Ebo Taylor has been a force in West African music since the 1960s as a guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and producer, though often an unheralded one.

The Ghanaian musician helped popularize highlife, a dance music that emerged in the first part of the 20th century, blending local rhythms and musical traditions with Western instrumentation and melodies. Taylor was tight with Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and released an impressive run of albums in the 1970s and early ‘80s, then largely retreated for more than 20 years to work on others’ albums and teach music at the University of Ghana. In 2010, he reemerged with a moody, bracing album called “Love and Death” that helped introduce him to a new generation of record collectors, as well as DJs and producers who sampled his work in songs by Usher, the Black Eyed Peas, Vic Mensa and more.

“I found out who Ebo was buying compilation records with his songs on them,” said Adrian Younge, an American producer and a founder of the label Jazz Is Dead. “Then I started to tie all the dots together. He’s a legend that was making music at the same time as Fela, but people in the U.S. don’t really know about Ebo.”

Younge, a prolific multi-instrumentalist, DJ, songwriter and producer who has worked with Kendrick Lamar, the Wu-Tang Clan and the Delfonics, started Jazz is Dead in 2017 with Ali Shaheed Muhammad, a similarly rangy musical polymath who is also a member of A Tribe Called Quest, and two other music industry veterans. The company, which produces live events and documentaries as well as studio albums, mostly focuses on older jazz, soul and world music artists. On Jan. 31, it will release “Ebo Taylor JID022,” the first album in seven years by Taylor, who is now 90.

On an overcast Ghana day in mid-November, Taylor appeared on a video chat, sitting on the patio of his home in Saltpond, a small city on the country’s Atlantic coast, alongside his son and bandleader, Henry Taylor. Ebo Taylor was wearing a maroon T-shirt over his thin, wiry frame, and a gray baseball hat with “New York” emblazoned on it. After initially declaring, “I’m good. Ready to go!” he fell silent for the duration for the 30-minute call, allowing his son to do all the talking.

In 2018, Taylor had a stroke, and although he can still sing, his ability to communicate in English has diminished considerably. That made the collaboration with Younge and Muhammad tricky.

“Most of my talking in the studio was with Henry,” Younge said from his Linear Labs studio in Los Angeles, where the album was recorded. “Ebo speaks directly with Henry, so Henry is the spokesperson for him.”

Henry Taylor first began playing with his father in 1996, when he was 17. “We’ve worked together for so long that I really understand Ebo’s rhythm, and he has trust in me,” he said. “I can stand in for him. What I was doing at the studio, I was trained for that.”

Jazz Is Dead initially brought Ebo Taylor to the United States in 2022 for his very first American shows. Singer and actress Janelle Monáe was among those who attended his concert in Los Angeles at Lodge Room that year. She’d first been turned on to Taylor by Ghanaian producer Nana Kwabena, who worked on Monáe’s 2023 album, “The Age of Pleasure.”

“‘Love and Death’ was the first song I heard, and I was floored,” Monáe wrote in an email. “It’s one of my favorite songs ever made. It scares me and yet articulates a feeling I have but couldn’t quite express.” Monáe said she cried and danced at the show in Los Angeles. “Seeing Ebo perform at this stage in his life deeply touched me. I felt like I was watching a mystic time traveler who had a lot to tell us about life.”

Taylor’s 2022 shows went so well that Younge proposed recording immediately after the short run of dates concluded. “To see how people responded, I got excited like, ‘What if we recorded a new album with Ebo on analog tape with real instruments and did something sonically that was raw but looking back at yesterday for tomorrow?’” he recalled.

Taylor is often credited with incorporating advanced jazz chords and deep funk rhythms into traditional highlife music, but these days, he can no longer play guitar — as Henry Taylor put it, “All his fingers won’t comply” — and his voice, once a sweet, mellifluous instrument, is raspy and labored. Rather than try to hide the musician’s new reality with production tricks, Younge and Muhammad leaned into it.

“I wanted to attack this the same way Ebo might’ve attacked this in his 20s,” Younge said. “Seeing him onstage, there was a very particular charm I got from his vocals, a bravado, something very unique. I wanted to own that. It’s that punk rock approach versus the smooth jazz way of doing records from older people. Ebo’s voice wasn’t anything to shy away from. It was the absolute center point.”

On the lively opening track, “Get Up,” Taylor’s deep, haunting vocals cut through a frenetic swirl of horns, synths, guitars and skittering beats. Amid the swaggering bass lines and stuttering guitar riffs that underpin “Kusi Na Sibo” and the hypnotic “Nsa a W’oanye Edwuma, Ondzidzi,” Taylor sings as if offering an ancient incantation. In other spots, the gravelly, guttural tones in his voice feel like a dynamic counterpoint to airy melodies and buoyant rhythms, regardless of whether he’s singing in English, as he still does occasionally, or in his native Fante dialect of Akan.

Although the album is saturated in many of the signatures that have marked Taylor’s music going back more than half a century, it’s less an exercise in retro revivalism than the latest salvo in a long-running, trans-Atlantic musical conversation. John Collins, a musician and musicologist at the University of Ghana where he and Taylor used to work together, said highlife developed in what was then known as the Gold Coast during the early 1900s in part by incorporating Caribbean melodies and rhythms brought by Jamaican and Trinidadian soldiers in the British colonial army who were stationed there during the Ashanti Wars in the late 19th century.

These soldiers “brought early forms of calypso music,” Collins said. “A couple of the oldest standard highlife songs in Ghana are, in fact, Caribbean melodies.”

This influence moves in both directions, spanning centuries

. It was West African rhythms and melodies that came over on slave ships that helped birth not just calypso, but American blues, jazz and later, R&B and rock. “The West Africans are fascinated by Black American rhythms,” Collins said. “They copy them, then transmute them into something else.” As Taylor himself put it in a 2018 interview, “I feel like I’m still playing jazz but with Ghanaian rhythms. There are American influences in my music but there’s African culture behind it.”

Taylor’s music was profoundly affected by American jazz and soul, particularly artists like James Brown and Miles Davis, so to work with Younge and Muhammad, who are steeped in these same influences, feels like a natural evolution.

“When you hear the album, you’re listening to these cultures coming together that have studied each other for decades,” Younge said.

Both Younge and Muhammad brought sketches of songs into the studio, and then the band — which included both Ghanaian musicians who are part of Taylor’s touring band, and session players with whom Younge and Muhammad had worked with before — built out the arrangements. Taylor wrote the lyrics and vocal melodies, while guiding the creative decisions, often with little more than a head nod.

“It’s a lot of trust because we don’t speak the language,” Muhammad said. “He understands everything being said. With some older musicians, people mistake their quiet as they’re not as connected to what’s going on. Ebo’s so connected. He’s not saying a lot but then when he commits to it, you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s been absorbing everything.’”

As Henry Taylor put it: “Everything comes from Ebo. There are certain things he couldn’t do because he’s old, but he’s still Ebo Taylor. He knows what he’s doing.”