One For The Weekend: Ebo Taylor w/ Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad

Ebo Taylor puts his own spin on Afrobeat with "Kusi Na Sibo." Catch Ebo w/ Pat Thomas at the Concert Hall on April 13. 

Ghanaian Afro-funk legends Ebo Taylor & Pat Thomas play The Phoenix, Oct 31

Ghanaian great Ebo Taylor is featured on the new Jazz Is Dead 021 LP. Don't miss his Toronto show w/ Pat Thomas in October.

Jazz Is Dead 021 comp features Ebo Taylor, Dom Salvador, Joyce and more

With the forthcoming Jazz Is Dead 021 compilation (due October 4th), Adrian Younge's Jazz Is Dead label is previewing their Series 3 selection of new albums by Ebo Taylor, Hyldon, Dom Salvador, Antonio Carlos e Jocafi, Carlos Dafé, Joyce e Tutty Moreno and The Midnight Hour, produced by label founders Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. 

Essentially, the Jazz Is Dead 021 album is a selection of unreleased songs from Jazz Is Dead Series 3 and more. This will be a very limited offering. Once the initial pressing of 1,000 units of black vinyl and 1,000 units of color vinyl are sold out, they will go out of print. Expect international tours and other limited memorabilia to accompany each individual release within Series 3. 

Hear the first single "Obi da Woa (If Someone Likes You)" by Ebo Taylor, Adrian Younge (Kendrick Lamar, Ghostface Killah, The Delfonics) and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (founding member of A Tribe Called Quest). Opening with a triumphant horn line paying homage to his timeless classic “Love and Death,” the 88-year-old Ghanaian Afrobeat legend Ebo Taylor partners with Jazz Is Dead co-founders Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad to create the track “Obi do Woa (If Someone Loves You).”  With a massive explosion of analog synths, funky horns and gritty percussion, Ebo’s voice pierces with undeniable force making this track the perfect introduction to the long-awaited Jazz Is Dead Series 3. Check it out: 

Hailing from Ghana, Ebo Taylor is the pioneer of Highlife and co-founder of Afrobeat alongside his former college roommate Fela Kuti. At 88 years of ago, Ebo Taylor, traveled to the US for the very first time to perform at the now iconic, Jazz Is Dead Concert Series, selling out venues across the country. It was during this time he recorded a psychedelic Afrobeat album alongside Jazz Is Dead producers Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad. The swirling horns and gritty guitars are reminiscent of his seminal seventies recordings that made him one of Africa’s (and the worlds) most prolific and revolutionary artists. 

This October, Ebo Taylor embarks on a historic tour across the Americas, accompanied by The Ebo Taylor Family Band and his protégé, Pat Thomas. For the first time ever, Ebo will bring his legendary sound to stages in Mexico and Brazil. These performances also mark the debut of Jazz Is Dead concerts on both Mexican and Brazilian soil. They'll play a rare Toronto show at The Phoenix Concert Theatre on October 31. Tickets are $42.50 – get 'em right here.

Jazz Is Dead announces another offering of top-shelf recordings taking listeners on a journey through the funky sounds of Ghana all the way to down to the psychedelic soul and samba of Brazil. Produced by label founders Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Jazz Is Dead Series 3 features new analog recordings from living legends Ebo Taylor, Hyldon, Dom Salvador, Antonio Carlos e Jocafi, Carlos Dafé, Joyce e Tutty Moreno as well as an unreleased LP from The Midnight Hour: Lost Tapes.

For Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, collaborating with music icons and personal heroes is a dream come true. As Younge notes, “with Series 1, our first 10 LPs, we established the sonic foundation of the Jazz Is Dead label. It’s that experimental jazz/funk that we would always search for while digging through records. With Series 2, we expanded upon this approach spending more time with our ideas and the nuances of our sound. But with Series 3, we hit a new level we never thought we could attain with the legends. The tears, the laughs and the disbelief at what we’ve accomplished is astounding. For some of these artists, these albums can be viewed as some of their best recordings to date proving that they still have a lot to say.”

