Ebo Taylor’s music and artistic practice defined a generation of highlife and Afrobeat music. OkayAfrica traces Taylor’s legacy with the help of African artists and historians like Juls, Uchenna Ikonne, Nsikak, and Joshua Ahazie.
The album cover for Ebo Taylor’s Love and Death (2010).courtesy of Ebo Taylor
Ebo Taylor is definitive of African music, specifically highlife and West African pop music. The Ghanaian musician passed away at 90 years old, leaving behind a trail of seminal creativity that will always set him apart as an immortal. His music — rolling, complex, accessible, warm, wickedly groovy — fused heritage and potent observations on life, an innate reverence for the past that incorporated timely messages for the present, and an eye for the future.
“[Taylor] was special because he understood highlife both as a pioneer and where it was going,” Lagos-based music curator and marketing executive Joshua Ahazie says. “He spent decades of his life creating the prototype — first through his solo career, but also through his work with other great bands and musicians along the way. Even in 2025, he toured the U.S. for the first time. Ebo Taylor carried highlife with a kind of quiet authority, but he belongs in the same lineage as pioneers like Fela Kuti in the West or Hugh Masekela down south.”
Starting his career in the late 1950s, Taylor joined the Stargazers after leaving college, playing in a highlife band led by saxophonist Teddy Osei and drummer Sol Amarfio, both founding members of the iconic Afro-rock band Osibisa. After the Stargazers disbanded, he played with and arranged for several bands in Accra and in Cape Coast, where he grew up. This was the golden era of early highlife, a genre that mutated from the adoption of Caribbean rhythms brought to the Gold Coast by soldiers serving in the colonial British army; many of these soldiers were from Jamaica and Trinidad.
In the early 1960s, he lived in London, studying at the Eric Gilder School of Music and getting exposed to a wide range of music, particularly jazz. It was during this time that he became good friends with Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the progenitor of afrobeats. “Fela used to say to me, ‘Why are we Africans always playing jazz?’ He said jazz was for the Americans and we should be doing our own thing,” Taylor recalled in an interview preceding his 2018 album, Yen Ara.
The cover artwork for Ebo Taylor’s 2018 album, Yen Ara.courtesy of Ebo Taylor
Jazz eventually played a role in both Taylor’s and Kuti’s music. For Taylor, it was folding complex jazz chords into the earthen vessel of highlife. It also involved pulling influences from funk music, combining these elements into a forward-facing vision of highlife that still remained tethered to its uniquely African identity.
“You could hardly find a more fastidious custodian of classic musical values of West Africa than Ebo Taylor, but what made him unique was the fluency in soul, jazz, reggae, and classical, and his almost effortless ability to use highlife as a language through which he could express these western modes,” music historian Uchenna Ikonne shared with OkayAfrica.
Ghanaian British producer Juls deems Taylor to be special because he simultaneously “evolved his sound and always stayed true to what his soundscape was, which was traditional Ghanaian highlife. Being able to create soundscapes with the same instruments, with the organ, the guitar, the horn sections, baselines, and still be distinct in his sound.”
Just before returning to Ghana, he formed Black Star Highlife Band with Osei and Amarfio, serving as the beginning of his ultra-hybrid style. Through the latter parts of the ‘60s and ‘70s, he led a few bands, released a handful of albums, and collaborated with a long list of artists across West Africa — particularly as an in-house session musician and producer for the iconic Essiebons label. His music, specifically, was dynamic, attuned to conveying the pomp of big band highlife and also the genre’s importance as a carrier of everyday emotions.
“Taylor cut his teeth in the golden age of Ghanaian big bands, and he somehow managed to carry that sense of scale with him throughout his career, even when playing with smaller combos,” Ikonne explains. “There was a certain grandiosity and expansiveness to his arrangements that lent an almost cinematic quality to his music. It’s a shame he never scored any movies, because he would have been perfect for it!”
Ahazie, who discovered Taylor during a deep dive into Ghanaian highlife in 2015, details the potency of these multi-dimensional powers. “I fell in love with a dusty 1974 45-inch titled ‘Nsamanfo / Baby-Baby / Kwaku Ananse,’ which he recorded during his time as bandleader of the Apagya Show Band. I’m dancing to the first side of the record, when it suddenly flips into ‘Baby-Baby.’ That’s when I hear a raspy Ebo Taylor asking his lover to ‘kiss me one more time, hold me one more time.’ It’s a lesser-known song, but that honesty stayed with me and made me want to understand the artist behind it.”
After a lengthy hiatus, Taylor returned in 2010 with Love and Death, headlined by its titular track and his biggest song. It introduced a whole new generation of listeners to the Ghanaian maestro’s music, proof that his groove didn’t need to fit the times to be timely. Nigerian guitarist Nsikak recalls listening to Love and Death seven years after its release and being floored by “the rhythm, the harmonies, the horns lines – this was crazy.”
The album led to a resurgence of Taylor’s visibility, earning him his flowers in real time. However, the defining part of those 15-plus years is that it showed that he carried an undying flame for creating, despite suffering a stroke in 2018. He recorded new music, including Ebo Taylor JID022, an album on the American label Jazz is Dead, released in early 2025, and he performed as much as he could.
“His biggest legacy is his catalogue of incredible music, and he never stopped performing,” Juls says. Taylor’s influence, both directly vivid and subtly definitive even to the landscape of current-day West African pop, is incredibly remarkable. Ahazie describes his impact as “unmeasurable,” particularly as an artist who constantly tested the edges of his sound, name-checking British highlife-fusion band Kokoroko, Nigerian sibling duo The Cavemen, and Berlin-based afro-soul duo Jembaa Groove as inheritors of Taylor’s lineage.
Ahazie adds that Taylor’s catalogue “ensures Ghana’s stories and ways of feeling live and stand the test of time. For new musicians, his catalogue will be reinterpreted and returned to move highlife to its new chapters. An undeniable force. He did it, and he did it well.”
