Well-travelled as the good ship Blaxploitation is, this 6CD box set nonetheless provides a useful ‘starter pack’ for those who may have somehow missed the boat of soundtracks to the films where black people got to play action heroes and heroines who were as cool and sometimes as entertainingly ludicrous as their white counterparts. While the growl of the wah-wah guitar and snakish hiss of the violins on Isaac Hayes's Shaft may feel just a touch worn out, such is the ubiquity with which these polychrome sounds have echoed down through the decades, they nonetheless retain their standing as great moments in modern music. Ditto much of the keys, drums and bass lines of Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man – particularly fertile ground for the beatmaker generation of the 1990s – which show off the high playing standards among musicians who consistently blurred the boundaries between soul, funk and jazz. Indeed Coffy by vibraphonist-vocalist Roy Ayers features some of his tastiest solos. Genre issues aside, these albums, above all James Brown's Black Caesar and Johnny Pate's Shaft In Africa, also underline how rich was the tradition of orchestration in black pop and the sheer punch packed by the strings and horns in the above cases resonates with the gunplay and sharp talking on screen. Booker T's Uptight marks something of a contrast, evincing a more stripped-down blues character that has some quite beautiful, gospel-infused melodies from the talented Mr Jones and his stellar sidemen.