“They enticed me back to the studio,” Smith says. Featuring nine tracks, JID017 marks Smith’s return to the electric Fender Rhodes piano that shaped his 70s sound, and was conceived in collaboration with the label’s co-founders and producers, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Twenty-five years after the release of his last album, the synth-driven Transformation, Smith is back with a record of original compositions on the label Jazz Is Dead. Now 82 and speaking from his home in Richmond, Virginia, Smith is as laid-back in person as his sound suggests. It was like stepping back in time – as soon as I saw the Rhodes, I started playing The database WhoSampled estimates that his work has been used in 395 tracks. Smith’s records have been sampled heavily by Jay-Z, Stetsasonic and Mary J Blige, while Smith himself collaborated on rapper Guru’s 1993 cult jazz-rap record, Jazzmatazz, Vol 1.
His music has continued to cross genre boundaries in the decades since.
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