Smith, Lonnie

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    Lonnie Smith, Soulful Jazz Organist, Is Dead at 79

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    Adept at blending the sophistication of jazz with the earthy appeal of rhythm and blues, he was later widely sampled by hip-hop artists.Lonnie Smith, a master of the Hammond B3 organ and a leading exponent of the infectiously rhythmic genre known as soul jazz, died on Tuesday at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 79.His manager and partner, Holly Case, said the cause was pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Smith, who began billing himself as Dr. Lonnie Smith in the mid-1970s, could draw an audience’s attention with his appearance alone: He had a long white beard and always wore a colorful turban. (The turbans apparently had no specific religious significance, and he did not have an advanced degree in anything and never explained why he had adopted the honorific “Dr.”) His playing was every bit as striking.He began his career at a time when organists like Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff were blending the sophistication of jazz with the earthy appeal of rhythm and blues. Mr. Smith was very much in that tradition, but his playing could also display an ethereal quality that was all his own. His music later reached new generations of fans when it was widely sampled by hip-hop artists.Reviewing a 2015 performance at the Jazz Standard in New York, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times praised Mr. Smith’s sense of dynamics. “When he is quiet, he is very quiet,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “During a gospelish song with the singer Alicia Olatuja, he started a solo passage at a level that almost couldn’t be heard and stayed there for quite a while, unspooling jagged, alert phrases that you had to strain to listen to: an easy trick but a powerful one.”Lonnie Smith was born on July 3, 1942, in Lackawanna, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo, and raised by his mother, Beulah Mae Early, and his stepfather, Charles Smith. As a teenager he sang in vocal groups and played trumpet and other instruments before a store owner’s generosity spurred his lifelong love affair with the organ.As he recalled in interviews, he spent a lot of time in a Buffalo music store, mostly just looking. One day he told the owner, Art Kubera (whom he would later call “my angel”), that he was sure he could make a living in music if he had an instrument. Mr. Kubera took him to the back of the store, showed him a Hammond B3 organ and told him that he could have it for nothing if he was able to get it out of the store. He did, he taught himself to play it, and his career began.Mr. Smith was soon working regularly at the Pine Grill in Buffalo. Mr. McDuff was an early influence, and when the guitarist George Benson left Mr. McDuff’s combo to form his own group, he hired Mr. Smith.The Benson quartet had an inauspicious beginning at a bar in the Bronx, where, Mr. Benson wrote in his autobiography, “Benson” (2014), “Lonnie and I played behind a revolving cast of go-go dancers.” After moving to a jazz club in Harlem, the Benson quartet began building a following.Mr. Smith’s first album as a leader was released by Columbia Records in 1967.Both Mr. Benson and Mr. Smith signed with Columbia Records. Mr. Smith’s first album as a leader, “Finger-Lickin’ Good,” which featured Mr. Benson on guitar, was released in 1967, but his tenure with Columbia was brief. The next year he moved to Blue Note, which had already used him on the alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson’s hit album “Alligator Boogaloo.”Blue Note, which had helped launch the organ-jazz boom by signing Jimmy Smith a decade earlier, was a natural home for Mr. Smith. But after releasing four well-received albums on the label, beginning with “Think!” (1968) and ending with “Drives” (1970), he moved on.He recorded for various labels throughout the 1970s, but by the end of the decade his brand of jazz was falling out of favor and he was growing tired of the music business. He stopped recording and maintained a low profile, performing only occasionally and sometimes under an assumed name.He ended his studio hiatus in 1993 with “Afro Blue,” a tribute to John Coltrane with John Abercrombie on guitar and Marvin Smith on drums, released on the MusicMasters label. (The same trio would later release two Jimi Hendrix tribute albums, “Foxy Lady” in 1994 and “Purple Haze”in 1995.) By that time Mr. Smith’s influence had grown in ways he had never anticipated: His 1970 cover of the Blood, Sweat & Tears hit “Spinning Wheel” had been sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, the first of many hip-hop acts that would find inspiration in his catalog.Mr. Smith began performing again, both with his own groups and with Mr. Donaldson, and eventually returned to Blue Note; his first album for the label in more than 40 years, “Evolution,” was released in 2016. His most recent album, “Breathe,” released this year, included a surprising guest appearance by the punk-rock pioneer Iggy Pop on two tracks, the vintage R&B ballad “Why Can’t We Live Together” and Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.”In addition to Ms. Case, Mr. Smith is survived by four daughters, Lani Chambers, Chandra Thomas, Charisse Partridge and Vonnie Smith, and several grandchildren.In 2017 the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a jazz musician.“A lot of musicians get into music because they want to be rich, famous or all of the above,” Mr. Smith said in a 2012 interview. “You are already rich once you sit down and learn to play. That’s richness in itself.