Blue Strawberry | | The Bosman Twins

The Bosman Twins

Dwayne Bosman and Dwight Bosman are music makers. Whether as composers, arrangers, players or educators, these Florida A&M University music scholars occupy a distinguished and esteemed position in the world of jazz.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Dwayne and Dwight became passionate about jazz at an early age.  They grew up listening to the sounds of great jazz artists like Earl “Fatha” Hines, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and their father Lloyd Smith, who was a well known businessman and a side man in Basie’s and Ellington’s orchestras. Paula V. Smith, the twins’ mother and the first African-American Administrator in the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor in the Reagan Administration, was also an avid jazz lover. Influenced by famous musicians and family friends Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, Dwayne and Dwight were performing professionally as The Bosman Twins by age 14. Over the years, they have shared their love of music and the stage with entertainment legends Freddie Cole, Branford Marsalis, Fontella Bass, Roy Ayers, David Peaston and the late trumpeter Lester Bowie.  Whether performing with their own band or accompanying other jazz notables, their unique style and renditions of jazz, rhythm and blues, funk and gospel have earned them national and international acclaim.