Biography
Pianist, organist and composer Lonnie Liston Smith supplied pivotal keyboard work on landmark sessions led by Roland Kirk, Pharoah Sanders, Gato Barbieri and Miles Davis before stepping forward as a bandleader. Once he assembled the Cosmic Echoes, the group issued six influential electric albums on Flying Dutchman from 1973 through 1977, among them Astral Traveling and Visions of a New World, that cemented his reputation as a jazz-funk innovator. From 1978 to 1980 he recorded four Columbia releases, including Exotic Mysteries and Love Is the Answer, that deliberately fused funk, disco and smooth jazz. After experiencing a spiritual awakening, Smith spent the following twenty years issuing recordings on Dr. Jazz and Startrak Records, culminating with Transformation in 1998. For the next twenty-five years he concentrated on session work, then resumed recording under his own name in 2023 on Lonnie Liston Smith JID017 alongside Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge.
Born in Richmond, Virginia on December 28, 1940, the acoustic pianist and electric keyboardist grew up with a father who sang in the local gospel ensemble the Harmonizing Four; gospel therefore shaped his earliest musical environment. As a child he regularly encountered prominent groups such as the Swan Silvertones and the Soul Stirrers, whose young lead singer Sam Cooke visited the family home. The music bug took hold early, and Smith began formal training while still young. In high school he studied piano along with tuba and trumpet. As a teenager he became known in the Baltimore metropolitan area as a backing vocalist—his father having instructed him in gospel harmony—and as a pianist. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in music education at Morgan State University, where he frequently performed with peers including Gary Bartz, Grachan Moncur and Mickey Bass. Shortly after graduation he secured a house-pianist position in the band at Baltimore’s Royal Theater.
Smith moved from Baltimore to New York City in 1963. He secured the piano chair in Betty Carter’s band and remained for a year. In 1965 he auditioned successfully for Roland Kirk’s group and made his recording debut with the multi-instrumentalist, sharing piano duties with Jacki Byard on Here Comes the Whistleman; the 1967 album Now Don’t You Cry, Beautiful Edith presented him as the ensemble’s sole pianist. Late that year he joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers briefly, sharing the piano bench with Keith Jarrett and English pianist Mike Nock; he departed after a three-night engagement at the Five Spot in 1966, at which point Chick Corea replaced him. Smith finished the remainder of 1967 as a member of Max Roach’s live quartet.
Early in 1968 he entered saxophonist Pharoah Sanders’ band. Sanders, whose mentor John Coltrane had passed away the previous year, was establishing his own leadership at the time. Smith’s first of three recordings with Sanders was the 1969 album Karma, produced by Bob Thiele and consisting of two extended pieces, among them “The Creator Has a Master Plan” featuring vocals by Leon Thomas. That same year Smith appeared on the singer’s Flying Dutchman debut Spirits Known and Unknown. Having already begun working with Gato Barbieri, he contributed to the 1970 release The Third World. Throughout this period he remained with Sanders both in the studio and on the road, participating in three further key albums: Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) and Jewels of Thought, both from 1970, and Thembi from 1971. He also played on Izipho Zam, recorded in 1970 and issued by Strata East in 1973.
Smith worked with Barbieri from 1969 until 1975, appearing on Fenix in 1971, the live recording El Pampero in 1972, and the 1973 albums Under Fire and Bolivia. In early 1972 Miles Davis recruited him. Davis, who employed several configurations sometimes featuring unusual instrumentation, asked Smith to master the organ within two days for the sessions that produced On the Corner.