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Lil Nas X Makes a Coming-Out Statement, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Taylor Swift, Rod Wave, Dr. Lonnie Smith and Iggy Pop and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Lil Nas X, ‘Montero (Call Me by Your Name)’Lil Nas X was born Montero Lamar Hill, and with “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” he cheerfully rejoices in lust as a gay man. “Romantic talkin’? You don’t even have to try,” he sings, over syncopated guitar and handclaps by way of flamenco. “Call me when you want, call me when you need.” The video — an elaborate CGI production, costume drama and visit to hell — makes clear that his identity has high stakes. (He also posted a note to his 14-year-old self on Twitter.) “In life, we hide the parts of ourselves we don’t want the world to see,” Lil Nas X says in the spoken introduction to the video clip. “But here, we don’t.” JON PARELESTaylor Swift featuring Maren Morris, ‘You All Over Me’The teenage Taylor Swift who wrote “You All Over Me” for her second album, the 2008 “Fearless,” largely styled herself as a country singer. The original track was left as an outtake, still unreleased. But Swift probably wouldn’t have opened it with the metronomic, Minimalistic blips that start her newly recorded version, which is part of her reclamation of the early catalog she lost to music-business machinations. “You All Over Me” was a precursor of Swift’s many post-breakup songs. With what would become her trademark amalgam of everyday details, emotional declarations and terse, neat phrases, she laments that it’s impossible to escape memories of how she “had you/got burned/held out/and held on/God knows/too long.” Blips and all — she worked with Aaron Dessner, one of the producers of her 2020 albums “Folklore” and “Evermore” — the track stays largely in the realm of country-pop, with mandolin, harmonica and piano, while Maren Morris’s harmony vocals provide understated sisterly support. It’s hardly a throwaway song, and more than a decade later, its regrets can extend to her contracts as well as her romances. PARELESJulia Michaels, ‘All Your Exes’Tuneful and resentful, Julia Michaels’s latest strikes a blow against kumbaya, trading feel-good pith for the much rawer wounds within. Her enemy? Her lover’s past: “I wanna live in a world where all your exes are dead/I wanna kill all the memories that you save in your head/Be the only girl that’s ever been in your bed.” It’s harsh, funny, sad and relatably petty. JON CARAMANICAAngelique Kidjo and Yemi Alade, ‘Dignity’“Respect is reciprocal” goes the unlikely chorus of “Dignity”; so is collaboration. A year ago, Angelique Kidjo was a guest on “Shekere,” a major hit for the Nigerian singer Yemi Alade; now Alade joins Kidjo on “Dignity,” a song in sympathy with the widespread protests in Nigeria against the brutality of the notorious police Special Anti-Robbery Squad. It mourns people killed by police; it calls for equality, respect and “radical beauty” while also insisting, “No retreat, no surrender.” The track has a crisp Afrobeats core under pinging and wriggling guitars, as both women’s voices — separately and harmonizing — argue for strength and survival. PARELESDr. Lonnie Smith featuring Iggy Pop, ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’Timmy Thomas’s “Why Can’t We Live Together” was an old soul tune with an Afro-Latin undercurrent that became the foundation for Drake’s “Hotline Bling.” In this cover, the organist Dr. Lonnie Smith stays mostly faithful to the original, though his solo subtly doubles the funk factor and the band finds its way into a swaggering shuffle. Where Thomas sang the song as an earnest, enervated plea for social harmony, Smith’s guest vocalist, Iggy Pop, does it in an eerie croon, somewhere between a lounge singer and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOInternet Money featuring Lil Mosey and Lil Tecca, ‘Jetski’Not enough has been said about the strain of sweetness running through one sector of contemporary hip-hop. Listen to Lil Mosey or Lil Tecca — not just the pitch of the voices, but the breathable anti-density of the cadences, and also how the subject matter rarely rises past mild irritation. It’s cuddles all around. CARAMANICABrockhampton featuring Danny Brown, ‘Buzzcut’The return of Brockhampton after a quiet 2020 is top-notch chaos — a frenetic, nerve-racking stomper (featuring an elastic verse by Danny Brown) that nods to N.W.A., the Beastie Boys, the Pharcyde and beyond. CARAMANICARod Wave, ‘Tombstone’In a weary but resolute moan, over a plucked acoustic guitar and subterranean bass tones, Rod Wave sings about how he’ll be compulsively hustling “to keep the family fed” until he dies. Halfway through the song, he does. Death turns out to be the ultimate release: “Finally, I’ll be resting in peace,” he sings, his voice rising to falsetto and growing serene, with a gospel choir materializing to commemorate and uplift him. The video adds another story: of a deaf boy shot dead by police and laid to rest, as Wave sings, echoing the Bible and Sam Cooke, “by the river.” PARELESSara Watkins, ‘Night Singing’“Under the Pepper Tree” is the latest album by Sara Watkins, from the lapidary acoustic bands Nickel Creek and I’m With Her, and it’s a collection of children’s songs, mostly from her own childhood. “Night Singing” is her own new song, two minutes of pure benevolent lullaby as she urges, “Rest your eyes, lay down your head,” while the music unfolds from cozy acoustic guitar picking to halos of ascending, reverberating lead guitar. PARELESChristopher Hoffman, ‘Discretionary’The cellist Christopher Hoffman’s unruly, unorthodox quartet — featuring the vibraphonist Bryan Carrott, the bassist Rashaan Carter and the drummer Craig Weinrib — moves around with its limbs loose, but its body held together. On “Discretionary,” the odd-metered opening track from his new album, “Asp Nimbus,” a backbeat is implied but always overridden or undermined; Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, an avant-garde chamber ensemble in which Hoffman plays, might flutter to mind. Carrott’s vibes make a web of harmony that Hoffman’s bowed cello sometimes supports, and elsewhere cuts right through. RUSSONELLO More

