Isaac Hayes: Shaft (2LP, soundtrack) [CONCORD JAZZ]

Why you'll love it

Craft's 2LP set remasters Shaft on 180g vinyl. It's the best-selling LP ever on a Stax label, and in 2014 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

This edition

• 2LP set
• 180g vinyl
• Remastered

About the album

Isaac Hayes signed on to Shaft hoping director Gordon Parks would cast him as the private detective himself. He hadn't heard that Richard Roundtree already had the part. Parks sent him raw footage instead, and Hayes wrote three pieces to fit it: the opening theme, "Soulsville" for Shaft's walk through Harlem, and "Ellie's Love Theme" for the love scene.

MGM liked them enough to hand him the whole score, which he wrote between tour dates over two months. He cut the rhythm tracks with the Bar-Kays in a single day, the orchestra the next and the vocals the day after, then re-recorded the lot at Stax Studios for a richer sound than MGM's three-track setup could give. "Theme from Shaft" is that wah-wah guitar, those hi-hats and that famous spoken-word call and response, "Do Your Thing" stretches out into a long, smouldering groove, "Soulsville" aches, and "Bumpy's Lament" and "Cafe Regio's" show what a gifted arranger of horns and strings he was.

It was the first double album of original studio material by an R&B artist, and it went to No. 1. Hayes did get a cameo in the film, and then an Academy Award for the theme, which, as consolation prizes go, is hard to beat.

Also at Kops: more Isaac Hayes on vinyl · browse 70s Soul On Up

Tracklist

Listen

On Enterprise / Stax / Craft Recordings, a reissue of the 1971 soundtrack.