Ebo Taylor, Adrian Younge + Ali Shaheed Muhammad – Ebo Taylor JID022 (Jazz Is Dead, 2025)
There’s a moment when music stops being just sound and transforms into memory; something deeper, something eternal. That’s the space Ebo Taylor JID022 occupies. Released in celebration of his 90th birthday, this album honors a life spent shaping the rhythms of West Africa and beyond. It is, in many ways, both a homecoming and a farewell, a bridge between past and present, between Ghana and the world.
Ebo Taylor has long been an architect of highlife and Afrobeat, a music historian whose guitar licks and brass-laden arrangements have struck a chord for generations. The fact that he recorded this album in Los Angeles, at Adrian Younge’s Linear Labs studio, rather than his native Ghana, adds a fascinating new layer to his ever-evolving story. Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, founders of the Jazz Is Dead label, have built their careers on reinterpreting and revitalizing Black music traditions, and here, they don’t just pay homage to Taylor’s legacy, they amplify it, infusing his signature sound with a fresh but reverent energy.
From the first track, it’s clear that this is an album that breathes. The swirling horns are defiant yet celebratory, echoing the golden era of highlife while carrying the weight of Afrobeat’s rebellious spirit. The guitars are raw, their fuzzed-out edges giving almost psychedelic texture. And then there’s the percussion; urgent, polyrhythmic, unrelenting. The rhythm doesn’t just keep time; it pulls you into its orbit, forcing you to move, to feel.
One of the most striking aspects of Ebo Taylor JID022 is its vocals. The Ghanaian backing vocalists create a spiritual atmosphere, one that feels less like performance and more like invocation. There’s a sense of communion in their harmonies, a call-and-response echoing from distant village gatherings to modern-day jazz clubs. Taylor’s own voice, however, carries the weight of time. It’s weathered now, the edges rougher, the notes sometimes strained. But within that aging voice is something even more profound, wisdom. On songs like “Feeling,” his reflections on love and life feel like lessons passed down, the kind of words a grandfather might offer under the shade of an ancient tree.
“Kusi Na Sibo” is even more poignant, a lesson in gratitude that feels like both a celebration and a goodbye.
That’s what makes this album so powerful, it doesn’t just sound like history; it is history. It’s a reminder of the bridges Taylor built between cultures, of the music he made that outlived the British Empire and military regimes, of the dance floors he filled from Accra to London to New York. And now, as he embarks on his farewell tour with the Ebo Taylor Family Band and his longtime friend Pat Thomas, there’s a bittersweet finality to it all.
Buy Ebo Taylor JID022.
Author: Madison Quinn
