Most musicians who get a second life abroad are rediscovered through old records. Ebo Taylor made a brand new one, at 74.
Ebo Taylor was a Ghanaian guitarist, composer, bandleader, producer and arranger who worked across highlife and Afrobeat for more than six decades. He was born on 6 January 1936 and died on 7 February 2026 in Saltpond, the Central Region town he called home.
Saltpond
Taylor came from Saltpond, near Cape Coast. He played in highlife dance bands as a young man, including some of the leading bands of the 1950s and early 1960s, and built a reputation as a gifted guitarist and arranger.
London and Fela
In the early 1960s, Taylor studied music in London. He spent time among African musicians there, including Fela Kuti, who was also studying. Both were interested in combining African music with jazz, and both would later help shape the sound that became Afrobeat.
The 1970s
Back in Ghana, Taylor worked as a bandleader, producer and arranger for other musicians, including Pat Thomas, the singer known as the Golden Voice of Africa. His own records mixed highlife guitar, funk rhythms, jazz horns and Fante folk melodies.
Songs such as “Love and Death” became favourites in Ghana, though his records were little known abroad at the time.
Rediscovery
In the 2000s, collectors and DJs in Europe began seeking out 1970s Ghanaian recordings. Taylor’s name kept coming up. In 2008, he met Berlin-based musicians from the Afrobeat Academy band, including saxophonist Ben Abarbanel-Wolff.
That meeting led to Love and Death, released by Strut Records in 2010. It was his first internationally distributed album and included new recordings of some of his classic songs.
A late career
Strut followed with Life Stories, a collection of his 1970s recordings, in 2011, and Appia Kwa Bridge in 2012. Taylor toured Europe and beyond, playing festivals with musicians young enough to be his grandchildren. His songs were sampled by hip-hop producers.
A teacher
Taylor also taught music and mentored younger Ghanaian musicians, passing on his knowledge of highlife and arranging.
His place in music
Taylor was one of the musicians who connected the dance-band highlife of the 1950s with the harder, funkier sound of the 1970s. He heard what Fela was doing and what James Brown was doing, and he put it through a Fante filter.
The last tour
Taylor spent his final decades in Saltpond, the town where he started. Few musicians have had to wait so long for the world to hear them, and fewer still have been ready, at 74, to go out and play for it.
