Consumer Guide Album

Pat Thomas: Coming Home [Strut, 2016]
This minor highlife legend doesn't sport as colorful a name as his sweeter bandmate Jewel Ackah or his grittier rival A.B. Crentsil--an enterprising subgenius, that's all. So after Ghana's economy went blooey in the early '80s, he relocated to Germany and spent quality time in Canada too, which left him with a two-CD cherry-pick documenting a syncretic shouter-crooner-moaner who does what pop pros do--cultivate collaborators, find tunes, and turn the beat around. Riding the rhythmic and presentational developments, tendencies, and fads of a stylistic catchall that's signified many things over many decades, he put his name on a whole bunch of terrific highlife singles, most of them in English. If one at the beginning and one at the end are credited to Broadway Dance Band and Super Sounds Namba, respectively, that's because band politics are a piece of the pop pro puzzle too. A−