If there’s a commonality shared by all the numerous junctures when jazz’s demise has been prematurely reported, it’s that they’ve often come when its practitioners and pioneers have dared to connect with other music that surrounds it, or dared to locate new audiences, or dared to involve new ideas to explore, new technologies to embolden those concepts, and new contexts within which it can flourish.
Lonnie Liston Smith’s Expansions, which reaches 50 this year and is more beloved than ever, fulfils at least one and maybe several of those criteria, inviting the opprobrium of the ossified cultural gatekeepers and, in the same breath, batting it away with a vivaciousness that hasn’t abated half-a-century on (and that is heard clearer on this sumptuous new remastered pressing, which for shit-sure sounds more alive, more vibrant and more polymorphously pleasurable than the beaten up OG copy and listless CD I’d thus far been making do with – more on this in a second). Expansions wasn’t an album conceived to preach to the already converted, but a spiritual call, a proselytization that broadcast far beyond the jazz club, to the discotheques and dancefloors of secular ecstasy that were ripe for the spiritual themes of rebirth and renaissance it carried. That was its crime, and that was its triumph, and that is why we celebrate it today.
Smith, a keyboard player, already had a voluminous discography as a sideman, one containing many landmarks, and several of the sort of divisive statements that exercised critics to send jazz’s supposed corpse to Quincy, MD. Smith plays on Miles Davis’s futurist, paradigm-flattening On The Corner, which on its 1972 release provoked Miles’ sharpest backlash yet, and is now recognised as exactly the record to hand a newcomer who might think Miles isn’t their ‘thing’. (If you wait by the river long enough, the clueless and outdated reviews of your oeuvre will float on by.) More importantly, Smith played on key albums Pharoah Sanders recorded following John Coltrane’s death, including Karma, Jewels Of Thought and Thembi. On these records, Sanders and sidemen were questing, reaching for the spiritual motherlode Coltrane had located on A Love Supreme.
1969’s Karma led with ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan’, an existential rumination so epic it outgrew Side One and continued unabated onto Side Two. But while its 33-minute journey went far enough out to satisfy the deep jazz head, it rarely threatened to alienate the casual listener, Sanders & co.’s exploratory excursions anchored by Leon Thomas’s melodious singing and enrapturing ululations. This was, Smith later told the Red Bull Music Academy, partly his doing: “I told Pharoah, ‘Let’s not leave the people out there… OK, we go out – but let’s bring them back. It worked. [On] ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan’, we really stretched out – but then we would come back to the melody at the end, and everyone can calm down.”
It was while working on his final album with Sanders, Thembi, that Smith first played a Fender Rhodes, and while fiddling with its many knobs and switches he fell upon the warm, meditative buzz that characterises that album’s opening piece, a Smith original he titled ‘Astral Travelling’. It was 1971, and to be a bit ‘woo’ weren’t no thing. Smith was a regular patron at Weiser Antiquarian Books, a New York staple he remembered as having “books on every religion, all philosophies. It was nothing to enter the bookstore and see Sun Ra, John Coltrane, looking at certain books. I was studying everything.”
Smith later described ‘Astral Travelling’ as a “cosmic blues”; it would serve as the title track of his own solo debut, which arrived in 1973 (on Flying Dutchman, the new imprint of former Impulse honcho Bob Thiele), and also included a revisit of another Smith original he’d cut with Pharoah, ‘Let Us Go Into The House Of The Lord’. Astral Travelling felt like a Pharoah Sanders set, except you were sat a little closer to Smith’s amp – that same beatific vibe, that same blissful resonance, only with Smith’s blurry, reverb-licked Fender Rhodes in the foreground. He hadn’t intended to go solo – indeed, he’d pencilled further sorties with Miles on his dance card – but after Astral Travelling hit the racks, Thiele urged Smith to form his own group to promote the LP. Its follow-up, Cosmic Funk, was the first credited to Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes, and it very much captures an artist in transition: the opening title track could’ve stumbled off the first Funkadelic LP, all contorted low-end and far-out vocalising, while elsewhere Smith and group delivered fiery post-bop readings of Wayne Shorter tunes (‘Footprints’) and spaced-out vamps on James Mtume numbers (‘Sais (Egypt)’) and a glide through ‘Naima’, Coltrane’s most beautiful ballad, with flautist Donald Smith singing unnecessary but not unwelcome words over the top.
