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Isaac HayesUltimate Isaac Hayes: Can You Dig It? Stax/Concord Track one, disc one Theme From Shaft. Track four, disc three (DVD) Chef from 'South Park' wraps his mouth around Chocolate Salty Balls. As inevitable as it is that 'Ultimate Isaac Hayes' should be book-ended in this manner, it does something to diminish the man. Isaac Hayes is the Barry White of morning-after regrets. He's James Brown if JB was only ever bewitched, bothered and bewildered. Where the bare chest and gold chains leave you anticipating a bragging black sex god, 'Ultimate Isaac Hayes' often delivers a man more at home amidst the sting and sadness of love. In short: he's a complicated man and no one understands him but his woman. By the time Hayes stepped out of the back-room to become a solo star he'd spent years writing for artists like Sam & Dave, producing and playing on dozens of Stax records, and had essentially graduated beyond the pop song. Consequently many of his successes are epic extrapolations of popular tunes; orchestras and horn sections deconstructing and rebuilding Walk On By and By The Time I Get To Phoenix for half a side of vinyl. 'Ultimate Isaac Hayes' displays sound judgement in distilling a prodigious output down to two solid CDs, especially in its choice of which tracks get the single-edit treatment (Joy, Soulsville, The Look Of Love) and which are left as full-length work-outs (Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic, I Stand Accused, Walk On By). It also rounds up some choice soundtrack cuts, single-only tracks and, as befits something purporting to be 'Ultimate' also unearths some previously unreleased material - here a great trio of live tracks from the Rev Jesse Jackson's PUSH Expo, Chicago 1972. The DVD (essentially three tracks from the 'Wattstax' documentary 30th Anniversary DVD plus Chocolate Salty Balls) also sees Isaac Hayes at the height of his powers and catches the potent mix of Black Power, spirituality and sex appeal which he embodied at the time. If you're invariably going to be remembered for one song then Theme From Shaft is a fairly cool calling card, but fortunately 'Ultimate Isaac Hayes' proves there was always more.  |
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