In 1970s Brazil, the Black Rio Movement redefined what soul music meant for black pride in Rio de Janeiro (and Brazil). Afro-Brazilians came together and developed a funk and dance scene that challenged Brazil’s military dictatorship and the systemic racism that plagued their people. Dom Salvador, Hyldon and Carlos Dafé were all instrumental in establishing the voice of Black Rio. It was during Jazz Is Dead's concert series with these maestros that they were able to identify the through line connecting each of their individual stories to the seminal Black Rio Movement.

From Brazilian jazz to samba funk, Dom Salvador is the grand master of the Black Rio movement who later became the musical director for Harry Belafonte. Salvador is one of Brazil’s most recorded pianists and producers with over 1000 recordings to his credit. On his forthcoming release with Jazz Is Dead, producers Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad highlight Salvador’s unique fusion of jazz, funk and samba.

Hyldon is recognized worldwide as a torchbearer of Brazil’s psychedelic soul. In the 1970’s, Hyldon worked with Jazz Is Dead alumni Azymuth, to produce some of Brazil’s most coveted albums. On his forthcoming release with Jazz Is Dead, Adrian Younge partners with Hyldon to create a new album that echoes the sentiments of his 1975 classic “Na Rua, Na Chuva, Na Fazenda.” In addition, this new album is one of the last recordings of the late Ivan “Mamão” Conti, drummer of Azymuth.

With his sultry voice, Carlos Dafé is notoriously known as Brazil’s Prince of Soul. He is also a voice heard on Arthur Verocai’s holy grail self-titled, debut album. On his forthcoming Jazz Is Dead release, Dafé meets Adrian Younge’s world of psychedelic and orchestral soul: a perfect harmony reminiscent of the Brazilian greats Tim Maia and Cassiano.

Antonio Carlos e Jocafi made some of the sweetest samba-soul of the 1970s by way of Salvador, Bahia. The duo emerged out of Brazil’s competitive music festivals mixing funky grooves, acid-rock guitars and sophisticated harmonies. Nearly 50 years after their initial release, Jazz Is Dead brought the pair to perform in the US for their very first time. It was during this trip they recorded their forthcoming Jazz Is Dead album in collaboration with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Together they created a delightful, anthemic album mirroring their classic Bahian sound.

The dynamic voice of singer/composer Joyce combined with the syncopated rhythms of her husband, the legendary drummer Tutty Moreno, forged a new trajectory in Brazilian music. This sound also inspired the acid jazz movement of the 1990s when DJs like Gilles Peterson discovered classic hits such as “Feminina” and “Aldeia De Ogum”. Jazz Is Dead brought the couple to Los Angeles to perform a special concert and record a new album. With Adrian Younge’s beautiful string arrangements and Joyce and Tutty’s experimental samba-jazz, their synergy reverberates on the forthcoming Jazz Is Dead album.

In 2016, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad came together to create a new group, The Midnight Hour. With the fusion of hip hop, jazz and breaks the album continues the conversations started by yesterday’s jazz and funk pioneers; those that created the bedrock of samples for hip hop’s golden era. On their forthcoming Jazz Is Dead album, The Midnight Hour: Lost Tapes, Younge and Muhammad dig deep into their vault of analog tapes to share music previously unreleased. 

Watch a performance by Ebo Taylor from 2014...

R.I.P. jazz pianist/composer Les McCann, 1935-2023

Sadly, pianist Les McCann has passed away. He'll be greatly missed. Here are a few interviews and performances worth checking.

Get a copy of Les McCann's photo book, Invitation To Openness right here. 

Allen Ginsberg's personal archive revealed in new book, Material Wealth

Material Wealth, compiled by Pat Thomas, offers a peek at the many photos (that's Robert Frank), flyers, postcards and other items collected by Allen Ginsberg.  

Here's the scoop...

