An Appreciation of Isaac Hayes: “Shaft”: Music from the Soundtrack
The carelessly easy soulfulness of this album shouldn’t distract you from the genius of its compositions and arrangements. Hayes’ creativity and imagination shows its full range here — from the ominous funk of the hit title track to the breezy Wes Montgomery-style jazz groove of “Cafe Regio’s.” The horn section is used to powerful effect, and it is seldomly in quite the way you would expect: the horns play the punctuating role of the keyboardist’s left hand, a flute takes the high notes on top of the brass section, or a single trumpet plays in unison with the low end of a guitar. The title track opened up the evocative possibilities for R&B music, something the Temptations would pick up on a year later with “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” Plus, eternal blessings to Hayes for making the wah-wah rhythm guitar and those 16th notes on the closed high-hat cymbal one of the iconic sounds of the ’70s. The sound is forever attached to its era, but it has lost none of its funkiness or drive 50 years later. You can listen to Shaft as the soundtrack to a badass movie. Or you can free yourself of that limiting context and hear it as a kind of Black Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, bursting with ambition, melodicism, imagination, range, and musicianship.
Pro-tip: if you ever see this album in a second-hand record store, take it to the counter, tell the clerk to play the near-seamless side four, and bet a dollar that someone will buy it right off the turntable. It’s worked for me twice.
(Originally published on the Arts Fuse, Feb. 20, 2021)