While still employed by Davis, Smith signed with producer Thiele’s RCA-distributed Flying Dutchman label to record his first album as leader, Astral Traveling, credited to Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes. The title track had actually been composed in the studio with Sanders during the Thembi sessions. During those same dates Smith encountered a Fender Rhodes piano for the first time; after improvising on it he created a drifting, spacious melody and chord progression that Sanders urged him to finish, and they committed the piece to tape. Astral Traveling marked a major advance for Smith. Modal and world-music explorers such as Coltrane, Sanders, Kirk, Yusef Lateef, McCoy Tyner and Charles Lloyd all drew from his spiritually resonant compositions. Neither Smith nor the Cosmic Echoes were jazz purists, however; their instrumental fusion merged post-bop and modal elements with various world-folk traditions. The original Cosmic Echoes lineup comprised George Barron on soprano and tenor sax, Joe Beck on guitar, Cecil McBee on bass, David Lee, Jr. on drums, James Mtume and Sonny Morgan on percussion, Badal Roy on tabla drums, and Geeta Vashi on tamboura. Astral Traveling remained entirely instrumental and proved the most vanguard of his early releases; although it did not chart, it received extensive positive coverage from jazz journalists in Europe and Asia.
Smith soon added a vocalist to the Cosmic Echoes, reflecting the central role vocal music—both gospel and R&B—had played in his upbringing. His brother Donald Smith, who had assisted in assembling the group’s first personnel, was enlisted to sing on the 1974 Thiele-produced Cosmic Funk, the initial Cosmic Echoes album to include vocals. Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes releases remained roughly eighty percent instrumental, yet the vocal selections always served as focal points. Later titles—Expansions and Visions of a New World in 1975, Reflections of a Golden Dream in 1976, and Renaissance in 1977—all entered the Top 200. Personnel shifts occurred naturally. When the band recorded Live! for RCA in 1977, an album that reached number 55, the lineup featured Smith, Donald on vocals, Dave Hubbard on tenor and soprano sax, Al Anderson on electric bass, Ronald Miller on electric guitar, and Hollywood Barker on drums.
In 1978 Smith disbanded the Cosmic Echoes and signed with Columbia. Loveland appeared under Smith’s name alone, although several Cosmic Echoes members participated; Anderson shared bass duties with Smith’s young protégé Marcus Miller. The album climbed inside the Top 40 on the R&B charts and reached number 120 on the Top 200. A solid seller among fusion, crossover and quiet-storm audiences, it drew cooler responses from purist jazz critics who reacted with confusion to the direction Smith had chosen. His next release, Exotic Mysteries, also surfaced in 1978; its single, the Miller-composed “Space Princess,” featured a strong vocal from Donald and carried the track into the Hot 100. Although Exotic Mysteries was primarily instrumental, “Space Princess” delivered funky disco imbued with the mystic Cosmic Echoes atmosphere. During the Columbia years jazz critics and many purist listeners accused Smith of selling out to produce commercial music; Smith, however, a lifelong admirer of R&B, soul and dance music as well as jazz, regarded the integration of these styles as a natural extension of his compositional approach.
Donald Smith departed after Exotic Mysteries and was replaced by vocalist James “Crab” Robinson on the 1979 release Song for the Children, an album that spent eight weeks on the chart and peaked at number 57 on Top R&B Albums. Love Is the Answer followed in 1980; again featuring Robinson, the studio band also included guitarist Abdul Wali, bassist Pee Wee Ford, drummer Lino Reyes and percussionist Lawrence Killian. The set reached number 51 on the Top R&B albums list.
In 1980 Smith performed in the band supporting Marvin Gaye’s Montreux Jazz Festival debut, drawing favorable notice from European critics; the concert finally appeared in separate audio and video editions in 2003 from Eagle Vision. Around this time Smith underwent a spiritual awakening that led him to adopt vegetarianism, meditation and discipleship under guru Sri Chinmoy.
Brother Donald rejoined in the early 1980s, and Lonnie left Columbia to reunite with Thiele at the producer’s newly established Doctor Jazz label. His debut there, Dreams of Tomorrow, issued in 1983 and produced by Miller—who also played synth and bass while Smith restricted himself to pianos—contained eight songs, half written by the leader, one co-written with Chinmoy, and the remainder composed by Miller. The single “Never Too Late,” a quiet-storm vocal piece written by Miller, became a minor hit and helped the album enter the R&B Top 50 and the general Top 200. Silhouettes appeared in 1984; although the eight-track set was presented essentially as a smooth or contemporary-jazz offering, it nevertheless reached the Top 40 on the Traditional Jazz Albums chart. The 1985 all-instrumental Rejuvenation, consisting mostly of originals, blended modal and contemporary jazz with Latin grooves and the straight-ahead piece “A Frozen Lake,” peaking at number 40 on Traditional Jazz Albums. Smith’s final Doctor Jazz recording was the 1987 standards collection Make Someone Happy, his first solo date devoted exclusively to acoustic piano.