A prolific poet, raconteur, activist, and thinker, Allen Ginsberg was also a prolific collector, meticulously saving letters, postcards, draft notes and manuscripts, photographs and snapshots, appearance bills and rally broadsheets, not only featuring him personally, but also his fellow poets, singers, lovers, writers, journey companions, friends, and agitators. Gathered here publicly for the first time is his personal archive of events and experiences documenting his life as a young man, breakaway poet, expansive spirit, curious intellectual traveler, and relentless enthusiast of the provocative and the profane.

There are hundreds of thousands of items carefully stored and archived at Stanford University’s Allen Ginsberg collection. Counterculture historian Pat Thomas, with the full cooperation of the Allen Ginsberg Estate's Peter Hale, has compiled and annotated a remarkable volume of material, unearthing in the process one astounding find after another. 

The result is a tome of previously unpublished historical paperwork and vintage graphics and photographs and ephemera that promises an unprecedented look inside one of the most prolific poets and agitators of cultural mores of the 20th century.

A poster for Patti Smith’s first-ever poetry reading. Correspondence from Allen’s stint as literary agent for William S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. Yippie manifestos from Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and John Sinclair of the MC5. A ticket for a 1974 concert by Bob Dylan & The Band (with Yoko Ono’s phone number scribbled on the back). 

Posters documenting early Beat Generation readings in 1950s San Francisco as well as later ones capturing the 1960s Haight-Ashbury Hippie era.

Allen’s own remarkable journey is here, too: agreements for BBC Radio appearances, schedules of lecture tours, notes for his iconic Kaddish poem. A parody of Howl as ‘Towel’ by Terry Southern. Obsessive letters from fans he never met.

Though this project is so much more than a book of Allen’s photography, the featured images can’t go unmentioned: Allen’s lens finds not only Kerouac, Corso, Burroughs, and other Beats, but also Lou Reed, Van Morrison, Philip Glass, Norman Mailer, Marianne Faithful, Anne Waldman, Iggy Pop, Don Cherry, Robert Frank, and Patti Smith. You’ll find he often scribbled his affection for the subject right on the photo itself.

Packed with ephemera you’ve never seen, Material Wealth is a smorgasbord of things that most of us would have tossed away decades ago: notes to oneself, accounting statements, letters of intent, fan and media crushes, criticisms and critiques, posters of events now considered historical and cultural canon, political manifestos, et al.

These are just a few of the most intriguing items folded between the pages of the one Ginsberg book that has never been—and needed to be done: a visual annotated compendium that reveals one of the unparalleled minds of his generation.

Get a copy of Material Wealth – Mining The Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg by Pat Thomas, published by powerHouse Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster right here. 

That time Ghana's Pat Thomas went electro-boogie in 1980

Ghana's Pat Thomas opened the new decade with two whumpin' disco high life jams on the second side of his 1980 album.

Mukatsuku recirculates 70s Ghanaian classics from Pat Thomas & Marijata

The UK-based Mukatsuku label is pressing up a limited-edition 7" single version of "Let's Think It Over" b/w "I Can Say" you can pre-order here.

Afro disco gems from Pat Thomas & Jon K recirculated by Soundway

Ghana ex-pats Jon K & Pat Thomas were living in London and Toronto respectively when "Asafo" and "Enye Woa" were cut circa 1988.

Mr. Bongo reissues rare Pat Thomas Introduces Marijata album

Here's the  album's best joint "Mother Africa" which wasn't issued on Strut's Pat Thomas comp "Coming Home"

Ghanaian great Pat Thomas finally gets a proper retrospective

Pat Thomas's Coming Home: Original Ghanaian Highlife & Afrobeat Classics 1967-81 is out now on Strut.

The U.K.-based Strut label has just released the first early career retrospective for Ghanaian highlife master Pat Thomas, covering the Golden Voice Of Africa's late ‘60s big band highlife recordings, funky '70s Afrobeat jams through to the disco hi-life movement of the early ‘80s. With the 65 year-old Thomas now dazzling audiences on the road in support of last year’s album with Kwishibu Area Band, the well-chosen Coming Home 2CD / 3LP collection offers an enlightening glimpse of Thomas’ exceptionally productive and incredibly influential career in Ghana prior to his arrival in Toronto during the 80s and inevitable resurgence.

