Tributes have been pouring in from throughout Ghana and the world for the reason that dying of Ghanaian highlife legend Ebo Taylor.
A guitarist, composer and bandleader who died on Saturday, Taylor’s six-decade profession performed a key position in shaping fashionable standard music in West Africa.
Usually described as one of many founding fathers of latest highlife, Taylor died a day after the launch of a music pageant bearing his identify within the capital, Accra, and only a month after celebrating his ninetieth birthday.
Highlife, a style mixing conventional African rhythms with jazz and Caribbean influences, was just lately added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage checklist.
“The world has misplaced an enormous. A colossus of African music,” an announcement shared on his official web page stated. “Your gentle won’t ever fade.”
The Los Angeles-based collective Jazz Is Lifeless known as him a pioneer of highlife and Afrobeat, whereas Ghanaian dancehall star Stonebwoy and American producer Adrian Younge, who his labored with Jay Z and Kendrick Lamar, additionally paid tribute to his legacy.
Nigerian author and poet Dami Ajayi described him as a “highlife maestro” and a “unbelievable guitarist”.
– ‘Uncle Ebo’ –
Taylor’s affect prolonged far past Ghana, with parts of his music showing within the soul, jazz, hip-hop and Afrobeat genres that dominate the African and world charts right this moment.
Born Deroy Taylor in Cape Coast in 1936, he started performing within the Fifties, as highlife was establishing itself because the dominant sound in Ghana within the years following independence.
Identified for intricate guitar traces and wealthy horn preparations, he performed with main bands together with the Stargazers and the Broadway Dance Band.
Within the early Nineteen Sixties, he travelled to London to review music, the place he labored alongside different African musicians, together with Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti.
The alternate of concepts between the 2 would later be seen as formative to the event of Afrobeat, a political cocktail mixing highlife with funk, jazz and soul.
Again in Ghana, Taylor turned one of many nation’s most sought-after arrangers and producers, working with stars equivalent to Pat Thomas and CK Mann whereas main his personal bands.
His compositions — together with “Love & Loss of life”, “Heaven”, “Odofo Nyi Akyiri Biara” and “Appia Kwa Bridge” — gained renewed worldwide consideration many years later as DJs, collectors and file labels reissued his music. His grooves have been sampled by hip-hop and R&B artists and helped introduce new world audiences to Ghanaian highlife.
Taylor continued touring into his 70s and 80s, performing throughout Europe and the USA as a part of a late-career renaissance that cemented his standing as a cult determine amongst youthful musicians.
Many followers affectionately referred to him as “Uncle Ebo”, reflecting each his longevity and mentorship of youthful artists.
For a lot of, he remained an emblem of highlife’s golden period and of a era that carried Ghanaian music onto the world stage.
AFP
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