Veteran Ghanaian musician Ebo Taylor has died at aged 90.
The maestro’s passing comes exactly one month after he celebrated his milestone 90th birthday on January 7 and just twenty-four hours after the grand launch of the inaugural Ebo Taylor Music Festival—an event designed to honour his life’s work while he was still among us.
Ebo Taylor’s Instagram page has also confirmed the news with the post below.
Born in 1936, Taylor grew up listening to the highlife music that has always been at the heart of his style, which fuses jazz elements with traditional highlife for a groovier sound. “I was inspired by the pioneering saxophonist and trumpeter E.T. Mensah and his band The Tempos,” he said in a recent interview in Saltpond.
“Fela never understood why as Africans we like playing jazz; he wanted us to be ourselves, be original and tell our stories,” said Taylor. Taylor joined the Stargazers, a highlife band led by saxophonist Teddy Osei and drummer Sol Amarfio (who would both go on to form the legendary British-based Afro rock band, Osibisa) shortly after leaving college.
In 1962, Taylor moved to London to study music at the Eric Gilder School of Music with funding from a government cultural program instituted by Ghana’s first prime minister and president Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who secured independence for Ghana from British rule.
Global influences
Yet Taylor’s influence can be seen across genres today, particularly with the emergence of afrobeats in the early 2000s, fusing afrobeat and highlife with EDM, hip-hop and reggae.
Taylor is quick to highlight the fact that the popularity of afrobeats has coincided with its embrace of authentically African arrangements and a departure from heavy hip-hop and R&B sounds which he believes could seem forced.
“The music we made was real music, it made you stop and think,” he said. “It’s not surprising that people are connecting with afrobeats more now that it is embracing elements from the music we made.”
“I want to be remembered for my music, for my art…” said Taylor.