FEATURE:
Revisiting the Phenomenal Summer of Soul
The Greatest Concert Film Ever?
_________
PERHAPS apropos of nothing…
IN THIS PHOTO: Summer of Soul’s director, Questlove (Ahmir Thompson)/PHOTO CREDIT: Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times
I am heading back to 2021. In the modern times, how easy is it to produce a music documentary that is up there with the very best?! We have plenty of innovative filmmakers and fascinating subjects. However, like classic albums, modern-day works of brilliance still do not get ranked alongside the established ones. When it comes to music documentaries/concert films, can you get better than Summer of Soul?! If you have Disney+, you can watch it now. I would argue it is the greatest concert films ever. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is an acclaimed documentary film about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. It was directed by Ahmir ‘Questlove’. Following its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, it went on to win the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in the documentary categories. In cinemas for a brief time, it then went onto streaming services such as hulu. Marking fifty-five years of a huge festival that coincided around the time of the Moon Landing, there was not enough media attention on the Harlem Cultural Festival. Not only was it a chance to highlight the inequality and poverty through Harlem and compel the U.S. Government to act and celebrate the richness and love within the community, it showed that there was more focus and appreciation of a comparatively needless and less significant event. Even if you felt the Moon Landing was huge and moving, it overshadowed the vitality and urgency of this Harlem festival. Coming years after assassinations of key figures like John F. Kennedy (1963), and Malcolm X (1965), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) and Robert F. Kennedy (1968), this seemed like the result of growing fears and need for change. Peace-makers and inspiring politicians gunned down!
When we think of Harlem in 1969, we might think of poverty and violence. Unrest ruling. However, there was social and economic change happening. Overcoming challenges such as urban decay, there were activists working hard towards positive change. Alongside this was the vibrant and inspiring creative and social hub. Summer of Soul takes us inside the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Artists like Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, and Gladys Knight & The Pips taking to the stage. You can read more about the festival here. I was actually made aware of Summer of Soul by Shaun Keaveny. The legendary broadcaster shouted it out on, I think, his former BBC Radio 6 Music show. He has also mentioned it on his Community Garden Radio show once or twice. Whenever I got that recommendation from him, I sat on it for a while. Watching the documentary for the first time recently, it was a mind-blowing experience! Beautifully constructed and narrated, you can feel the love and effort that went in to making Summer of Soul. With recent interviews from artists who were there (such as Mavis Staples) and contributions from festival-goers and those keen to share their impressions, it shone a light on the importance of Harlem. Not only in terms of the music and community. It was being fought for by activists and politicians. On a wider national stage, there was not the same sort of focus and care. The 1969 festival almost like this rebellion and insurrection of love and passion. Through Gospel, Soul and other genres, thousands attended the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.
There is a whole gang of brilliant and insightful interviews with Questlove about Summer of Soul. I will select from a couple of them. I will finish with a couple of reviews for the 2021 documentary. Fifty-five years after that sensational Harlem festival, there is so much relevance and timeliness. In terms of where America is now. How we do need a similar concert like this to raise awareness of issues. Fighting against evil in the world. Although it is a different climate to 1969, there is genocide and war around the world. Poverty and injustice. How there has not been anything as electrifying as that Harlem celebration in 1969. I want to start by sourcing from Pitchfork. They spoke with Questlove in 2021 about his directorial debut. The Roots’ drummer discussed the fight to give Black music its rightful dues:
“While the rest of America was celebrating the Apollo 11 moon landing in the summer of 1969, Harlem was awash in the sounds of soul, blues, jazz, gospel, and pop. There at Mount Morris (now Marcus Garvey) Park, it was a different leap for mankind. The Harlem Cultural Festival, a concert series held over six Sundays, featured a seemingly infinite Rushmore of Black music icons: a then 19-year-old Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, B.B. King, David Ruffin, and the Staple Singers, to name just a few. Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke. Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson practically ripped the clouds out of the sky with their gospel duet. It all started in the weeks before Woodstock.
