Lonnie's track, "Expansions", has been featured in two videogames: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Driver: Parallel Lines. Another Smith song, "A Chance for Peace," was featured in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV.
Lonnie's music has been sample by artists from Jay Z to Mary J. Blige .
"Mary J. really captured my original feel with this song, and it sends a very important message to today's young ladies. Be confident in yourself, stay true to yourself, and not what others say you should be" LLS!
Lonnie Liston Smith is one of contemporary music's most versatile musicians. In a career that spans some 25 years, he has been headlined in a variety of recordings as a featured sideman for some of Jazz music's most illustrious leader's before stepping out to reveal his own original concepts as a bandleader in the mid 70s. He is a keyboardist of the first rank and has influenced a generation of young players who have acknowledged his rhythmic (swing), harmonic acumen and composing skills.
Lonnie was born in Richmond, Virginia into a musical household -- his father was a member of the Gospel Harmonizing Four. From a very early age, Lonnie remembers such groups as the Swan Silvertones and the Soul Stirrers with Sam Cooke being frequent visitors. There was a piano in the house and he began investigating its sound before receiving formal instructions a few years later. It was during high school that Lonnie became enamored with modern Jazz through hearing alto saxist Charlie Parker, one of the seminal figures in the music. It was not long before he was listening to Miles Davis (a future employer), as well as John Coltrane. Not surprisingly, he patterned his keyboard style after innovative horn players, and not the many fine pianists around. Of course, he was aware of artists like McCoy Tyner, Wynton Kelly, Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Sonny Clark, and Thelonius Monk, but made a deliberate effort not to mimic their styles .
He was then invited to join the Miles Davis group, in which he became part of Davis' revolving cast of players in a blur of marathon studio work. Much of these early 70s sessions remain unreleased, but Lonnie appears on parts of "On The Corner" and "Big Fun". Next, he hooked up with Argentinean Saxophonist Gato Barbieri which reunited him with producer Bob Thiele (who supervised Sander's albums on the Impulse label). Lonnie toured Europe and worked with such world class players as Ron Carter, Stanley Clarke, Airto, Nana Vasconcelos, Bernard Purdie, and John Abercrombie, who all recorded as sidemen on Gato's LPs such as "Fenix" and "Under Fire" for the Flying Dutchmen label.
Thiele signed Lonnie to a solo contract for the first time, which both symbolically and tangibly ushered in a new image for the artist as a leader. While Astral Traveling was released in 1974 as his first vinyl, it was his third album, titled Expansions (pictured below), that propelled Lonnie into the spot light as a major jazz recording artist.
He renewed his association with Bob Thiele again, who had distribution deal with CBS, and once again recorded well received albums including Silhouettes, Rejuvenation, and Dreams of Tomorrow. Lonnie also appeared on the Jazz Explosion Tour with Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard, Roy Ayers, Jean Carne, Angela Bofil, Stanley Clarke and Gato Barbieri, while keeping his audience's attention through incessant roadwork.
In the 90s, Lonnie became involved with Guru Jazzmatazz Volume One (Rap meets Jazz) and turned on a new young audience to the power of Jazz. Throughout the years, Lonnie has been surrounded by jazz greats, including the young lions making the scene like Doc Powell, and the late Zachary Breaux, among many others. In addition, his unconventional composition style incorporating (what were at the time) unexpected instruments have been studied and adopted by many young recording artists burning with the desire to leave make their marks in music -- from hip hop to jazz.
Lonnie's page is maintained by Genius Developments Music .
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