Ebo Taylor & Pat Thomas (Uhuru Yenzu) - Nsamanfo [1981] Full Vinyl Album - Ghana Highlife & Soul

Ebo Taylor and Pat Thomas are two of the titans of highlife and are each, in individual ways, responsible for broadening the scope of what highlife was and could be.

Ebo Taylor is a composer and arranger par excellence who successfully introduced elements of rock, jazz, classical, and American funk into the arrangement of highlife music in the mid-70s and embraced big band horn-based highlife at a time when small scale guitar band highlife was king.

Pat Thomas, the man with the golden voice, was maybe the most in-demand vocalist in Ghana in the 70s. He was responsible for bringing a smoother, more Soul-inspired, “velvet” style of singing to highlife. Pat, maybe even more so than Ebo, with his run of excellent albums on G.A. Prah’s Gapophone Record Label, was responsible for bringing dance band style highlife back to popularity after it was eclipsed by guitar band highlife.

Pat Thomas and Ebo Taylor had a long and fruitful collaborative relationship, beginning with the Blue Monks Band, the house band for the Tip-Toe Garden club, in the early-70s all the way to the present day. This album, Nsamanfo - People's Highlife Vol.1, is one of their lesser known projects, having been released on a small Nigerian record label in 1981. Nevertheless it has all the elements of a great Pat Thomas - Ebo Taylor album: impeccable horn arrangements, sweet vocals, and eclectic but well-blended compositions. Some of the tracks, like Skin Pain (written by Kojo Donkoh) and Wofa Nono (written by, I believe, Dokyi Apenteng) are what would be called in Jazz, standards; the rest are Ebo Taylor originals.

A1 Skin Pain
A2 Beye Bu
A3 Mensu
A4 Isu A Murusu
B1 Wofa Nono
B2 Nsamanfo
B3 Eben Asem Na Om Dada
B4 Woma Mi Nzimabro