Jazz is Dead has announced an April 28th release date for Lonnie Liston Smith JID017, a new album from legendary jazz keyboard player Lonnie Liston Smith, his first album since 1998. Composed alongside Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammed, contemporaries who have enshrined much of Smith’s musical trails, and featuring the sultry vocals of frequent Jazz is Dead collaborator Loren Oden, the album is a triumphant celebration of love’s power to heal.
With a career spanning over five decades, Lonnie Liston Smith is a jazz-funk legend who has played an integral role in shaping and establishing the genre’s iconic sound. Featured as sideman for some of jazz’s most distinguished leaders, Smith performed with the likes of Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders, Gato Barbieri and Leon Thomas, before going on to form his own ensemble, Lonnie Liston Smith and the Cosmic Echoes. It was when he began to record on a Fender Rhodes piano that he produced some of his most creative keyboard work. In a genre he dubbed as ‘Cosmic Funk’, Smith redefined the boundaries of jazz, integrating its free and spiritual energy with a groove derived palette, later combining funk, soul and South American rhythms.
Beloved by generations of jazz, hip-hop and dance music fans, Smith’s inimitable influence on past and contemporary music cannot be underestimated. His music served as the foundation for immortal hip-hop samples for acts likes Jay-Z and Grammy Award winning tracks by Mary J. Blige. In the 1990s, Smith collaborated with pioneering acts such as Guru and Digable Planets, appearing on ground-breaking albums including 1993’s Jazzmatazz and 1994’s Diggin’ ( A Refutation of Time and Space), respectively.
Widely regarded as one of the most influential recordings of the time, Smith’s Expansions, released in 1975 on Flying Dutchman Records, is heralded as an essential feature on dancefloors today and his albums continue to be staples in the crates of DJs around the world. Smith continues to tour and inspire legions of new listeners, and remains one of jazz’s most revered figures.
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