The first organ notes of “Get Up” do more than begin an album. They open a door between generations, continents, and methods of making records. Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad built Jazz Is Dead around encounters with musicians whose work had already traveled far beyond its original audience, often through reissues, record collectors, DJs, and sampling. Ebo Taylor’s music had been circulating through all of those routes for decades, but this collaboration does not treat him as a source to be excavated or a master recording to be sampled. At eighty-eight, he enters the studio as the living center of a new ensemble. His voice is rougher and more weathered than on his celebrated Ghanaian recordings of the 1970s, but age has not reduced its authority. When Taylor sings, the band rearranges itself around him. The horns answer, the backing singers reinforce his phrases, the rhythm section gathers momentum, and the entire production begins to feel less like a reconstruction of classic highlife than a fresh social space created for his voice.
That distinction matters because Younge’s fascination with vintage recording techniques can easily be misunderstood as nostalgia. JID022 was recorded to analog tape at Linear Labs in Los Angeles, using the warm organs, electric pianos, fuzzy guitars, dry percussion, and tightly arranged horns associated with earlier West African funk and highlife records. Yet the production does not merely apply artificial dust to a modern session. Younge and Muhammad understand that the power of Taylor’s older music came from relationships between instruments rather than from surface age. The drums, congas, bass, guitars, Fender Rhodes, organ, flute, saxophones, trombone, trumpet, and voices occupy an interconnected rhythmic system. No instrument sits still for long enough to become ornamental. A guitar figure pushes against the percussion, a horn phrase redirects the vocal line, and a keyboard pattern supplies both harmony and movement. The analog sound is valuable because it binds those actions together, not because old equipment automatically creates authenticity.
“Get Up” establishes the album’s communal language with an organ pulse that seems to lift the other instruments from the floor. Taylor’s command arrives through timing rather than vocal perfection. His phrases stretch, crack, and lean into the groove, carrying the expressive grain of a body that has lived alongside this music for most of a century. The backing singers do not conceal that age. Their brightness frames it, creating a dialogue between accumulated experience and collective renewal. Horns enter from several directions, with baritone saxophones giving the arrangement weight while flute, alto saxophone, trombone, and trumpet create a more airborne counterforce. The music is dense but never clogged. Each part is short, exact, and rhythmically alert, leaving openings through which another musician can answer.
The album’s seven songs are unusually concise for music connected to Afrobeat, a form often associated with long-duration development. Most end before four minutes, but they feel larger because their arrangements contain so many simultaneous pathways. “Obra Akyedzi” moves with tremendous economy, compressing guitars, percussion, Rhodes, bass, horns, and call-and-response vocals into a groove that never wastes a gesture. Taylor’s singing rises above the ensemble without becoming disconnected from it. He sounds like a bandleader inside the rhythm rather than a featured vocalist placed over a completed backing track. “Kusi Na Sibo” slows the emotional temperature without losing movement. Its lesson of gratitude is carried through a darker, more patient pocket, with Taylor’s voice settling into the instrumental weave as though the words have been tested repeatedly against life.
Taylor’s son Henry is essential throughout the record. He plays Fender Rhodes on every track, shares the writing credits, contributes background vocals, and served as a crucial bridge during the sessions. Following Ebo Taylor’s 2018 stroke, communication in English had become difficult and he could no longer play guitar, the instrument through which he had shaped so much Ghanaian popular music. JID022 never attempts to disguise those realities. Instead, it creates a new working arrangement around them. Henry’s presence allows family continuity to become part of the album’s actual construction rather than a sentimental footnote. The father’s musical language is not preserved in isolation. It continues through conversation, translation, shared composition, and the physical presence of another Taylor at the electric piano.
“Obi Do Woa (If Someone Loves You)” may be the album’s most immediately affectionate piece. Its horn entrance carries ceremony, but the song quickly settles into a lighter, swaying movement. Taylor’s elongated syllables pull against the carefully drilled ensemble, introducing human elasticity into the arrangement. The musicians are precise, yet his delivery refuses mechanical neatness. This tension appears throughout JID022: the band creates a disciplined frame while Taylor bends time inside it. On “Nsa a W’oanye Edwuma, Ondzidzi,” the longest track, that relationship becomes more spacious and psychedelic. Layered voices and curling instrumental lines surround a performance whose gravity comes from restraint. The groove does not need to shout because its parts are locked together deeply enough to generate pressure at a moderate volume.
Younge and Muhammad also avoid reducing Ghanaian highlife and Afrobeat to a generalized “African” sound. The percussion team includes Ghanaian musicians Philip Andy Biney, Samson Olawe, and Emmanuel Ackone, while the backing-vocal ensemble brings additional Ghanaian presence into the Los Angeles studio. The result is not a solitary elder deposited among American revivalists. It is a mixed ensemble in which Ghanaian and American players collaborate under Taylor’s musical authority. Ali Shaheed Muhammad’s role is characteristically subtle. Listeners expecting the obvious fingerprints of A Tribe Called Quest will not find hip-hop drums pasted onto highlife. His bass, organ, guitar, and percussion contributions reveal the deeper continuity between his production history and this project: an understanding that a groove becomes powerful through placement, subtraction, and the relationship between repeating parts.
“Beye Bu, Beye Ba” brings the album especially close to the buoyancy of classic highlife. Its gentle two-step motion carries Taylor’s spiritual message about divine provision without turning the song into a heavy declaration. Faith is embedded in movement, reassurance, and the collective response of the singers. The arrangement seems to smile without becoming lightweight. This ability to hold instruction, pleasure, spirituality, and dance inside the same song is central to Taylor’s work. His music rarely treats joy as an escape from serious life. Joy is one of the ways life is understood, endured, and shared.
The closing “Feeling” removes some of the earlier density and leaves Taylor’s English-language refrain exposed within a softer arrangement. “Just look around you” becomes an invitation to awareness rather than a complicated philosophical claim. After an album rich with horns, rhythmic intersections, and historical resonance, the final message is almost startlingly direct. Taylor asks the listener to notice what is present. Rhodes, organ, bass, percussion, and winds support him without crowding the thought. The song ends in a state of openness, as though the record has not concluded so much as returned responsibility to the person hearing it.
Ebo Taylor died in February 2026, making JID022 his final album. That knowledge inevitably changes the emotional atmosphere surrounding it, but the record should not be reduced to a farewell. Nothing about these performances sounds like a ceremonial closing of accounts. Taylor is working, teaching, singing, adapting, and directing energy toward the future. Jazz Is Dead can sometimes appear to be a series built around overdue recognition, but its best releases do more than honor the past. They allow musicians to create something that did not previously exist. JID022 is valuable not because it makes Ebo Taylor young again or perfectly recreates 1970s Accra. It allows an elderly artist, his son, Ghanaian collaborators, and a Los Angeles ensemble to meet at the actual point each had reached. The record’s warmth comes from that honesty. Those who know the meanings and linguistic details of Taylor’s Akan lyrics, or who heard his American performances surrounding these sessions, are invited to add further depth to this extraordinary final chapter.
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