Restless by nature, Smith returned to hybrid recordings with Love Goddess on Startrak Records in 1990. Cut at several Maryland studios, the project featured invited guests including vocalists Jean Carne and Phyllis Hyman, bassist James Jamerson, Jr., saxophonist Grover Washington, Jr. and bassist Lonnie Plaxico, among many others. Norman Connors produced or co-produced most of the album, which climbed to number ten on the Contemporary Jazz Albums chart and remained there for twenty-three weeks. He followed with Magic Lady in 1991, a further venture into adult-contemporary R&B and funk that spent fifteen weeks on the R&B charts and peaked at number 75.
In 1993 Smith appeared on rapper Guru’s groundbreaking Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 as well as on Digable Planets’ Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) and Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. On the jazz side he guested with Shakatak on the 1993 album Full Circle.
He revisited a Cosmic Echoes-oriented approach in 1998 when he and Donald reunited for Transformation, issued on Smith’s own Loveland Records. Although limited promotion and distribution prevented it from charting, many listeners regard it as one of his strongest contemporary jazz/R&B fusions because of its relaxed atmosphere, wide rhythmic palette and assured playing. It remained his final album for twenty-five years.
Smith’s music continues to attract younger artists who draw from his catalog. Both Mary J. Blige and Jay-Z achieved hits by sampling his recording “A Garden of Peace.” In 2002 Sony’s Legacy Recordings surveyed the late-1970s and early-1980s output with the double-disc retrospective Explorations: The Columbia Years. Smith maintained an active performing schedule that included an appearance at Glastonbury in 2009 and a set at the Norfolk Waterfront Jazz Festival in Virginia in 2017. Throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century, numerous titles from his catalog—particularly those originally on Flying Dutchman—received fresh reissues.
In February 2020 Smith headlined Jazz Is Dead’s Black History Month series in Los Angeles, jamming with label principals Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge together with several local musicians. Two years later he returned to the Jazz Is Dead studio, writing and recording with Younge and Muhammad, vocalist Loren Oden, and drummers Greg Paul and Malachi Morehead alternating. The completed session, issued in April 2023 as Lonnie Liston Smith JID017, marked his return to recording under his own name.
Born in Richmond, Virginia on December 28, 1940, the acoustic pianist and electric keyboardist grew up with a father who sang in the local gospel ensemble the Harmonizing Four; gospel therefore shaped his earliest musical environment. As a child he regularly encountered prominent groups such as the Swan Silvertones and the Soul Stirrers, whose young lead singer Sam Cooke visited the family home. The music bug took hold early, and Smith began formal training while still young. In high school he studied piano along with tuba and trumpet. As a teenager he became known in the Baltimore metropolitan area as a backing vocalist—his father having instructed him in gospel harmony—and as a pianist. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in music education at Morgan State University, where he frequently performed with peers including Gary Bartz, Grachan Moncur and Mickey Bass. Shortly after graduation he secured a house-pianist position in the band at Baltimore’s Royal Theater.
Smith moved from Baltimore to New York City in 1963. He secured the piano chair in Betty Carter’s band and remained for a year. In 1965 he auditioned successfully for Roland Kirk’s group and made his recording debut with the multi-instrumentalist, sharing piano duties with Jacki Byard on Here Comes the Whistleman; the 1967 album Now Don’t You Cry, Beautiful Edith presented him as the ensemble’s sole pianist. Late that year he joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers briefly, sharing the piano bench with Keith Jarrett and English pianist Mike Nock; he departed after a three-night engagement at the Five Spot in 1966, at which point Chick Corea replaced him. Smith finished the remainder of 1967 as a member of Max Roach’s live quartet.
