It seems worth exploring Presenting Isaac Hayes, his album debut, in the light of Hayes’ recent sudden passing.

Presenting Isaac Hayes was no traditional recording session. It was essentially an after-hours jam, Hayes running through some tunes on acoustic piano in early 1968 with bassist Duck Dunn and drummer Al Jackson, Jr., while Stax exec Al Bell, no recording engineer, manned and rolled the recording tape. The audio quality from Bell’s attempt at recording proved so haphazard that he took the tapes to New York, where Atlantic Records engineer Tom Dowd and producer Arif Mardin cleaned them up. Steve Cropper edited the music into separate tunes and medleys. Dunn, Jackson and Bell are listed as producers; Mardin is credited as mixer and Cropper as editor.

This jam session casualness is this music’s blessing and curse. Since it was impromptu and unrehearsed, Hayes relies on blues standards with which all three were already familiar, which means that you might be familiar with them, too. But even if Presenting sounds unorganized and casual (because it was), Hayes’ playing in an acoustic piano trio is a great opportunity to hear him stand out more, by himself, without all the strings and rhythm machines and female vocalists and complicated arrangements that characterize his later, trademark work. He’s just jammin’ on some blues.

Or to quote Hayes from Rob Bowman’s notes to the ‘95 CD release: “I was drunk when I did that album. Me and Duck sneaked off to the bathroom and hoarded two bottles of champagne ’cause it was somebody’s birthday.”

Hayes’ piano playing on Presenting sounds like jazz-blues pianists Ramsey Lewis, Charles Brown and even Les McCann, sometimes in turn and sometimes all together: Like Brown in “When I Fall in Love” and “Misty,” cocktail blues that sort of explain why Hayes would later be so interested in producing Billy Eckstine for his Enterprise label; like Lewis when he first wades into the water of “Precious, Precious”; and like McCann in the lusty funk later in “Precious, Precious” and “Rock Me Baby.”

“I Just Want to Make Love to You” nicely comes together deep in the pocket then segues into “Rock Me Baby”; Jackson seems to tire of the straight, slow blues beat and blasts the tempo into double-time, which kicks off the hottest playing in the set. “Rock Me” turned into one of Hayes’ live medley staples (you can hear it, for example, with “Stormy Monday Blues” on Live at Sahara Tahoe).

The CD version also includes an instrumental workout on “You Don’t Know What I Know,” which Hayes wrote with David Porter for Sam & Dave, and the 20-minute jam from which Hayes’ first Stax single “Precious, Precious” was edited and released in February ‘68. It did not enter the Pop or R&B charts.