Craft Recordings is excited to announce a
new deluxe reissue of Isaac Hayes’ GRAMMY® Award–winning album Shaft. Set for a
June 14th street date and limited to 5,000 copies worldwide, the two-CD
collection will offer the newly remastered, classic soundtrack—as originally
released in 1971—plus all of the original music from the film, which did not
appear on the best-selling LP. In-depth liner notes from Ahmir “Questlove”
Thompson round out the set. A single-disc version consisting of only the
remastered soundtrack will also be available.
Unbeknownst to many, the music from the Shaft soundtrack
album and the film were actually not the same. When Isaac Hayes was tapped to
score the film’s music, he was at the height of his success as a solo artist,
following years as a hit songwriter and producer at Stax. Hayes composed a
collection of funky, moody arrangements for the Gordon Parks–directed action
film, which told the story of a black detective in Harlem hired to recover the
kidnapped daughter of a mob boss. For two months, in between tour dates, the
musician recorded the iconic “Theme From Shaft,” “Do Your Thing,” and a wealth
of instrumentals at MGM Studios in Culver City, CA. Hayes then returned to
Memphis, and the familiar confines of the Stax studios, to re-record much of
the music from the film for the soundtrack album. It would be those later
recordings that would be released in 1971 as Music From The Soundtrack. The
music heard in the film wouldn’t see the light of day in any form until 2008,
when it was released as part of a limited-edition box set. It’s taken nearly 50
years, but finally both the music from the film and the now-classic recordings
from the soundtrack can be heard together for the very first time. In his liner
notes, Questlove praises that “Hayes was a specialist at mood music, in the
sense that he knew how to employ orchestration and tempo to elicit emotions
from his listening audience. ‘Bumpy’s Lament’ is sad and contemplative, a
perfect match for Gunn’s gangster, worried about the fate of his daughter.
‘Walk to Regio’s’ approximates downtown energy with a pulsing bass and a
chirping guitar that opens up into a fully orchestrated section. ‘Do Your
Thing’ is another straightforward song, brassy and sultry.”
Both a commercial and critical success, Shaft—Music From The
Soundtrack remains Isaac Hayes’ best-known and best-selling album. The
groundbreaking title—which, upon its release, was already setting a record as
the very first double album of original studio material from an R&B
artist—became an instant success. Shaft spent 60 weeks on the Billboard 200
chart, peaking at Number One, while “Theme From Shaft” went to Number One on
the Hot 100 singles chart. Hayes took home three GRAMMY® Awards for the album
and its songs in 1972, and an Academy Award® for “Best Original Song” for
“Theme From Shaft,” becoming the first African American to win an Oscar® in a
non-acting category. In 2014, Shaft—Music From The Soundtrack was inducted into
the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being
“culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Singer, songwriter, producer, and actor Isaac Hayes
revolutionized soul music, leading it out of the era of the three-minute single
and into cosmically new territory. Born outside of Memphis, Hayes began his
career in the mid-’60s as a session keyboardist at Stax, where he worked with
some of R&B’s biggest names at the time—from Otis Redding and Booker T.
& the M.G.’s to The Bar-Kays and Rufus Thomas. Hayes would soon move into
producing, as well as songwriting, where he would pen some 200 songs with David
Porter, including hits for Johnnie Taylor, Carla Thomas, and, perhaps most
famously, Sam & Dave. With songs like "Soul Man" and “Hold On!
I’m Comin’,” Hayes and Porter would help shape the “Memphis Sound” that made
Stax a soul powerhouse.
Hayes’ career as a solo artist took off in 1969 with his
landmark sophomore album, Hot Buttered Soul. The LP was unlike anything that
fans of the genre had heard before; with the singer’s husky, baritone rapping
and intimate crooning set against a massive backdrop of strings and horns from
the Memphis Symphony and a solid backbeat by the Bar-Kays. Tracks included a
nearly 19-minute performance of Jim Webb’s “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” and a
12-minute rendition of the Burt Bacharach / Hal David classic “Walk On By.” He
would follow with The Isaac Hayes Movement and …To Be Continued in 1970, and
Black Moses in 1971. By the time that Shaft had hit movie theaters, Hayes had
established himself as a revolutionary musical force. Throughout the ’70s and
’80s, the artist would continue to be endlessly prolific in the studio, while
also acting regularly in film and TV roles. In 2002, Hayes was inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2005, he was inducted into the
Songwriter’s Hall of Fame. Hayes passed away in 2008.
As Hollywood gears up for a reboot of Shaft this June, the
original film’s enduring legacy still remains. In his liner notes, Questlove
declares that the movie “was the Big Bang of African American movies. . . . It
was Year Zero for the [Blaxploitation] movement. It was the blast center.”
While Shaft was revolutionary in its own right, Isaac Hayes’ compositions for
the film helped set the stage for countless scores to follow. Questlove
elaborates, “Shaft did many things. What it did, most of all, was cement the
relationship between African American movies and African American music. Every
Blaxploitation film that followed, whether it was a straight crime story, a
feminist rewrite, a comedy, or even a horror movie, had an accompanying
soundtrack by an artist trying to put the black experience on wax.”