Growing up with music around him (“my uncle, King Onyina, was an important highlife musician”), Thomas was inspired to become a singer after hearing vocalist Joss Aikins: “He sang with Broadway Dance Band and Decca in Ghana chose him to sing with any group that came into their studios.”

When a new incarnation of Broadway Dance Band was created in ‘67, led by Ebo Taylor, Thomas received his first big break. “Ebo started to write new songs. I added the lyrics and sang them and it worked very well. Ebo and I agreed on things at a very early stage. I understood him and where he was coming from with his music.”

The partnership with Taylor would become one of the enduring forces in Ghanaian music during the ‘70s, creating a fresh, progressive new highlife sound. They played together as The Blue Monks – regularly appearing Accra's popular Tip Toe Gardens nightclub – before forming Sweet Beans in '74 with the backing of Ghana’s Cocoa Marketing Board. Listen to "Merebre" off the False Lover album by Pat Thomas & The Sweet Beans.


The False Lover album for the Gapophone label established Thomas across Ghana. His backing band, The Sweet Beans – featuring bassist Anim Addo, drummer Kofi Addison, guitarist Bannerman Wood, keyboardist Bob Fician, percussionist J.N.K. Asiedu, trumpeter Lovis Hammond, saxophonists J.R. Arhin, Atta Kennedy, Korle Patrick and Conacov –  eventually disbanded but the musicians stayed together as Marijata. “The guys initially used Jewel Ackah as their vocalist but they involved me and I re-vocalled the album. This became the ‘Pat Thomas Introduces Marijata’ LP. At that time, I would go to George Prah at Gapophone to ask for money and he would say, ‘if you want me to pay you, go and write a song!’ So, tracks like ‘Coming Home’ came about that way, written on the spot.”

A second Marijata album followed before a damaging coup in Ghana in 1979. “Jerry Rawlings’ 'house-cleaning' was designed to stop corruption but it seriously damaged our country’s music culture. That's when the music died. Before that, there was so much music everywhere. It was so important and then the coup destroyed it all. Bars and venues closed everywhere because of the strict curfews.” Check out the scorching "I Need More" from 1977's Pat Thomas & Marijata album on Gapophone.


Thomas left for Berlin and stayed true to his highlife roots, becoming the first Ghanaian to record highlife there. “Guitarist George Darko was already there playing clubs with his band and I then began to work with some great Ghanaian highlife players who eventually became the Roots Anabo Band. There was Ekow Brown, Sammy Quist on guitar and a guy called Willie. We were put in a big studio, Audio-Tonstudio, where many big artists had recorded. We simply called the album 1980. George Darko played on it, Bob Fician came in on keyboards, Kologbo on rhythm guitar, Nat Osmasu on bass." Listen to the synth-tweaked dancefloor destroyer Yamona from the 1980 album below.


Thomas then travelled to Togo and London before heading to Canada where he spent much of the rest of the 80s living, teaching and performing in Toronto as part of the vibrant Queen West music scene. “A professor/doctor friend arranged for me to come over to Toronto. There was a band there who took me on. While I was flying in, looking at Toronto from the sky, I thought it looked so heavy! I had a sense that I was going to live in this city and I end up there on and off for 10 years.  I taught percussion privately there, played for universities, Ghanaian societies and a WOMAD Festival. The band and I also landed a one-year contract at The BamBoo nightclub in the city.”

Pat is now back in Ghana, recording and touring worldwide with Kwashibu Area Band, a project put together by talented young musicians Kwame Yeboah and Ben Abarbanel Wolff. Explains Thomas, “Highlife is part of Ghana's musical DNA but, what people like Ebo Taylor and I did was to make it fresh and modernize it, make it more relevant to our day and more funky. We took the great Kwa music of Kumasi and other local styles and added Western elements with new horn arrangements, vocals, guitar and other developments. Since then, highlife has become the world's music and I am proud to still bring it to audiences wherever we play." Check out the horn-hyped "We Are Coming Home" from 1976's Stage Two album on Gapophone.