Accra

Accra /əˈkrɑː/ is the capital and largest city of Ghana, with an estimated urban population of 2.27 million as of 2012. It is also the capital of the Greater Accra Region and of the Accra Metropolitan District, with which it is coterminous. Accra is furthermore the anchor of a larger metropolitan area, the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), which is inhabited by about 4 million people, making it the second-largest metropolitan conglomeration in Ghana by population, and the eleventh-largest metropolitan area in Africa.

Accra stretches along the Ghanaian Atlantic coast and extends north into Ghana's interior. Originally built around a port, it served as the capital of the British Gold Coast between 1877 and 1957. Once merely a 19th-century suburb of Victoriaborg, Accra has since transitioned into a modern metropolis; the city's architecture reflects this history, ranging from 19th-century architecture buildings to modern skyscrapers and apartment blocks.

Accra serves as the Greater Accra region's economic and administrative hub. It is furthermore a centre of a wide range of nightclubs, restaurants, and hotels. Since the early 1990s, a number of new buildings have been built, including the multi-storey French-owned Novotel hotel. The city's National Theatre was built with Chinese assistance. In 2010, the Globalization and World Cities Research Network designated Accra a Gamma-minus-level world city, indicating a growing level of international influence and connectedness.

Ghana

Coordinates: 8°N 2°W / 8°N 2°W / 8; -2

Ghana (ⁱ/ˈɡɑːnə/), officially called the Republic of Ghana, is a sovereign unitary presidential constitutional democracy, located along the Gulf of Guinea and Atlantic Ocean, in the subregion of West Africa. Spanning a land mass of 238,535 km², Ghana is bordered by the Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, Togo in the east and the Gulf of Guinea and Atlantic Ocean in the south. The word Ghana means "Warrior King" in Mande.

The territory of present-day Ghana has been inhabited for millennia, with the first permanent state dating back to the 11th century. Numerous kingdoms and empires emerged over the centuries, of which the most powerful was the Kingdom of Ashanti. Beginning in the 15th century, numerous European powers contested the area for trading rights, with the British ultimately establishing control of the coast by the late 19th century. Following over a century of native resistance, Ghana's current borders were established by the 1900s as the British Gold Coast. In 1957, it became the first sub-saharan African nation to declare independence from European colonisation.

Ebo Taylor

Ebo Taylor (born 1936) is a Ghanaian guitarist, composer, arranger, bandleader, and producer, focusing on highlife-style music. Highlife is characterised by jazzy horns and multiple guitars which lead the band.

Career

Born in 1936, guitarist, composer, arranger, bandleader, and producer Ebo Taylor has been a vital figure on the Ghanaian music scene for over six decades. In the late '50s he was active in the influential Highlife bands the Stargazers and the Broadway Dance Band, and in 1962 he took his own group, the Black Star Highlife Band, to London, which led to collaborations with Fela Kuti and other African musicians in Britain at the time. Returning to Ghana, he worked as a producer, crafting recordings for Pat Thomas, C.K. Mann, and others, as well as exploring his own projects, combining traditional Ghanaian material with Afro-beat, jazz, and funk rhythms to create his own recognizable sound in the '70s. "Taylor's work became popular internationally with hip-hop producers in the 21st century, which led to the release of Love and Death on Strut Records in 2010, his first internationally distributed album." Its success prompted Strut to issue the retrospective Life Stories: Highlife & Afrobeat Classics 1973-1980, in the spring of 2011. A year later, in 2012, a third Strut album, the deeply personal Appia Kwa Bridge, appeared, and showed that at 77, Taylor was still intensely creative and focused, mixing traditional Fante songs and chants with children's rhymes and personal matters into his own sharp vision of highlife.