Lonnie Liston Smith, Jr. (born December 28, 1940) is an American jazz, soul, and funk musician who played with such notable jazz artists as Pharoah Sanders and Miles Davis before forming Lonnie Liston Smith and the Cosmic Echoes, recording a number of albums widely regarded as classics in the fusion, quiet storm, smooth jazz and acid jazz genres. 　　In October 1986, he moved closer to his musical roots with "Make Someone Happy" (Doctor Jazz, 1986), an acoustic session that included new recordings of several jazz standards by the trio of Smith, Cecil McBee and Al Foster, produced by Bob Thiele. However, despite critical acclaim for this work, Smith found himself without a recording contract until the turn of the decade, when the small Startrak label released Love Goddess (Startrak, 1990) and Magic Lady (Startrak, 1991). "I had a lot of idealistic concepts about music, and about the spiritual message I was trying to get across. But most record companies only care about demographics and bottom line sales."Both of the Startrak albums marked an about turn to the smooth jazz mode of the Cosmic Echoes period, "Love Goddess" featuring vocalist Phyllis Hyman and saxophonist Stanley Turrentine. 　　Around this time, the emerging hip-hop movement took an interest in Smith's earlier work, and he found himself working with rapper Guru, who was mixing hip-hop with jazz in an innovative way. "Guru and the other rappers would tell me how their uncles used to make them listen to me and Miles and Donald Byrd and how they got the message" Smith told Australia's Daily Telegraph Mirror newspaper in 1995.Smith appeared on Guru's groundbreaking Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 album (Chrysalis, 1993), once again finding a new audience for his earlier work as a result. He had also toured Europe in 1991, but after this short period of activity Smith produced little further work in the 1990s. Despite extensive radio play, appearing on a number of compilation albums and being name-checked and sampled by an increasing number of younger musicians discovering his Cosmic Echoes output, he spent the next few years mainly involved in setting up his own label, Loveland, and it was not until 1998 that Sony International took advantage of his new found audience by reissuing Exotic Mysteries and Loveland as a double CD. The same year, he recorded Transformation (Loveland, 1998), once again revisiting the genre he had been most successful in and reuniting with his brother Donald's vocals. For this release he re-recorded "A Chance For Peace (Give Peace a Chance)" (both as vocal and instrumental versions) and "Expansions" as well as "Space Princess". 　　Since then he has not recorded, although he has performed live and toured on a number of occasions, especially in Europe and Japan, where he remains popular with new generations of listeners. He has also spent much of his time teaching at various workshops. In 2002, Sony issued a double album retrospective of his Columbia output, Explorations: The Columbia Years, and his compositions remain a feature of jazz fusion orientated radio and CD compilations. The Cosmic Echoes track, "Expansions" has been featured in two videogames: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Driver: Parallel Lines, while "A Chance for Peace" featured in Grand Theft Auto IV. He most recently appearing on the Jazz World Stage at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2009.