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 emerged in the first part of the 20th century, blending local rhythms and musical traditions with Western instrumentation and melodies. Taylor was tight with Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and released an impressive run of albums in the 1970s and early ’80s, then largely retreated for more than 20 years to work on others’ albums and teach music at the University of Ghana. In 2010, he reemerged with a moody, bracing album called “Love and Death” that helped introduce him to a new generation of record collectors, as well as DJs 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, an 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, DJ, 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 JID022,” 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. Ebo 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.
In 2018, Taylor had a stroke, and although he can still sing, his ability to communicate in English has diminished considerably. That made the collaboration with Younge and Muhammad tricky.
“Most of my talking in the studio was with Henry,” Younge said from his Linear Labs studio in Los Angeles, where the album was recorded. “Ebo speaks directly with Henry, so Henry is the spokesperson for him.”
Taylor is often credited with incorporating advanced jazz chords and deep funk rhythms into traditional highlife music, but these days, he can no longer play guitar — as Henry Taylor put it, “All his fingers won’t comply” — and his voice, once a sweet, mellifluous instrument, is raspy and labored. Rather than try to hide the musician’s new reality with production tricks, Younge and Muhammad leaned into it.
“I wanted to attack this the same way Ebo might’ve attacked this in his 20s,” Younge said. “Seeing him onstage, there was a very particular charm I got from his vocals, a bravado, something very unique. I wanted to own that. It’s that punk rock approach versus the smooth jazz way of doing records from older people. Ebo’s voice wasn’t anything to shy away from. It was the absolute center point.”
On the lively opening track, “Get Up,” Taylor’s deep, haunting vocals cut through a frenetic swirl of horns, synths, guitars and skittering beats. Amid the swaggering bass lines and stuttering guitar riffs that underpin “Kusi Na Sibo” and the hypnotic “Nsa a W’oanye Edwuma, Ondzidzi,” Taylor sings as if offering an ancient incantation. In other spots, the gravelly, guttural tones in his voice feel like a dynamic counterpoint to airy melodies and buoyant rhythms, regardless of whether he’s singing in English, as he still does occasionally, or in his native Fante dialect of Akan.
Both Younge and Muhammad brought sketches of songs into the studio, and then the band — which included both Ghanaian musicians who are part of Taylor’s touring band, and session players with whom Younge and Muhammad had worked with before — built out the arrangements. Taylor wrote the lyrics and vocal melodies, while guiding the creative decisions, often with little more than a head nod.
“It’s a lot of trust because we don’t speak the language,” Muhammad said. “He understands everything being said. With some older musicians, people mistake their quiet as they’re not as connected to what’s going on. Ebo’s so connected. He’s not saying a lot but then when he commits to it, you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s been absorbing everything.’”
As Henry Taylor put it: “Everything comes from Ebo. There are certain things he couldn’t do because he’s old, but he’s still Ebo Taylor. He knows what he’s doing.”
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