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      How Lonnie Smith Found an Unlikely New Collaborator: Iggy Pop

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      The soul-jazz organist and the punk frontman worked together on a pair of covers and discovered a musical kinship.In 2018, Iggy Pop was recording a pair of covers for an upcoming album by the soul-jazz pioneer Dr. Lonnie Smith. At first, the punk icon couldn’t quite find the groove, said the guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg, who was in the studio that day. Then something clicked.“Suddenly, in the middle of the take, it just started sounding really in the pocket, and had all this energy,” Kreisberg recalled. “I turned my head over and looked through the control room glass, to the room he was in, and he had taken off his shirt. He had become Iggy Pop.”Pop’s covers of Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” and Timmy Thomas’s “Why Can’t We Live Together” will appear on Smith’s joyous, intimate “Breathe,” due Friday on Blue Note Records. The rest of the album, which includes a four-piece horn section, guest vocals from Alicia Olatuja and a reconfigured Thelonious Monk tune, comes from a week of 2017 gigs at New York’s now-shuttered Jazz Standard, a run that doubled as a 75th birthday party for “Doc.”As he nears 80, Smith is merely doing what he’s always done: collaborating, arranging and playing organ with an understated virtuosity that prizes feeling over flash. Not a lot has changed since he released his first album, “Finger-Lickin’ Good Soul Organ,” in 1967. But new listeners — including one very high-profile rock star — are still finding Smith. And his organ hasn’t lost an ounce of soul.Originally from Buffalo, N.Y., Smith started on organ when a local instrument shop owner gave him a Hammond B3. The music of Jimmy Smith and Bill Doggett found him at the same time.“I just loved the sound” of the instrument, said Smith, who currently resides in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in a phone interview. “It’s an orchestra. It’s a bass. And it’s a soloist. I mean, you got everything right there.”“I like the way he sounded,” Smith said of Pop’s performances on his album. Frank DeBlaseSmith moved to New York City in the mid-60s and began recording on albums by the guitarist George Benson and the saxophonist Lou Donaldson. His LP with Donaldson — most notably “Alligator Bogaloo” from 1967 and “Everything I Play Is Funky” three years later — became part of the foundation of soul-jazz, an ecstatic, organ-heavy subgenre that fused jazz with funk and R&B. Even with an abundance of fine organists on the scene in the ’60s — Smith’s contemporaries included Shirley Scott, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Reuben Wilson and Jimmy McGriff — Benson and Donaldson chose Smith. They still keep in touch; Donaldson visits and Benson had called two days before this interview.“I liked the feel, and they must have liked the feel also,” Smith said. “I’m guessing. We had a ball when we played. You feel at home when you play with certain people. And that’s a great thing. Because everybody sound good, but they don’t feel good. Or they don’t play well together. That’s the thing about music.”Around this time, Smith began recording his own albums, too, including a quartet of classic releases for Blue Note between 1969 and 1970: “Turning Point,” “Think!,” “Drives” and “Move Your Hand.” (Smith left the label in 1970 and returned in 2016.) His take on Blood, Sweat & Tears’ “Spinning Wheel” was sampled by A Tribe Called Quest in 1990, and more recently, the title track from “Move Your Hand” became a favorite of Pop’s.“I was listening to ‘Move Your Hand’ over and over at my family home in Florida, and the neighbor across the canal has cockatoos,” Pop said. “I was playing Barry White that day,” and the birds were quiet. “But when I played ‘Move Your Hand,’ they started screaming.” He laughed.The collaboration between Smith and Pop arose naturally — Pop went to a Smith gig and they started talking. Later, Pop suggested the covers. He had been a fan of “Why Can’t We Live Together,” famously sampled by Drake on “Hotline Bling,” since its 1972 release. And Smith had previously covered “Sunshine Superman” on “Move Your Hand”“I like the way he sounded,” Smith said of Pop’s performances on his album. “Natural. You know when people try to overdo it? Again? You don’t have to do that. He just did what he did.”Pop, who turns 74 next month, had collaborated with artists on the fringes of jazz before, like the bassist and producer Bill Laswell, but never with an artist so rooted in the tradition. And true to jazz form, there was essentially no rehearsal.“I’d never done a proper jazz session before, so I was, you might say, on my best behavior,” Pop said with a laugh. “And, you know, we do that, and then I’d watch him, and that was about it. With each one. We didn’t really talk out the arrangement as much as just watch him for cues.”“Breathe” is technically the second time that Smith and Pop have worked together. At the show where they first met, Smith at one point picked up his DLS Electric Walking Stick, a cane and percussion instrument made by the Slaperoo company. Pop played it that night, too, and a bond was formed over the unlikeliest of instruments.“I was playing it through the audience, and he was over there, and I let him play it,” Smith said. “And we decided to do it. Do it together. And it worked. It worked.” More