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What happens when you mix a sweet, free-flowing tropical guitar with infectious horns and keys and the gut-busting kicks of West African rhythms? What’s it called? Highlife? Afrobeat? Funk? Or is it a sort of wicked popular infusion, sweetened with the traditional yet salted with the future, unashamed to entertain and make you dance?

One legendary guitarist has worked ceaselessly to develop exactly this sound, and in doing so, he’s made a music that is uniquely his own. He is Ebo Taylor.

Born in 1935 to a family of fisherman, Ebo showed promise as a guitarist at an early age and joined the legendary Broadway Band in it's original formation. In 1962, Ebo and fellow west African Fela Kuti won a prestigious scholarship that brought him to London for 4 years. Ebo's friendship with Fela lasted over 30 years. He returned to Ghana in 1965 and became the leader and musical director of countless formations like the Stargazers Band, the Broadway Band, and the Uhuru Band, as well as mentoring young afrofunk bands like Sweet Beans and Marijata. A fearless composer, arranger, and solo artist who cut some of the best Highlife, Jazz and Funk tunes to come out of Africa during the 1970s, Ebo Taylor has embraced a fusion of traditional and Western forms of popular music.

This innovative and distinctive style is clearly recognizable on albums like “Ebo Taylor and the Pelicans,” “Twer Nyame,” or “My Love and My Music,” as well as on the albums of C. K. Mann or Pat Thomas that he composed for and arranged.

Coming to the wider attention of crate diggers in the last decade, it is his remarkably funky B-sides thathave since been reissued to much critical acclaim to a new generation of listeners.

Now, Ebo Taylor has joined with the Afrobeat Academy, Europe’s hottest proponents of afrofunk musicto record a new album that will surely launch his reputation as a master innovator, as great as anything to come from the coasts of Africa or the Caribbean with a sound in which everything is in it's place and designed for the ultimate destination: your hips.