And yet, the remarkable festival footage lay dormant for 50 years before the Roots drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson unfurled it for his directorial debut, Summer of Soul. The documentary—in theaters and on Hulu July 2, after winning top awards at Sundance—functions as both a concert film and a loving artifact of Black music amid the Civil Rights Movement. “Never mind the moon,” one festival-goer says in the doc. “Let’s get some of that cash in Harlem.”
Questlove first discovered the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1997 during a Roots tour stop in Tokyo, where he sat in the Soul Train Café dazzled by a two-minute bootleg clip of Sly and the Family Stone’s set, shown on a video screen. “I didn’t know they were playing to an all-Black crowd,” he recalled to Pitchfork. “I saw the word ‘festival’ and thought, Obviously it must be in Switzerland or Montreaux.” Two decades later, producers unearthed 40 hours of lost footage from the late videographer Hal Tulchin and tapped Questlove to condense it into archival gold. It was no easy feat, with the original cut clocking in at three and a half hours: “Cutting 90 minutes was one of the most painful things I’ve ever done,” he said. The result is a breathtaking capsule of Black music history that gives as much energy and gravity to the performances as it does to artists’ and attendees’ relived memories of the event.
Talking over Zoom from his office at The Tonight Show in June, Questlove discussed the daunting task of chronicling and curating such a timeless display of grandeur.
Pitchfork: In documenting this type of lost Black culture, a powerful thing happens. It’s rewriting history by actually writing us into it. What sense of obligation did you feel while working on the film?
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson: When I was going through that funk of “ugh, I don’t know if I can do this,” my girlfriend snapped me out of it. Like: This is bigger than you. This is your chance to make history. It’s bigger than your nervousness of getting a bad review or embarrassing yourself in your directorial debut. This is your chance to right a wrong. It’s weird because the main motherlode of the interview weeks was March 13, 2020. And within days, the world was shut down. For half a second, I was like, I guess it was nice working with you guys, see ya. You’re watching death after death after death every night. Trucks of body bags on the corner. Who has the time to think about a movie when it’s like, is my mom going to be alive? After a two-week panic period, we got it together. We figured out inventive ways to conduct interviews. Mavis is a great example. We had this wheelie device that was like the Mars rovers, with a camera crew in the hallway of her apartment. They had to remote control this thing inside her apartment, and we did our audio interview that way. The timing of making this film changed this film.
Was there any point where you felt like people wouldn’t care?
No. It was gold. If anything, it was an embarrassment of riches. It was too much. I kept this on a 24-hour loop for about six months straight. Slept to it. Traveled to it. It was the only thing I consumed. I didn’t watch any movies, television shows. Nothing. If something hit me, I wanted to get it organically. While the master reel was being reprocessed and digitized—which took like five months—anything interesting I saw, I noted. When I felt that I had enough goosebump moments, I curated it like I curate my DJ sets or like I curate a show. I work backward. Always start with the ending first, and then work my way to the front.
The Mavis and Mahalia moment in the middle is insanely moving. How did the emotions in these performances help you decide the sequence?
The summit meeting between Mavis and Mahalia was one of the first things I saw. I knew it was so powerful; I didn’t want any interruptions. My first draft was three and a half hours, and that was my initial ending. But as we were cutting, we couldn’t help but see the mirroring of what was happening 50 years ago happening right now. My producer Joseph was like, “I don’t know if you want to go Kumbaya with this.” Once you force Mavis and Mahalia to the middle, it forces you to come up with an even stronger ending. By that point, I realized this is Nina’s moment to cap this off. With Nina at the end, suddenly, this film has an edge and energy to it.
