Stax Records to Reissue Isaac Hayes’ “Shaft” in Deluxe Edition (Coming Nov. 3rd, 2009)

Pivotal
1971 soundtrack was one of soul music’s best sellers of all time and
earned Isaac Hayes a Grammy, Oscar and Golden Globe.

LOS
ANGELES, Calif. — In 1971, the song was everywhere. “Who is the man who
would risk his neck for his brother man?” Shaft? Damn right. Isaac
Hayes’ Shaft soundtrack album became a #1 album on both the pop and
R&B charts — and remained on the charts for a jaw-dropping 60
weeks. The first soul soundtrack to a major motion picture would earn
Hayes a Grammy, Oscar and Golden Globe and set him on his way to
stardom. The soundtrack continues to influence popular music — hip-hop
in particular.

On November 3, 2009, Stax Records, a unit of
Concord Music Group, will release Shaft (Deluxe Edition), a digitally
remastered reissue of the soundtrack including a bonus track: “Theme
From Shaft [2009 Mix].” Ashley Kahn, author of several music books,
contributor to NPR’s “Morning Edition” and adjunct professor at New
York University, wrote the liner notes for the deluxe edition.

A
primary reason for the enduring significance of the ultimate
Blaxploitation film Shaft is Hayes’ score. He created music that
sounded like nothing else of its day. “The one thing I’ve learned from
Shaft, ” Hayes told The New York Times in 1972, “is that pop music
doesn’t set any restrictions anymore. You don’t just have to go up
there and sing a song because that’s the way it was always done before.
Use whatever means necessary, be it rap, song or arrangement, to get to
the people.”

As Kahn notes, “Ironically, the world’s first major
motion film score created by a soul music producer boasts few tracks
that fit neatly into the category of soul. Hayes created a wide variety
of styles — some vocal, most instrumental — to serve the film’s many
locations.” Examples: the organ-trio groove of “No Name Bar, ” the
popping, jazzy pulse of “Be Yourself, ” and the gentle 3/4 feel of “A
Friend’s Place, ” which channels the bittersweet sway of a
Bacharach-David melody.

“Soulsville, ” a slow-moving vocal
heard behind a lengthy ghetto scene, features mournful saxophone and
Hayes’ somber voice delivering a sermon on inner city reality. And
filling an entire album side was the 19-minute jam “Do Your Thing, ”
featuring distorted guitar pushed along by intermittent horn lines and
chanting of the song title.

But the best known song remains the
four-minute, 40-second “Theme From Shaft.” According to Stax historian
Rob Bowman, both musical ideas came from Stax sessions in the ’60s —
the high-hat lick from the break of Otis Redding’s 1966 recording of
“Try a Little Tenderness” and the guitar part from “a long forgotten
track that for one reason or another was never released. The song went
two and a half minutes before the vocal part began. And then, as Kahn
describes, “that call-and-response, or rather question-and-answer lyric
that elevated its subject to a mythic level of machismo: who was the
black private dick that was a sex machine to all the chicks . . . who
would risk his neck for brother man . . . who would not cop out.”
Shaft. Right on.