Ebo Taylor & Afrobeat Academy - Love & Death
It's the end of the weekend, but here's the next post in my little Black History Month series so you can imagine your next vacation. Or a permanent one, I dunno. We'll all go together when we go, as the late Tom Lehrer once said.
Of course these Ziopsychotic chumps might initiate global WWIII by then, so we gotta get our jams in before the nuclear winter settles. And you can kiss your ass goodbye, as the great Sun Ra once said.
Amyway in our continuing, 12+ year odyssey into People Not To Be Found On The Epstein List, tonight we have a cat that I have dug since I heard songs of his at a party in SF in the early 1990s.
He jussssst made 90 before leaving our rapidly deteriorating excuse for a world a couple of weeks ago, but in the decades before he did he sure put a hootenanny on the thing.
One of the Twin Towers of Afrobeat -- standing tall alongside the more well-known Fela Kuti -- there isn't nanothermite powerful enough to topple what those two guys built in their time on Earth.
I know there are other contenders for the crown, but it's hard not to come up with the opinion that Ebo Taylor is the greatest musician ever to come from Ghana.
Starting in the early 1960s and all the way up to February 7th and his astral departure, he led the way for Highlife and Afrobeat -- which became so globally popular and influential among other musicmakers -- as much as anyone, even Fela himself.
This is another one of those deaths where it's almost impossible to bemoan it as this awful tragedy, because the person lived into their 90s and had almost the best possible life whilst here, leaving behind a beautiful legacy that will endure for generations and more.
Of course you wish he got more recognition and flowers in his lifetime, but as we alluded to Fela kind of gets all the juice and credit for this particular strain of sound, even though a figure such as Ebo Taylor arguably was just as instrumental, over time, in establishing the longevity of the music.
I guess Fela is the Nigeria wing and Ebo is the Ghana wing of the Afrobeat/Highlife axis. And somewhere, King Sunny Adé is reading this and dispatching a high-value, super elite hit squad armed with submachine guns that are shaped like guitars to my house.
I guess I'll have to get to King Sunny, who turns 80 later this year, before he gets to me and put up a concert or ten.
Anyhow, so rather than wait for Ebo's next birthday next January, let's smash up this wild collab with Afrobeat Academy from 12 years ago in his eternally deserved honor.
Ebo Taylor & Afrobeat Academy
New Morning
Paris, France
3.26.2014
01 walk-on applause
02 Kwame
03 Aborekyair Aba
04 Nsu Na Kwan
05 Kruman Dey
06 Victory
07 Love & Death
08 Kweku Ananse/band introductions
09 Dofu
10 Yaa Amponsah
Total time: 1:13:30
Ebo Taylor - guitar & vocals
Henry Taylor - keyboards & vocals
Eric "Sunday" Owusu - percussion & vocals
Ekow Alabi Savage - drums, percussion & vocals
Ben Abarbanel-Wolff - tenor saxophone
Philip Sindy - trumpet
Emmanuel Ofori - bass
Franck Biyong - guitar
320/48k audio extracted from an HD YouTube video
spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making this equivalent to a pre-FM source
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited & slightly remastered by EN, February 2026
481 MB FLAC/direct link
Poor Ebo looking like he's contemplating imminent catastrophe there, but he's probably somewhere happy he at least got the heck outta here before the whole world is turned to a pile of nuclear, glowing excrement hitting a giant fan, thanks to the psychosis that's always implicit to Supremacist Delusions.
I'll be back in a few days, if there's a world to come back to. On the off chance there will be, do enjoy this scorching and highly syncopated 73 minutes in celebration of Ebo Taylor, still never mentioned -- along with no gays, no trans, no drag queens, no Black people, no "illegals" and pretty much no anyone not a craven, childfucking white, straight male Ziomonstrous bumbaclaat slab of jackalshit -- a single time in 5 1/2 million pages of those terrifying files!--J.
1.6.1936 - 2.7.2026