Ebo Taylor

Ebo Taylor, born Deroy Taylor, was a Ghanaian guitarist, composer, bandleader, arranger and producer whose career in highlife and Afrobeat ran for more than six decades. He worked alongside Fela Kuti in London in the early 1960s, shaped the sound of the Essiebons label in the 1970s, and late in life found a new international audience when hip-hop and R&B producers began sampling his records. He died on 7 February 2026, aged 90.

Early life

He was born on 6 January 1936 in Cape Coast, in what was then the Gold Coast, and started playing the piano at the age of six.

Highlife bands and London

In the late 1950s he played in two of the leading highlife bands of the day, the Stargazers and the Broadway Dance Band. In 1962 he took his own group, the Black Star Highlife Band, to London, where he worked with the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and other African musicians.

Producer and solo artist

Back in Ghana he became the in-house guitarist, arranger and producer for Essiebons, the label founded by Dick Essilfie-Bondzie, and produced records for Pat Thomas and C. K. Mann. His own records of the 1970s mixed traditional Ghanaian material with Afrobeat, jazz and funk, among them My Love and Music (1976), Ebo Taylor (1977) and Twer Nyame (1978).

A second career abroad

In 2008 he met the Berlin musicians of the Afrobeat Academy, and in 2010 Strut Records released Love and Death, his first internationally distributed album. The same year Usher and Ludacris sampled his song "Heaven" on "She Don't Know". His music was also sampled by the Black Eyed Peas, Kelly Rowland, Jidenna, Vic Mensa and Rapsody. Strut followed with the retrospective Life Stories (2011) and Appia Kwa Bridge (2012), recorded when he was in his late seventies. In 2025, at 89, he released an album with the American label Jazz Is Dead.

Honours

He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2014 Vodafone Ghana Music Awards and again at the 2019 Highlife Music Awards.

Death

Ebo Taylor died on 7 February 2026 in Saltpond on the Central Region coast. A delegation from the Musicians Union of Ghana, led by its president Bessa Simons, visited his family there to offer condolences.