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Ghana

Accra funk, forgotten then found

Rob

Robert Roy Reindorf, who performed simply as Rob, was largely self-taught on piano and drew on Ray Charles and Otis Redding records as well as the Beninese bandleaders of Orchestre Poly-Rythmo. His 1977 album Funky Rob Way, recorded in Accra for the Essiebons label, put that funk and soul straight onto West African highlife, with organ, wah-wah guitar and horns. It sold almost nothing at the time. Rob left music for decades, working as an insecticide distributor and later running restaurants, while original copies of the album turned into prized collector's items. Producers including J Dilla and Madlib sampled him without ever tracking him down. It took reissues by Soundway, Analog Africa and Mr Bongo to do what the original release couldn't.

An electronic pioneer from Niger

Mamman Sani

Mamman Sani Abdoulaye is usually described as Nigerien, not Ghanaian, a pioneer of West African electronic music working from Niamey, Niger. He ends up here by way of his career rather than his birthplace. While working as an English teacher and later as a UNESCO functionary, he acquired a secondhand electronic organ from a Rwandan delegate at a UNESCO meeting, reportedly one of the first in the country. In 1978, at Niger's national radio studio, he recorded a whole album, La Musique Électronique du Niger, more or less in two takes. Only around a hundred cassette copies were made. The recording sat almost unheard for thirty-five years, until American archivist Christopher Kirkley reissued it in 2013 and brought Sani's spare, folk-rooted electronic melodies to a wholly new audience.

Raw Ghanaian funk, one LP, 1976

Marijata

Marijata released just one album, This Is Marijata, in 1976 on the small Ghanaian label Gapophone. It was recorded at the Ghana Film Industry Corporation studios: four tracks of rootsy, driving funk that stood apart from the slicker dance-band sound most Ghanaian labels favored then. Little of the trio's own history survives beyond the record itself, and who they were before or after the session isn't well documented anywhere. The album's afterlife is a different story. Original pressings now count among the most sought-after Ghanaian funk records on the collector market, and reissues on Academy and Mr Bongo have kept it in circulation for a new generation of crate-diggers.

Highlife's arranger, gone at 90

Ebo Taylor

Ebo Taylor started on piano at six in Cape Coast, and by the late 1950s he was playing in Ghana's leading highlife bands. In 1965 he became house guitarist, arranger and producer for the Essiebons label, working behind the scenes on records by Pat Thomas, C.K. Mann and the Apagya Show Band he fronted. In London in the early 1960s he became friends with a young Fela Kuti, and the two jammed together and studied jazz records side by side. Taylor later said it was Fela who pushed him to stop playing other people's jazz and write from his own tradition. He kept recording into his eighties, got sampled by Usher along the way, and died in February 2026 at ninety, a month after his own namesake festival launched in Ghana.

A cassette found in Cape Coast

Ata Kak

In 1994 Yaw Atta-Owusu, a drummer from Kumasi living in Toronto, recorded an album called Obaa Sima at home, rapping and singing in Twi over a secondhand drum machine. His brother duplicated about fifty cassette copies. Almost none of them sold. In 2002 an American student named Brian Shimkovitz bought one off a street vendor's cart in Cape Coast, Ghana, drawn by the cover art. He didn't actually listen to it for years, but once he did, it became the founding post of his blog Awesome Tapes From Africa. Finding the artist took another decade of dead ends. Then a chance Facebook post in 2014 connected Shimkovitz to Ata Kak's own son, and within days to Ata Kak himself, who was astonished to learn he had fans across the world.

The Collection