Track Listing

1. Shaft
2. Bumpy's Lament
3. Walk From Regio's
4. Ellie's Love Theme
5. Shaft's Cab Ride
6. Cafe Regio's
7. Early Sunday Morning
8. Be Yourself
9. Friend's Place
10. Soulsville
11. No Name Bar
12. Bumpy's Blues
13. Shaft Strikes Again
14. Do Your Thing
15. End Theme

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23755 in Music
• Released on: 1993-12-31
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Soundtrack

Amazon.co.uk Review
The "Theme from Shaft" is now so ingrained in popular consciousness as the blaxploitation-movie track that it's hard to listen to it without a faint smirk. ("Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?"!!) But if you can get past the inadvertent humour, it's still a devilishly exciting piece of music--all hi-hat 16ths, wah-wah guitar, strings and woodwind, like a Norman Whitfield Motown production taken to a baroque extreme. The rest of the album consists mainly of incidental mood music of no great worth: "Walk from Regio's", "Ellie's Love Theme"--you know the sort of thing. Only two other tracks feature the Black Moses pipes, while the endless "Do Your Thing" takes its place in the catalogue of Hayes epics that began with Hot Buttered Soul. --Barney Hoskyns

CD Description
The title track's perennially recognisable hi-hat and wah-wah guitar intro, interlocking horn/string parts, and smooth,proto-rap verses conjure the name SHAFT as surely as a snake-charmer's incantation. It also conjures the name of Isaac Hayes--the songwriter, arranger, musician, and producer responsible for the phenomenally successful soundtrack to the landmark 1971 Blaxploitation film. Hayes's status as a key player in the Stax/Volt soul empire, and as a solo artist of considerable renown, went through the roof with this double-LP(now compiled on a 70-minute CD).
Hayes's lush, ambitious arrangements are performed by the Bar-Kays, one of Stax's premier house bands, along with guest string and horn players. Aside from the highbrow funk of the title track and two other vocal cuts (Hayes's ballad "Soulsville" and the near-20-minute midtempo funk of "Do Your Thing"), this is an instrumental set with a strong "cinematic" feel. Jazz, lounge, R&B, and atmospheric interludes are blended to give ample evidence of Hayes's brilliance as a composer and arranger. SHAFT was a commercial zenith for Hayes, and made his name as a giant of soul.

Customer Reviews

Not many soundtracks come hotter than this!
Isaac Hayes once again works his musical genious to produce a soundtrack that is second to none. The best known track is the "theme from shaft", but the others are all equally enjoyable. Definitly money well spent.

A truly great soundtrack
My dad was a big fan of Isaac Hayes and indeed a lot of the other Stax artists, as a result, I grew up listening to a lot of music from the Stax label.

So far as Isaac Hayes is concerned and film soundtracks, this really is worth buying. Isaac Hayes shows the depth of his creativity by producing an original soundtrack that has everything in it...vocals, instrumentals, lots of strings, horns, excellant rhythym section etc.etc.

Most people will be aware of the 1st track 'The Theme from Shaft' but all the others are great as well. My particular faves include 'Soulsville', 'No Name Bar' and 'Bumpy's Lament' which specifically has been sampled/copied by numerous other rnb and rap artists.

Overall, it's a masterpiece and thoroughly deserving of its Oscar. As for the film........well the less said about that the better!

Wasted on the movie
One of my most listened to albums and still absolutely ace after all these years. It's miles better than the dull, dated and cliché-riddled movie for which it was written and was, apparently, the first album to be more successful than the movie. The definitive wucka wucka guitar on the title track with a fab recording too, at Stax Studios down in Memphis, and all written when he was only 28. Tracks such as Soulsville are just absolutely dripping with cool (man), whilst Cafe Regio's is an utter classic of its genre.

Mr Hayes produced (brilliantly), whilst guest musicians include Lester Snell (electric piano), James Alexander (electric bass), Michael Toles and Charles Pitts (guitars ~ and the guitar playing here and there is utterly first class), Willie Hall (drums & tamborine) and Gary Jones (bongos and congas). The brass section on a few tracks is ace as well, though who the musicians were isn't credited.

Side 4's 19'38" Do Your Thing wasn't in the movie at all, but somehow it's still an essential element of the album, criminally cut to a quarter of its original length for the otherwise excellent 24 bit DR edition, almost certainly to accommodate the multi-media photos, artist info and video track stuck on at the end ~ which are okay, but not worth what had to be sacrificed to make way for them.

Funny, but to this day I've never managed to hear more than the odd track from any other of his albums, except for Hot Buttered Soul which didn't inspire me at all. Somehow, none could ever measure up to this one. A true and enduring classic, excellently remastered by Joe Tarantino at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, CA.