General
At 90, the Ghanaian Highlife Pioneer Ebo Taylor Finds a New Voice
The singer, guitarist and composer released heralded music in the 1970s and early ’80s before retreating. The label Jazz Is Dead is boosting his rediscovery.
Ebo Taylor has been a force in West African music since the 1960s as a guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and producer, though often an unheralded one.
The Ghanaian musician helped popularize highlife, a dance music that emerged in the first part of the 20th century, blending local rhythms and musical traditions with Western instrumentation and melodies. Taylor was tight with the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and released an impressive run of albums in the 1970s and early 1980s, then largely retreated for more than 20 years to work on others’ albums and teach music at the University of Ghana. In 2010, he re-emerged with a moody, bracing album called “Love and Death” that helped introduce him to a new generation of record collectors, as well as D.J.s and producers who sampled his work in songs by Usher, the Black Eyed Peas, Vic Mensa and more.
“I found out who Ebo was buying compilation records with his songs on them,” said Adrian Younge, the American producer and a founder of the label Jazz Is Dead. “Then I started to tie all the dots together. He’s a legend that was making music at the same time as Fela but people in the U.S. don’t really know about Ebo.”
Younge, a prolific multi-instrumentalist, D.J., songwriter and producer who has worked with Kendrick Lamar, the Wu-Tang Clan and the Delfonics, started Jazz is Dead in 2017 with Ali Shaheed Muhammad, a similarly rangy musical polymath who is also a member of A Tribe Called Quest, and two other music industry veterans. The company, which produces live events and documentaries as well as studio albums, mostly focuses on older jazz, soul and world music artists. On Jan. 31, it will release “Ebo Taylor,” the first album in seven years by Taylor, who is now 90.
On an overcast Ghana day in mid-November, Taylor appeared on a video chat, sitting on the patio of his home in Saltpond, a small city on the country’s Atlantic coast, alongside his son and bandleader, Henry Taylor. The elder Taylor was wearing a maroon T-shirt over his thin, wiry frame, and a gray baseball hat with “New York” emblazoned on it. After initially declaring, “I’m good. Ready to go!,” he fell silent for the duration for the 30-minute call, allowing his son to do all the talking.