Ebo Taylor: My Love & Music [MR. BONGO]

Why you'll love it

Mr Bongo brought this out-of-print classic back for Taylor's 80th birthday year in 2016. The original came out in Ghana on George Prah's Gapophone label in a tiny run, reportedly around 500 copies.

About the album

Ebo Taylor spent years making other people sound great before he got round to a record of his own. Born in Cape Coast in 1936, he played with the Stargazers and the Broadway Dance Band in the 1950s, took his Black Star Highlife Band to London in 1962, where he worked alongside Fela Kuti, and came home to produce and arrange for Pat Thomas, C. K. Mann and others.

My Love and Music, his debut as a leader, mixes traditional Ghanaian music with afrobeat, jazz and funk in the way that became his signature. There are just four tracks, each given room to breathe. "Maye Omama" sets a warm, rolling groove and the title track is lush, laid-back highlife, while "Odofo Nnyi Ekyir Biara" and "Will You Promise" stretch out and simmer on side two. Taylor's guitar weaves through all of it, never showy, always in the pocket.

Hip hop producers found him decades later, with samples turning up in records by Usher, the Black Eyed Peas and Kelly Rowland, and Strut's albums brought him a worldwide audience in his seventies. A record that waited forty years for most of the world to hear it is in no hurry, and neither should you be.

Also at Kops: more Ebo Taylor on vinyl · browse World

Tracklist

Listen

On Mr Bongo (cat# MRBLP132).