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Life is funny, and at times the humdrum and the routine is pierced momentarily by a poignant and serendipitous occurrence that just makes you stop and think. I’m not talking about any flashes of mysticism, or spiritual awakenings, not about metaphysical musings on the meaning of life and everything else. Just that funny knack that life has of throwing you the odd curveball, the occasional coincidence to give you pause for thought in an other wise busy day. So there I was last week on a work trip to Japan, and had 30 minutes spare in Shibuya, just long enough to pop into the brilliant Sam’s for a dose of the best of black music in the heart of the city. And one of the things I picked up, and have been searching on for some time, was a DVD of the legendary WattStax concert from 1972, encased within Mel Stuart’s brilliant 1973 documentary.

The sight of the mighty Isaac Hayes resplendent in golden chain mail waistcoat from the concert itself that adorned the DVD cover then reminded me to pick up a CD version of Hayes’ “Hot Buttered Soul”, “Black Moses” and “..To Be Continued”, three of the finest records of all time, and up until that point owned by myself only on vinyl (or in the case of the latter a ropey old cassette tape). So happy with my purchases on Saturday, I fly back to the UK on Sunday and get online for a news update (having been incommunicado largely whilst in Japan) and also to get the disks onto the ipod quick smart.

And then, of course, I was greeted with the news that you all have learnt and been saddened by, namely the untimely death at just 65 years old of the very same soul legend. Odd timing as the purchase of the CDs and DVD had lead me to be planning to write a post on this musical master this very week. And now the timing could not have been sadder.

For I am genuinely saddened by this passing, as I am sure we all are, not only because of the legacy of the man who played on more Stax records than virtually any other individual, who changed the very face of soul music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but because I always felt that Hayes had one last great piece of work in him. I don’t know why, I just always felt that he would return to form with another masterpiece in his later years, a feeling increased by the quality of the two mid-90s albums “Branded” and “Raw and Refined”, and his rise to popular re-appraisal and visibility following his role as Chef in South Park. In many ways it matters not, however, because even if the only thing that Hayes had ever done was to have produced the song he is most famous for, 1971’s “Shaft” soundtrack and the lead “Theme from Shaft” single, or any one of his early 1970s albums, to me his legacy would be secure.

Indeed, even if he had merely continued to be the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who contributed so much to the canon of incredible Stax material throughout the 1960s his passing would have been of some note. That he did all of these things, and produced along the way some of the finest soul music you are ever likely to hear makes his death a subject of true mourning. I would go so far as to say that with the afore-mentioned “Hot Buttered Soul”, from 1969, he produced simply one of the most significant and perfect slices of music in all history. Not only for its daringly long and complex compositions, it’s languid delivery and downright soulfulness, but also for how it just changed the game, subtly at first, but then monumentally.

It set the standard, and the template, for so much to come, rendering Motown archaic, the Godfather himself as over-pomped, and defining the places where black music could, and indeed would, go to. And the ripples are still felt today, not only in soul and r’n’b, but in hip-hop itself, in clothing, in design, in our very culture. Hayes’ music in this album is perfection, the syrupy production of another level entirely, his performance breath-taking, and the ambition within enough to make you weep with the sheer audacity of it. His tough yet sensual persona straddles the work, and introduces a new dynamic to black music, a dynamic which paved the way for the Blaxploitation he is commonly associated with because of Shaft, but also for the many high-points of black music in the decade that followed.

It helped define an identity that the civil rights movement had fought to allow breathing space. And that “Hot Buttered Soul” is merely one highlight in his one-man musical odyssey serves only to shine a beam on why we have lost an extremely special individual. And so, the only thing to do is to wish that he rest in peace, that his Scientology beliefs of personal upliftment serve him well wherever he now resides, and dig out any one of his recorded output, and drift into the deep, and eeply important, music of Mr Isaac Hayes. Sometime hyperbole is justified. For Hayes, it was invented.