Live!

If you want to hear what fusion sounds like when you take it out of the studio (or the elevator) and put it in a packed, feverish nightclub, rest assured that it’s in good, remarkably expressive hands with keyboard legend Lonnie Liston Smith. Live! is culled from a three-night stand at Brooklyn joint Smucker’s Cabaret, a 600-capacity club that sounds here like it holds ten times that many. And in this setting, the cuts that sounded gracefully mellow in the studio, like the airy glide of “Sorceress” and the spiritual wave-crest of “Sunset,” feels even more expressively alive and organically spontaneous. As for the stuff that sounded intense in the studio? This dramatically ramped-up version of “Expansions” should’ve provided listeners with a safety harness.