Les Frères Smith

Brandishing the Afrobeat banner high, without getting rid of the hypnotic ethio-jazz nor of the West African vibrations captured during their previous discographic adventures, Les Frères Smith have once again taken the road of groove and trance. Following a dusty and analog trail that winds through Conakry, Ghana, explores Cameroon, and goes back to the Nigerian spring, they composed and recorded their 3rd album MUTATION. Eager for novelties, the eleven brothers never got bogged down in the swamp of repetition. Permeable to external influences from noisy concrete cities or hostile nature, Les Frères Smith have combined funk and highlife, jazz and soul, tropical flavors, incandescent copper and polyrhythms into a highly flammable fuel, heated by the spellbinding voice of Swala Emati Smith and the fury of Prosper Smith. They named this fuel the Afrikanbeat. Like society, environment and the world at large, the music of Les Frères Smith has been constantly mutating. Its expression, shape and contours have been redesigned, refined or hardened. But it is still the sense of combat, along with the sense of celebration, and the desire to share music as a precious yet accessible to all commodity, that guides their explorations, animates their compositions and nourishes their improvisations.