Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes

When Lonnie Liston Smith made the transition from sideman to leader in 1973, that was the beginning of a fusion/crossover/post-bop band that he dubbed Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes. The acoustic pianist/electric keyboardist, who was born in Richmond, VA, on December 28, 1940, and should not be confused with soul-jazz/hard bop organist Lonnie Smith, would have had an impressive resumé even if he had never formed a band of his own; in the '60s and early '70s, he had been a sidemen for, among others, Pharoah Sanders, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Gato Barbieri, singer Betty Carter, and trumpeter Miles Davis. In fact, Smith was still in Davis' employ when he signed with producer Bob Thiele's RCA-distributed Flying Dutchman label and recorded his first album as a leader, Astral Traveling (which Thiele produced). Nonetheless, The Cosmic Echoes were a major step forward for Smith; the improviser had a lot more time to devote to his own compositions, and he was free to concentrate on a very spiritual type of fusion that had a variety of influences. The post-bop of model explorers like Coltrane, Sanders, Kirk, Yusef Lateef, Mccoy Tyner, and Charles Lloyd were a heavy influence on Smith's composing; all of those artists shared The Cosmic Echoes' spiritual concerns. But The Cosmic Echoes were hardly jazz purists. Their instrumental fusion combined those post-bop influences with funk, pop, and rock, and some of their best-known vocal numbers (which include 1979's "Space Princess" and 1983's "Never Too Late") were outright R&B.

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