ISAAC HAYES
Ultimate Isaac Hayes: Can You Dig It?

Stax/Concord Music Group

Read Wattstax: The Resurrection of a Historic Musical Event

With an artist as influential as Isaac Hayes, anyone putting together a compilation is going to be damned if they do and damned if they don’t. With many of Hayes’ most compelling tracks clocking in at 10 minutes or more (some closer to 20 minutes), should one include the complete versions of these if it reduces the overall breadth of the collection, or edit tracks that should be heard in their entirety so that more material can be included? Producer Rob Bowman has chosen the latter path, and while purists will say the results are less than representative of Hayes’ best work, I would argue that Ultimate allows one to experience the depth and breadth of Hayes’ work as a performer and conveys both how representative of their time they are, yet how contemporary. It will show listeners who weren’t around at the time how influential a figure Hayes was in black American culture—as influential as James Brown or Miles Davis, or perhaps even a social leader like Jesse Jackson. In the late 1960s and early 70s, black music was in a true renaissance period, with many artists finally finding ways to incorporate all forms of black American popular music—jazz, funk, soul, r&b, rock, gospel, blues—and heal the imaginary schism the music industry had created between these black musical styles. Hayes was at the forefront of that renaissance, with his ability to craft perfect pop-soul songs as well as to create symphonic soul and lay the cornerstone for the romantic ‘love man’ r&b balladeers who would follow.

For its nicely-arranged presentation of Hayes’ career with the Stax label, Ultimate gets a big thumbs-up. That said, anyone who really wants to hear the full majesty of Hayes’ sprawling psychedelic love-soul or spicy symphonic grooves is still going have to spring for the separate albums Hot Buttered Soul, Black Moses, and Shaft. But for musically astute listeners, Ultimate will be eye-popping enough an intro to send them in search of these touchstones of black music.

There is so much here that most listeners have likely either not heard at all or not heard in a long time. Whether Hayes is playing outrageous funk as psychedelic and imaginative as that of George Clinton’s Parliament and Funkadelic, as on “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” providing soul conciousness-raising music a la Curtis Mayfield, as he does on “Soulsville,” or inciting the ladies to riot on any number of slow burn romantic numbers, including “The Look of Love,” “I Stand Accused” or the incredibly sensous “Joy (Part 1),” Hayes is always the innovator, never the duplicator. Some of this work here will remind listeners of the work of Barry White, but Hayes predates White by a couple of years.

Then there’s the absolutely mind-bending combo of soul, late night city vibe, and raw sex that fuel such innovative Hayes fare as “Walk on By” and “Do Your Thing.” The fiercely psychedelic guitar work of Michael Toles and Harold Beane cut right through the cinematic strings and the sexy background vocals, providing the perfect setup for Hayes’ vocals, in which one can hear things that later vocalists, including Barry White, Luther Vandross, picked up on and incorporated into their vocal work. Hayes, however, remains unique in that he was the complete architect of his sound in a way that few singers ever were. Writing his own arrangements and playing organ and saxophone as well as singing and frequently conducting, Hayes also produced most of his releases. A few other soul singers were able to create completely distinctive sounds by collaborating with a particularly sympathetic producer, as with Al Green and Willie Mitchell, or Lou Rawls and David Axelrod, but Hayes was the complete package.

Hayes solidly demonstrates that he can easily generate electricity even in a stripped-down performance environment. His performances from an October, 1972 performance at Jesse Jackson’s PUSH Expo provide evidence that Hayes’ gospel roots were deep, and that he drew, as many performers have, on the spiritual inspiration of gospel, even when he was performing secular music. Jackson and Hayes appeared together frequently, in part because they were labelmates (Jackson recorded several spoken word performance albums for the Stax label), and also because they were both leaders in the black community. Jackson introduced Hayes at the 1972 Wattstax festival and at other performances as well. The three tracks from the PUSH expo included here—“His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” “Brand New Me,” and “If Loving You is Wrong (I Don’t Want to Be Right)” are some of the real treasures unearthed in the production of this collection.

The period of Isaac Hayes’ greatest influence, 1968—1975, was a time when black performers, in particular, were striving to fuse the fragmented parts of the whole of African-American music. Divided by the recording industry over the years into such tightly defined categories as blues, jazz, gospel, r&b, soul, funk, and rock & roll, musicians (both black and white) were seeing beyond the thin genre veil of the music industry, and real cross-pollination took place in a way comparable to the birth of rock and roll. Consider the things that were happening in this time period—the emergence of artists like Hayes, Sly & the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton, the cross-pollination of jazz and other genres pioneered and explored by Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, and the emergence of white artists who demonstrated some of the common threads between blues, gospel, soul, country, bluegrass, and American folk music, including Janis Joplin, The Band, The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, and others—it was truly a monumental time in the history of virtually every form of popular music. Isaac Hayes was an important part of this time, and The Ultimate Isaac Hayes: Can You Dig It? Is a worthy collection for those interested in hearing what he did then and how current it still is.