Isaac Hayes

Just look at the vinyl sleeve and everything becomes clear: Isaac Hayes is wearing sandals, dressed like a Moses on the shores of the Red Sea about to part the waters. His open arms express welcome, peace, universal love. But above all, contact — sensory and spiritual. Yet this messiah wears sunglasses, and he's just come down from his Sinai singing the Jackson 5's "Never Can Say Goodbye" and the Carpenters' "(They Long To Be) Close To You". And also Curtis Mayfield's "Man's Temptation" or "Need To Belong To Someone". The year, after all, is a magical one. We're in the golden age of black music, right on the cusp of that shift that would soon carry soul and funk toward the clubs of Los Angeles or the dancefloors of New York. And, naturally, on to every corner of the globe.

Isaac the prophet, singer, actor and genie of the lamp who once accompanied Bacharach in a dance on the Moon, this time rides his "Shaft" surfboard heedless of buoys or lifeguards. He's the divine descending to the streets with solid-gold chains and a bald head gleaming like a bowling ball ready to score another strike, or an eight-ball sent into the pocket while the smoke of the club wraps around his thoughts — and something else besides.

"Black Moses" arrives on a golden sleigh in 1971, just before Christmas. Naturally via Stax, through the Enterprise imprint. It's Hayes' fifth consecutive album to top the Billboard R&B chart in the States. The outfit described above, somewhere between a sub-Saharan preacher and a Sufi hermit, signals, at least visually, a kind of borrowed spirituality. The music, meanwhile, aims for the soul epic of his other masterpiece, "Hot Buttered Soul", building on a record that once again blends the ability of the Covington-born musician to reshape the instant classics of the day in his own lacquered style, while also expanding the "experimental" medley — in short, shaking up an unprecedented mix to send flying and rearrange axles, backsides and sheet music alike.

"Black Moses", like its aforementioned predecessor, establishes the formula of an album packed with masterful covers and hypnotic flourishes that, had they been released on their own, might not have achieved the same overall effect. It's an album as bold as it is clever and inspired.

The chapters of this "ancient" testament of black music need to be broken down accordingly. First, there are the Hayes-style reworkings that reinvent the originals, slowing down the tempo and, in some cases, drawing out an even deeper sensuality. Which is remarkable, when you think about it, since nearly all these songs were already miraculous in their own right. Take, for instance, the famous opening track, which Hayes makes entirely his own, dragging it with an almost surreal candor between his sheets, wrapped in the robes of some guru straight out of a random blaxploitation film.

Horns, drums and Hayes' scorching voice draw the sap from the original bark to grow new branches of pure soulfulness on either side. It's the first of Isaac the prophet's superpowers. Right after comes a radiant variation on "(They Long To Be) Close To You", carried on waves of light and sparkling strings by the orchestra. Speaking of which: Hayes spares no expense this time either. Alongside the indispensable Hot, Buttered & Soul backing vocals, there's Ronnie Hudson on bass, Gary Jones on bongos, Willie Hall on drums, Lester Snell and Sidney Kirk on piano, and, last but not least, Charles "Skip" Pitts on guitar.

Moving on to the covers, which deserve a chapter of their own, there's a long list of inspired choices worth mentioning. Like the lunar funk of the great Clay Hammond's "Part Time Love", smoothed out at the edges for the occasion, or the "Walk On By"-style treatment of Jerry Peters and Anita Pore's "Going In Circles". Hayes strips these songs down and stitches them back up in matching colors, wrapping both body and soul of the listener in something entirely new — entirely his, and no one else's. The songs thus double in size and rise, for the most part, toward the sky and the stars of a magnificent summer night.

It's pure soul magma that Hayes draws from beneath the surface of the tracks he chose to cover on an album that also anticipates yet another worldwide crowning achievement, arriving just a few weeks later with the Academy Award for Best Original Song, won by Hayes for the theme from "Shaft". Pastoral reinterpretations like Curtis Mayfield's "Need To Belong To Someone" or Burt Bacharach's "I'll Never Fall In Love Again" (him again) are also fittingly placed around the edges of the medleys.

And here we are: the medleys on "Black Moses" are its beating heart. There are three of them, forming three tablets as important to soul music (and to rap!) as the Ten Commandments — sticking with the album title's imagery, a title originally suggested to Hayes by Stax's Larry Shaw, partly as a way of poking fun at the nickname coined by promoter Dino Woodard after a concert at the Apollo Theatre.

"Ike's Rap": II, III and IV. Three movements following the spoken monologue recorded on "To Be Continued…" just months earlier. The conflicts of a Shakespearean love lift off the ground on piano, strings and Hayes' storytelling, as he transforms into an untamable lover who refuses to bow to the rubber walls of an American society more class-bound than the Verona ruled by the Scaligeri lordship.

The first little chapter, though, is merely a pretext to start over and line up three compositions that are a piece of black music history in their own right. The list of artists who have sampled, in one way or another, a fragment of these three mini-suites is a long one. Scattered here somewhat at random, and somewhat by importance, a few are worth mentioning: Tricky, Portishead, Mary J. Blige, Lianne La Havas, Vince Staples, Cormega.

"Ike's Rap II" is split into two parts, with the second, "Help Me Love", turning into pure soul outburst, the group conjuring the mood of a serenade drifting down 138th Street.

Help me, Love, find my way

I'm still living in yesterday

There are certain things I don’t care to reveal

You see they make me feel the way that I feel

The nine minutes of "Ike's Rap III" go even further, soaking the room in Hudson's brassy bass and Hayes' singing, which delays the spoken word still panting with love and much more. The crescendo is unhurried, the way foreplay ought to be in the old days (and at its finest). It's a love that's virtually distant, yet simmering everywhere. Hayes' voice seems to rise from the mouth of a long-dormant effusive volcano, melting like chocolate in the sun before giving way to the congas.

The fourth and final episode of the “Ike” saga leans on the score of Jerry Butler's “A Brand New Me”, stripping away its optimistic emphasis thanks to the piano, turning it into an irresistible slow number, with the chorus mutating into genuflection. Hayes' singing is light expanding toward the most complete love. The old coat, the old shoes: for Hayes it's all still there, now and forever, just like “that old blues“. It's the definitive closing statement of an album that, after the incandescent glories of “Hot Buttered Soul“, crowns Isaac Hayes as the apostle and mentor of a soul sensualism perhaps never again so passionate.

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28/01/2024