When I got to the Stevie Wonder drum solo, I knew that was the gob-smacking cold-open shocker of all shockers. People have never seen Stevie Wonder in a sort of percussion context. So I figured that’s my little wink to anyone coming in with folded arms like, OK, what’s the Roots drummer going to do with this film? Of course, he’s going to do a drum solo. There’s a point where Stevie and his bandleader Gene are riffing. When Stevie comes on stage, that’s when Apollo lands on the moon. When he lightly mentioned it, you hear boos, and that was curious to me. Of course, growing up, I listened to Gil Scott and Curtis Mayfield. I’ve heard snide remarks about the moon landing in soul songs, but I didn’t realize the disdain was that strong. Once we heard boos, it’s like, whoa, let’s investigate. Unbeknownst to us, CBS Evening News’ Walter Cronkite happened to send a man-on-the-street [reporter]. It was done in a snarky way, like, “While the world stands by to watch history, they’re in the park…”
Why hasn’t there been such attentiveness toward archiving Black music, and why is it important?
I know that is my purpose. No one is more of a sentimental packrat than I am. I am a VHS-collecting, Super 8-collecting archivist. I’ll take all the first five years of Jet Magazine archives, and make my girlfriend angry because five other boxes of Right On! Magazine are in the living room. I was collecting for personal reasons. But I now see that this is important. Once I finished this, everyone was coming out of the woodworks, DMing me like, “Questlove, we have 19 hours of footage of this concert.” Wait, what?! Things I never heard of before. Somewhere between nine to 15 other incredible high-level events were filmed for posterity and rejected, so now it’s in the basement of UCLA or somewhere. I’m keeping my eye on the Universal Hip-Hop Museum that’s opening in the Bronx. I’m hoping they will preserve history. But all too often, Black culture is so easily disposable in every aspect. TikTok content creations, our slang, our music, our style. I guess the attitude has always been: It’s not a big deal. It’s just a dance; it’s just a concert. But it is a big deal. And I realized it was a big deal with our very first interviewee Musa Jackson. Initially, I was concerned because he was 5 years old [during the Harlem Cultural Festival]. What 5-year-old is going to have true insight into the magnitude of what they’re going through? But when he talked to us, he was like, “This is my first memory of life.” He’s 56, 57 now. The common thing was that no one believed. Can you imagine trying to tell people, “Yeah, in Harlem, I saw Sly and the Family Stone and Stevie Wonder”? It’s unbelievable that this could be that easily dismissed.
We conducted this interview without any context, no photos, showed him nothing. Just: “Alright, tell us everything you know.” And it was almost like talking to a medium. You don’t believe him because he was spot-on with everything. He knew the Fifth Dimension had on creamsicle outfits. When we showed him the footage, the emotional outpouring started. I realized we’re giving him his life back. Even for Marilyn McCoo [of the Fifth Dimension]. She’s done everything. She was in one of the first Black groups to win a major Grammy. I was wondering, why is this particular show hitting your heartstrings with the millions of things that you’ve done? And suddenly, I realized that she and I had something in common. No matter what job they have, every Black person in their workspace has to juggle code-switching. Between Motown and certain acts that wanted not to make it but survive, you had to code-switch.
No example is more obvious than David Ruffin’s performance. It’s in the middle of August. He has on a wool tuxedo and a coat. Why would he do this? And then I thought, man, you’d rather suffer and be uncomfortable in the name of professionalism. That’s something. That was implemented in him via his Motown charm school days. I asked Marilyn McCoo why I’d never seen them be this loose and relaxed at a performance before. She was like, “We’d been dying to perform for Black people for the longest.” At that point, they were the biggest act in the world, bigger than the Supremes. They had the No. 1 song. To them, it’s like, “We had to do this because this is our one chance to get to our people”.
International Documentary Association interviewed Question about Summer of Soul, A celebration of Black joy, I think that the tremors of the documentary/concert film will last for years. I hope that more people do check out this wonderful thing. This gift that we were given. Part celebration and a concert film, there is so much social history and backdrop that adds colour and context. Few can argue against the fact that Summer of Soul is the greatest music documentary ever. Whether you class it as one of a concert film, it stands above the competition in my opinion:
“MH: Speaking of your directorial debut, tell us about what the intent was for the film, and exactly what do you think, now that you’ve had some time away from it, makes it a Questlove jawn?