Early in 1968 he entered saxophonist Pharoah Sanders’ band. Sanders, whose mentor John Coltrane had passed away the previous year, was establishing his own leadership at the time. Smith’s first of three recordings with Sanders was the 1969 album Karma, produced by Bob Thiele and consisting of two extended pieces, among them “The Creator Has a Master Plan” featuring vocals by Leon Thomas. That same year Smith appeared on the singer’s Flying Dutchman debut Spirits Known and Unknown. Having already begun working with Gato Barbieri, he contributed to the 1970 release The Third World. Throughout this period he remained with Sanders both in the studio and on the road, participating in three further key albums: Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) and Jewels of Thought, both from 1970, and Thembi from 1971. He also played on Izipho Zam, recorded in 1970 and issued by Strata East in 1973.
Smith worked with Barbieri from 1969 until 1975, appearing on Fenix in 1971, the live recording El Pampero in 1972, and the 1973 albums Under Fire and Bolivia. In early 1972 Miles Davis recruited him. Davis, who employed several configurations sometimes featuring unusual instrumentation, asked Smith to master the organ within two days for the sessions that produced On the Corner.
While still employed by Davis, Smith signed with producer Thiele’s RCA-distributed Flying Dutchman label to record his first album as leader, Astral Traveling, credited to Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes. The title track had actually been composed in the studio with Sanders during the Thembi sessions. During those same dates Smith encountered a Fender Rhodes piano for the first time; after improvising on it he created a drifting, spacious melody and chord progression that Sanders urged him to finish, and they committed the piece to tape. Astral Traveling marked a major advance for Smith. Modal and world-music explorers such as Coltrane, Sanders, Kirk, Yusef Lateef, McCoy Tyner and Charles Lloyd all drew from his spiritually resonant compositions. Neither Smith nor the Cosmic Echoes were jazz purists, however; their instrumental fusion merged post-bop and modal elements with various world-folk traditions. The original Cosmic Echoes lineup comprised George Barron on soprano and tenor sax, Joe Beck on guitar, Cecil McBee on bass, David Lee, Jr. on drums, James Mtume and Sonny Morgan on percussion, Badal Roy on tabla drums, and Geeta Vashi on tamboura. Astral Traveling remained entirely instrumental and proved the most vanguard of his early releases; although it did not chart, it received extensive positive coverage from jazz journalists in Europe and Asia.
Smith soon added a vocalist to the Cosmic Echoes, reflecting the central role vocal music—both gospel and R&B—had played in his upbringing. His brother Donald Smith, who had assisted in assembling the group’s first personnel, was enlisted to sing on the 1974 Thiele-produced Cosmic Funk, the initial Cosmic Echoes album to include vocals. Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes releases remained roughly eighty percent instrumental, yet the vocal selections always served as focal points. Later titles—Expansions and Visions of a New World in 1975, Reflections of a Golden Dream in 1976, and Renaissance in 1977—all entered the Top 200. Personnel shifts occurred naturally. When the band recorded Live! for RCA in 1977, an album that reached number 55, the lineup featured Smith, Donald on vocals, Dave Hubbard on tenor and soprano sax, Al Anderson on electric bass, Ronald Miller on electric guitar, and Hollywood Barker on drums.
In 1978 Smith disbanded the Cosmic Echoes and signed with Columbia. Loveland appeared under Smith’s name alone, although several Cosmic Echoes members participated; Anderson shared bass duties with Smith’s young protégé Marcus Miller. The album climbed inside the Top 40 on the R&B charts and reached number 120 on the Top 200. A solid seller among fusion, crossover and quiet-storm audiences, it drew cooler responses from purist jazz critics who reacted with confusion to the direction Smith had chosen. His next release, Exotic Mysteries, also surfaced in 1978; its single, the Miller-composed “Space Princess,” featured a strong vocal from Donald and carried the track into the Hot 100. Although Exotic Mysteries was primarily instrumental, “Space Princess” delivered funky disco imbued with the mystic Cosmic Echoes atmosphere. During the Columbia years jazz critics and many purist listeners accused Smith of selling out to produce commercial music; Smith, however, a lifelong admirer of R&B, soul and dance music as well as jazz, regarded the integration of these styles as a natural extension of his compositional approach.
