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The singer, guitarist and songwriter released seminal music in the early ’80s before retiring. The Jazz Is Dead label is accelerating its rediscovery.
By David Peisner
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 made the impression in the first component of the 20th century, combining local rhythms and musical traditions with Western tools and melodies. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he largely retired for more than 20 years to paintings on other people’s albums and taught music at the University of Ghana. In 2010, he records the impression with a moody and uplifting album called “Love and Death” that helped introduce him to a new generation of record collectors, as well as DJs and makers who tried his paints on songs through Usher, the Black-eyed Peas, Vic Mensa and more.
“I found out who Ebo was buying compilations with their songs,” said Adrian Younge, an American manufacturer and discoverer of the Jazz Is Dead label. “Then I started connecting all the dots together. He’s a legend who was making music at the same time as Fela, but in the United States, other people don’t know about EBO.
Young, a prolific multi-instrumentalist, DJ, singer-songwriter and producer who worked with Kendrick Lamar, Wu-Tang Clan and Delfonics, presented Jazz is Dead in 2017 with Ali Shaheed Muhammad, a music mathematician with a similar long career 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, focuses primarily on veteran artists from jazz, soul, and international music. On January 31, he will release “Ebo Taylor Jid022”, the first album in seven years by Taylor, who is now 90 years old.
On a cloudy day in Ghana in mid -November, Taylor gave the impression of a video chat, sitting in the courtyard of his house in Saltpond, a small city on the Atlantic coast of the country, throughout his son and leader of The band, Henry Taylor. The biggest Taylor wore a brown shirt on its thin and rigid frame, and a gray baseball cap with “New York” stamped. Duration of the 30 -minute call, allowing your child to speak.
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