AQT: Well, the intent of the film is kind of a loaded mission. As a musician, these are precious artifacts that are historical, but then on top of that it’s really making sure that it gets its right place in history.
At the time I happened to be finishing up Prince’s autobiography, and he’s telling this warm, fuzzy memory that he had of his dad taking him to his first movie when Prince was 11, which was Woodstock. He explains how that changed his life; the legend of Woodstock and the light we hold Woodstock in—all that happened because of the movie. Granted, the lineup was enough to make people from all parts of the country take a pilgrimage. But all the acts, all the memories, all the images, anything that we associate with what we think the ’60s were, chances are you’re either thinking of the March on Washington or you’re thinking of Woodstock.
For me, I still got immersed and baptized in musical education without having a Woodstock of my own to claim. But I always wondered, if this [original concert] film were given the greenlight to be just as brilliant as it could have been, what a difference that would have made in the lives of young musicians such as myself, who really didn’t have musical documents growing up.
Thank God I had parents that were super hip and super cool, that would wake me up at 11:45 p.m. so I could watch the second song on Saturday Night Live before Soul Train came on. Philadelphia was weird. It was one of the markets in which Soul Train would come on at 1:00 in the morning instead of 12:00 in the afternoon like the rest of America.
So, I often wonder, had this film come out, how different music could have been. Because Woodstock defined a generation. This could have defined us, and it’s sort of weird what Soul Train wound up doing. But, no more "would’ve, could’ve, should’ve," I think that this film is still potent and it’s timeless and the fact that it’s 50 years later and we’re still talking about the same issues will show how valuable it still is.
MH: And as we’re moving through this tumultuous time, this 21st century, the millennium, what you’ve done—pulled together these archives, created a score, curated this history—this is a Black cultural experience, but it’s also a universal experience. Your first cut was three hours and 20 minutes; talk about your process in making the film—around letting certain sequences breathe, and then cutting down others?
AQT: Well, in this case, time was really on our side. In his mission to sell the film, Hal Tulchin probably gave it one last go-around with the 25th anniversary; I think in 1994 he tried to make something happen. What winds up happening is, once we got the original reels, that process alone to transfer took a good five months. They had to bake the film, take a very sensitive bristle device and gently restore the film without scratching or destroying it.
I took the transfers that he made to VHS, which we transferred to DVD; even though it was four cameras, it’s 20 hours of unique footage. I basically made that my visual aquarium for those five months. Instead of sitting here with my pad and pen and just watching everything, I wanted it to naturally hit me. So, all the TVs in my house, in my office at NBC, my laptop—it was like a screensaver. The concert just constantly played for 24 hours. I kept notepads next to each monitor in my house.
I’ll say that for me the most important thing was, I wanted my first five minutes to be like a gobsmack, just totally surprise you by what you were watching. And I felt that nothing spoke more of that surprise than Stevie Wonder playing drums, which shocked even me! Everyone knows I’m a drummer, so of course I’d be attracted to this, so that’s the beginning.
This is also how I plan shows. I feel as though most people remember the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes of any show, but it’s almost like, what’s in between doesn’t matter. Yes, in this case it does matter, but for me, it was like, when people first see this, what do they see and what do you leave them with?
But also, I gave permission for [producer] Joseph [Patel] and everyone to really speak their voice and let me know if I was trailing off into amateur-hour territory. For the ending—initially I thought well, obviously, Mahalia [Jackson] and Mavis Staples have to close this; that’s the most magical moment of the thing. And then Joseph challenged me.
I felt it was more dangerous and edgy, and it spoke more of today to let Nina Simone have the last word, especially with "Are You Ready, Black People?", with her challenging people to immerse themselves. We live in a time where a lot of performative activism is trying to masquerade itself as actual activism, especially with social media. Once we shifted Mavis and Mahalia to the middle, it elevated the film even more, then of course, Nina’s fiery performance was the hardest to break up because that entire 45 minutes was the most magical. I’ve never seen a person just so sure of themselves in new territory. She’s not singing jazzy love ballads like "My Baby Just Cares for Me." She’s going into a new territory of activism. So, once you have those three, the story writes itself. And this is a story of change.
