For most of the 1970s, Essilfie-Bondzie's Dix and Essiebons labels were synonymous with the best in modern highlife, and his roster included a who's who of highlife legends. C.K. Mann, Gyedu Blay Ambolley, Kofi Papa Yankson, Ernest Honny, Rob 'Roy' Raindorf and Ebo Taylor all released some of their best under the Essiebons banner.

But Essilfie-Bondzie was destined for a very different career. Born in Apam and raised in Accra, he was sent to business school in London at age 20, then returned to the security of a government job in Ghana. But his passion for music, inspired by the sounds of Accra's highlife scene, had never left him, and in 1967 he found a way to combine music and business by opening West Africa's first record pressing plant.

The venture, a partnership with the Philips label, was a huge success, attracting customers from across the continent. In the early 1970s, Essilfie-Bondzie quit his government job to focus on his labels, and by the mid-1970s he was on a roll, feeding album after album of restless highlife into the bloodstream of the Ghanaian music scene. Essiebon's special includes a selection of obscure tracks from some of the label's biggest hits.

But in the process of digitizing his vast archive of master tapes, Essilfie-Bondzie found a number of Afrobeat and instrumental Maszterpieces tracks from the label's golden age of the mid-'70s that, for one reason or another, had never been released. These songs are included here for the first time.