Shaft (1971)

Performer: Isaac Hayes                                        Writer: Isaac Hayes
Album US Chart Position: #1                                Label: Stax Records
Musicians: Isaac Hayes, Lester Snell, Charles Pitts, James Alexander and Willie Hall

I didn’t actually get around to purchasing Isaac Hayes’ masterpiece, the soundtrack to Shaft, until twenty-five years after it was first released. Which is not to say I wasn’t aware of it all through the seventies. A person would have had to be in a coma not to. We played the title number in the high school band, and I also had brilliant arrangement of the song performed by Maynard Ferguson’s big band on his M.F. Horn II album. Thinking back, it probably had to do with the culture where I grew up. While I was raised on Barry White and The O’Jays, The Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire, I was completely unconscious of sixties soul and the artists who made it, even if they continued to work into the seventies. Like the young girl in Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen,” I didn’t know that Aretha Franklin was the queen of soul until The Blues Brothers movie. And as corny as John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd might have seemed, they were directly responsible for leading me back to the music of Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Ike and Tina Turner, and the mother lode of all sixties soul music, Stax Records. Even then, however, I never got around to picking up Isaac Hayes’ first soundtrack album until much later. It’s not hyperbole to say that it was a life-changing experience.

Director Gordon Parks hired Isaac Hayes to write some music for his film and, while still in production, Hayes wrote “Soulsville,” the only full vocal performance on the soundtrack when Richard Roundtree as Shaft is walking through Harlem, “Ellie’s Love Theme,” a jazz-influenced tune that features the vibraphone, and the title track, “Theme from Shaft.” Impressed, Parks gave him the go ahead to score the entire film, which he did, in Los Angeles with the Bar-Kays rhythm section and members of his own band to back him up. And the music is exceptional. There are pithy little numbers, like “Shaft’s Cab Ride,” suspenseful cues like “Walk from Regio’s,” as well as beautifully soulful tunes like “Early Sunday Morning.” But the two most memorable tracks after the title song have to be the vibrant “Be Yourself,” with its aggressive sax solo by Harvey Henderson, and the nearly twenty minute tour de force, “Do Your Thing.” It starts out on a medium groove with a brief vocal by Hayes, and then gradually increases in tempo and intensity until the thing is practically rattling the speakers. Finally, the tape lurches forward until a record needle scratches the song to a jolting conclusion. But Hayes isn’t done, and wisely reprises the opening track without the vocals to bring the album to a satisfying close.

Not only did the album rocket to the number one slot on the charts in the summer of 1971, but it stayed on the album charts for over a year. In addition, the album won a number of Grammys as well as an Oscar for the title song, all of which were well deserved. But while I had loved the album, I had still never seen the film, and nothing prepared me for the shock when I watched it for the first time and realized that none of the music from the album was in the film. Oh, the songs were the same, but it turns out that they were hastily put together for the actual soundtrack in L.A. When the job was finished, however, Hayes and the rest of his musicians went back home to Memphis and he decided to record the music all over again, this time with the intention of making a great album. And he did exactly that. By comparison, the original soundtrack has been released recently and it contains some fascinating insights into the origins of the songs, as well as music that wasn’t used in the film. But the thing that stands out the most is how incredible the recording facilities were in Memphis at the Stax studio. There’s a depth and richness utterly lacking in the L.A. studio recordings, and so it makes sense that practically everything recorded at Stax was terrific. Isaac Hayes’ soundtrack to Shaft remains one of the all time great albums of the seventies and is every bit as powerful today as it was the day it was released.