In 1969, younger activists were at a newer place than the older activists were. We started calling ourselves Black, our fashion and ideas got bolder, there was the voices of the Black Panthers versus the earlier ’60s civil rights..Attitudes had changed. So, it’s just filling in the blanks, really.
MH: And it was just so exciting to see what kind of story you would tell. I know that you believe that the film is so much more than a concert film. It’s not just about these extraordinary performances, but the decisions you have to make about constructing the narrative out of the material you had, and the themes that you wanted to embrace.
AQT: I’ll admit that this sort of fell in my lap, at maybe the tail end of 2016, or early 2017. I had a friend that had a copy. If you remember, Aretha Franklin was key in keeping the Amazing Grace film from coming out when she was living, but I had gotten to watch maybe 35 minutes of it, because a friend of mine had a cut of it from years before, and I always thought it was such a bold choice to show the performances with no context whatsoever. But I’m a guy that lives for Easter eggs and director’s commentaries and all those things, so immediately I started stalking anybody involved in that film. Once I heard the backstories, a part of me was like, Wow, is there a way for me to include those things as well, in this film?
So, in the beginning I kind of decided, OK, let me curate a really good, tight, two-hour performance and just make you a fly on the wall. But the more these stories kept revealing themselves, the big question was, Do we have people that attended the concert give commentary? We found about ten to 15 people, and even that was hard because you were either under the age of 10, so your memory might be spotty, or you were over the age of 75 and your memory might be spotty. For me, Musa Jackson was probably the gamechanger. He was our first interview, and the thing that I never considered was the fact that this concert was his very first memory”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the majestic and hugely moving Summer of Soul. Receiving almost perfect reviews across the board, few other concert films/documentaries have ever come close to achieving that. I want to keep on with a review from Vox:
“Every moment is a surprise. After a while, you’ll find yourself sitting with mouth agape, waiting to see which incredible cultural icon will walk out onto the stage next. The footage is kinetic and vivid, shot from angles that emphasize how the crowd is responding to each performance, pulling in close to faces dripping with sweat and emotion, and sometimes shooting from the stage, through gaps between instruments, to reveal faces thrilled with the show.
I’ll never recover from watching Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples sing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” on the same mic, so close we can see their individual teeth. It’s a song Jackson had performed alongside Martin Luther King Jr. many times before; King had been murdered a year before the concerts.
“Gospel was more than religious,” Al Sharpton explains. “Gospel was the therapy for the stress and pressure of being Black in America. We didn’t know anything about therapists, but we knew Mahalia Jackson.”
Thompson, realizing that the significance of the event to the Black community of the historical moment could use contemporary reinforcement, brings in commentators — mostly people who were there more than 50 years ago — to talk about what it meant to see a crowd full of Black faces celebrating. Or to have the concerts occur in a moment of revolution, of crystallizing Black identity. “By the fashion in the crowd, you could see the change happening,” one commentator says.
A generational shift was taking place among Black Americans, and it mattered that the concerts occurred while debates raged within Harlem itself about nonviolence and militance, about expanding consciousness to encompass a whole range of cultures who’d been shut out by mainstream white America.
In one sequence, Thompson weaves together a poignant exploration of the moon landing, which occurred in the midst of the festival’s run, and what the people gathered in Mount Morris Park were thinking during that “giant leap for mankind.” Archival footage reveals people significantly less convinced that landing on the moon was worth spending money that could have been used to relieve poverty and hunger down here on earth. In a manner that recounts a documentary like 2016’s O.J.: Made in America, Summer of Soul deftly weaves the mood of the time and the long history of Black expression through music into this one moment, and it practically explodes off the screen.
