Before Lonnie Liston Smith became an international sensation, he was spending an obligatory Sunday of his Virginia boyhood listening to free-form church worship.
A deacon would throw a call heavenward - "I love the Lord. He heard my cry" or some other practiced recitation - and waiting parishioners would throw back a wondering, arching response. "I-Iiiii-Iiii-uh loooooo-uh-uve, thee-ee-eeee-eee-e-e, La-aw-aw-d ..."
The music took shape depending on what was transpiring in the lives of those gathered, on who needed a healing or some other help or, citing the good that had come their way, simply to say "hallelujah."
Pianist Smith, whose 72nd birthday is approaching, fondly remembers those beginnings. "Uh-huh," he says, chuckling some and imagining.
He mentions that his daddy was part of gospel's "Harmonizing Four. "They were big all over the world. Eleanor Roosevelt invited them to come sing after her husband, President Roosevelt, died," he says.
His history factors into the music he's been creating longer than he can actually pinpoint. Particularly as a soloist - he's recorded and performed with the likes of Art Blakey, Betty Carter, Miles Davis, Taj Mahal, Pharoah Sanders - Smith has aspired to the similar organic styling that he first noted as a boy listening to the call-and-response of that old Virginia church flock. And, as they did, he's aimed for a transcendent message.
"'Expansion,'" he said, citing one of his hits, "was all about expanding the mind and having a vision of a new world where everybody can live in peace. That's always been my theme. We still need that today."
That title, "Garden of Peace" and "Divine Warrior," Smith says, are sure to be in his lineup of offerings during performances Friday and Saturday at Prime Smokehouse.
The next performer in Prime's Icons of Jazz Series, Smith was selected for his unbound musicality and his legacy, said Prime's owner Ed Wiley III, scion of world-renowned jazz saxophonist Ed Wiley Jr., who died in 2010.
"As the music called jazz evolved into different phases, people like Lonnie Liston Smith were there, helping propel it to the next phase. He's played with Miles, with a lot of the greats. He's done everything from be-bop to fusion to hip-hop."
All artistic labels aside, Wiley adds, "people like Lonnie Liston Smith play what they play, and they wouldn't necessarily call it what other people call it. They called it based on what they felt, based on the time and the space they were in any given moment."
On the stage with Smith this weekend are Brian Jackson, a keyboardist and flutist known for his 1970s collaborations with Gil-Scott Heron; and jazz pianist Mark Adam, who's also enjoyed a solo career and worked with artists from Ron Carter to Bobbi Humphrey to Hugh Masekela.
Smith says the trio will let the music "flow and manifest itself."
"You try not to come to this process without too many preconceived ideas," Smith says. "Sometimes, you sit down ... and, all of sudden, something happens. You cannot put that in a bottle or mathematically jot it down. It has everything to do with creativity and letting the music just be."