The key track on Cosmic Funk leads directly to where Expansions takes us: ‘Beautiful Woman’ is set to a righteous, forwards-moving beat, bustling and heavy on the chiming cymbals, over which Smith’s piano rumbles and rhapsodises, and Donald Smith croons mellifluously. And while not everything on Expansions would stay in this lane – ‘Desert Nights’ is a mesmeric holding pattern of modal jazz, riding all the bells and whistles of its percussion base to somewhere sublime; ‘Peace’ is a cover of a co-write by Horace Silver and Doug Carn, first recorded in 1959 but clearly intended as a comment on the still-raging Vietnam war – Smith’s third album would guide its raptures to the dancefloor. Expansions is Smith’s boldest foray into the fusionlands of jazz funk, but it arrives at a moment when disco is opening a new front for the dancefloor, and the title track is a supreme combination of contemporary Black music elements: funk, R&B, jazz, even Afro-Cuban and Latin, smooshed together by the joyful sincerity of Donald Smith’s sonorous vocal and the gauzy mysticism that cloaks the entire operation. ‘Expansions’ is ecstasy, is delirium, is the warm breath of spring jangling across frost-coated streets: an awakening, a rebirth.
If the two preceding albums were the sound of Smith poring over tomes from the shelves of Weiser’s, Expansions (and, in particular, its opening title track) wandered from that Brooklyn shopfront to take in further afield landmarks of 1970s New York, not least its burgeoning disco scene. The gospel according to ‘Expansions’ seems purpose-built for delivery via the immaculate hi-fi system of David Mancuso’s The Loft nightclub, and its blend of superbad bassline, shimmering and insistent rhythm track and Smith’s chimeric synth-strings could easily have insinuated its way into the hallowed Paradise Garage, which opened only a couple of years later. In this sense, Smith was continuing the example of his father, Lonnie Sr – a member of The Harmonizing Four, a gospel quartet of the 30s and 40s who performed at FDR’s funeral, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s wedding – by proselytising in the musical mode of his moment. But Smith’s message was non-denominational by definition and intention; “I wrote ‘Expansions’ because I was studying spirituality,” he told Red Bull Music Academy, “and I realised everyone wants the same thing: peace, love and harmony. I wanted to put that into the feel of the music itself.” He expanded upon this for Audiophile Style: “It seemed like all religions and philosophy are basically saying the same thing. You might call the creator of the universe a different name. But it’s all oneness. And we were definitely trying to express that oneness through the music.”
In that non-denominational spirit, in that quest for oneness, Expansions became a message of unity that created that of which it sang, cross-pollinating its influence across genre, infiltrating scenes, transcending its era. Frank Tope’s sleevenote to this reissue – which comes housed in a glorious, gently oversized and humbly glossy gatefold sleeve, and has been brilliantly remastered and lovingly pressed – very quickly moves on from the story of Smith and his musicians, to exploring its subsequent influence. The 7″ release of that title track became a burner on London dancefloors like the 100 Club and Crackers, and is a foundational text for the Acid Jazz scene that followed in the 80s and 90s, alongside key works by Roy Ayers and Donald Byrd. Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy tells Tope she discovered ‘Expansions’ at David Mancuso’s Loft: “The Latin percussion resonated with the people of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.” She adds: “Lonnie Liston Smith was on a quest for peace on Earth,” drawing a parallel between this mission and Mancuso’s “social experiment” club nights.
Elsewhere, Tope traces its sampled afterlife through Stetsasonic’s ‘Talkin’ All That Jazz’, to Roni Size’s ‘It’s A Jazz Thing’, to Louis Vega playing ‘Expansions’ at New York’s Sound Factory. My own personal entry-point was hearing Mike D dreaming of finding “two sealed copies of Expansions” while crate-digging on Beasties’ ‘Professor Booty’, which sent me in search of my own, single, unsealed and very beaten-up copy years ago. But this is definitely the pressing he’d want to find, and you would, too.
Expansions is out now via BGP
