Celebrated Ghanaian producer and musician Ebo Taylor has died aged 90

Ebo Taylor, the pioneering highlife musician and record producer hailing from Ghana, has passed away at the age of 90.

The news was revealed via a post on Ebo’s official Instagram page on February 8, reading: “The world has lost a giant. A colossus of African music.”

“Ebo Taylor passed away yesterday, a day after the launch of Ebo Taylor Music Festival and exactly a month after his 90th birthday, leaving behind an unmatched artistry legacy,” the statement continued. “Your light will never fade.”

Born in Accra’s Gold Coast, Ebo Taylor had an early fascination with music, learning to play piano at the age of six and later the guitar, joining pioneering highlife bands The Stargazers and Broadway Dance Band in the 1950s.

After forming his own group, the Black Star Highlife Band, in the early '60s, Ebo travelled to London to collaborate with afrobeat legend Fela Kuti and later met and was influenced by the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

In the ‘70s, Ebo worked as an in-house guitarist and producer on multiple projects, and worked solo on his own work, which merged traditional Ghanaian music with jazz, funk, and the emerging sound of afrobeat.

Ebo received multiple Lifetime Achievement awards throughout his career in music, the first in 2014 at The Ghana Music Awards, and the second in 2019 at the Highlife Music Awards.

Speaking to the BBC’s Newsday programme, a Ghanaian presidential spokesperson said: "He will be remembered as one of our greatest musicians ever... as a man who strove to put Ghanaian music on the global map at a time when other genres of music were prominent.”

Read some more tributes below.

Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Associate Digital Editor, follow her on X