Donald Smith departed after Exotic Mysteries and was replaced by vocalist James “Crab” Robinson on the 1979 release Song for the Children, an album that spent eight weeks on the chart and peaked at number 57 on Top R&B Albums. Love Is the Answer followed in 1980; again featuring Robinson, the studio band also included guitarist Abdul Wali, bassist Pee Wee Ford, drummer Lino Reyes and percussionist Lawrence Killian. The set reached number 51 on the Top R&B albums list.
In 1980 Smith performed in the band supporting Marvin Gaye’s Montreux Jazz Festival debut, drawing favorable notice from European critics; the concert finally appeared in separate audio and video editions in 2003 from Eagle Vision. Around this time Smith underwent a spiritual awakening that led him to adopt vegetarianism, meditation and discipleship under guru Sri Chinmoy.
Brother Donald rejoined in the early 1980s, and Lonnie left Columbia to reunite with Thiele at the producer’s newly established Doctor Jazz label. His debut there, Dreams of Tomorrow, issued in 1983 and produced by Miller—who also played synth and bass while Smith restricted himself to pianos—contained eight songs, half written by the leader, one co-written with Chinmoy, and the remainder composed by Miller. The single “Never Too Late,” a quiet-storm vocal piece written by Miller, became a minor hit and helped the album enter the R&B Top 50 and the general Top 200. Silhouettes appeared in 1984; although the eight-track set was presented essentially as a smooth or contemporary-jazz offering, it nevertheless reached the Top 40 on the Traditional Jazz Albums chart. The 1985 all-instrumental Rejuvenation, consisting mostly of originals, blended modal and contemporary jazz with Latin grooves and the straight-ahead piece “A Frozen Lake,” peaking at number 40 on Traditional Jazz Albums. Smith’s final Doctor Jazz recording was the 1987 standards collection Make Someone Happy, his first solo date devoted exclusively to acoustic piano.
Restless by nature, Smith returned to hybrid recordings with Love Goddess on Startrak Records in 1990. Cut at several Maryland studios, the project featured invited guests including vocalists Jean Carne and Phyllis Hyman, bassist James Jamerson, Jr., saxophonist Grover Washington, Jr. and bassist Lonnie Plaxico, among many others. Norman Connors produced or co-produced most of the album, which climbed to number ten on the Contemporary Jazz Albums chart and remained there for twenty-three weeks. He followed with Magic Lady in 1991, a further venture into adult-contemporary R&B and funk that spent fifteen weeks on the R&B charts and peaked at number 75.
In 1993 Smith appeared on rapper Guru’s groundbreaking Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 as well as on Digable Planets’ Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) and Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. On the jazz side he guested with Shakatak on the 1993 album Full Circle.
He revisited a Cosmic Echoes-oriented approach in 1998 when he and Donald reunited for Transformation, issued on Smith’s own Loveland Records. Although limited promotion and distribution prevented it from charting, many listeners regard it as one of his strongest contemporary jazz/R&B fusions because of its relaxed atmosphere, wide rhythmic palette and assured playing. It remained his final album for twenty-five years.
Smith’s music continues to attract younger artists who draw from his catalog. Both Mary J. Blige and Jay-Z achieved hits by sampling his recording “A Garden of Peace.” In 2002 Sony’s Legacy Recordings surveyed the late-1970s and early-1980s output with the double-disc retrospective Explorations: The Columbia Years. Smith maintained an active performing schedule that included an appearance at Glastonbury in 2009 and a set at the Norfolk Waterfront Jazz Festival in Virginia in 2017. Throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century, numerous titles from his catalog—particularly those originally on Flying Dutchman—received fresh reissues.
In February 2020 Smith headlined Jazz Is Dead’s Black History Month series in Los Angeles, jamming with label principals Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge together with several local musicians. Two years later he returned to the Jazz Is Dead studio, writing and recording with Younge and Muhammad, vocalist Loren Oden, and drummers Greg Paul and Malachi Morehead alternating. The completed session, issued in April 2023 as Lonnie Liston Smith JID017, marked his return to recording under his own name.
Albums
