Lisa Beane in November, is survived by his mother, Roxie, of Charlottesville, and two brothers, Rodney and Jeffrey, both of Atlanta.

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