That we’ve been talking about Woodstock and not the Harlem Cultural Festival all this time as if it’s the moment in which a generation emerged is not all that surprising. “The so-called powers that are, or were, didn’t find it significant enough to keep it as a part of history,” one participant in the film notes. It wasn’t like the festival’s essential erasure from cultural memory was an anomaly; Black history gets memory-holed all the time. It doesn’t happen by accident. Powerful people make choices about what they think is worth preserving in the cultural memory, and what’s just fine to forget.
That’s why a movie like Summer of Soul matters. It’s not just a blast to watch — and it truly is a blast. It’s another tiny step in reclaiming the full history of America, expanding the context of our present not just for people who remember the past, but people who never knew about it in the first place. We’re fools if we don’t think burying the era-changing import of events like these is as much a part of American history as the events themselves — and movies like Summer of Soul fight back bringing the past vibrantly to life.
At the beginning of the film, Musa Jackson, who attended the festival as a kid, sits down to be interviewed about the experience. Off-camera, Thompson tells him that he’s going to start playing footage so Jackson can see it as he answers questions. But as soon as the light of the screen falls on his face, Jackson is transfixed, unable to answer questions, his eyes starting to grow wet. At the end of the film, he says that watching the footage moved something within him that always kind of doubted that his memory of the festival was real. Crying, he says, “I knew I was not crazy. But now I know I’m not. And this is just confirmation”.
In July 2021, Mark Kermode wrote a five-star review for The Guardian. Arguing that it could be the best concert film ever, this really is something that everyone needs to watch! I cannot really stress that enough. I have come to it late though, looking at issues in the world today, you wonder whether we should have something similar. Could that ever be done?! In some ways, the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival was a one-off. A phenomenon that cannot be consigned to history. We need to keep talking about it:
“This Sundance award-winner is an absolute joy, uncovering a treasure trove of pulse-racing, heart-stopping live music footage (originally captured by TV veteran Hal Tulchin) that has remained largely unseen for half a century. While Mike Wadleigh’s Woodstock and the Maysles’ Gimme Shelter have long been considered definitive documents of the highs and lows of 1969 pop culture, Summer of Soul makes both look like a footnote to the main event: a festival in the heart of Harlem that was somehow written out of the history books. Capturing Stevie Wonder at a turning point in his career, Mavis Staples duetting with Mahalia Jackson (“an unreal moment”, says Staples) and Nina Simone at the height of her performing powers, director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s feature debut intertwines music and politics in one of the best concert movies of all time.
Produced and MCed by Tony Lawrence (“a hustler, in the best sense”), and supported by the liberal Republican New York mayor, John Lindsay, with security by the Black Panthers, the 1969 Harlem Cultural festival played out over six weekends in Mount Morris Park at a time of profound cultural re-evaluation, a year on from the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King. Up in space, Neil Armstrong may have been taking one small step for a man, but as a festivalgoer states: “Never mind the moon, let’s get some of that cash in Harlem.”
Astutely chosen news footage outlines a decade of tension, producing disparate strands of resistance – civil rights and Black power. Among those on stage are the saxophonist Ben Branch, whom King spoke to immediately before his death, requesting that Branch play his favourite song, Precious Lord, Take My Hand. It’s that song that Staples and Jackson perform together in a moment that matches the ecstatic heights of Amazing Grace – another long-delayed music doc, covering Aretha Franklin’s 1972 performances at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles.
Blending wry laughter with piercing insight, interviewees explain how the word “Black” shifted from a fighting-talk term of abuse to one of self-determination and pride. Trailblazing journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault remembers the battle she fought to get the New York Times to use “Black” rather than “negro”, while others describe festival power-couple Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach as being “unapologetically Black – they lived that phrase every day”.
Watching footage of her band the 5th Dimension performing Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In with tasseled orange suits, Marilyn McCoo remembers how they had been criticised for being “not Black enough”, and how happy they were to be there in Harlem, reclaiming their identity. Then to cap it all, we watch Nina Simone showcasing a new song, inspired by the stage production To Be Young Gifted and Black, performed in a voice that the Rev Al Sharpton astutely characterises as “somewhere between hope and mourning”.
While Simone is described as looking “like an African princess”, Hugh Masekela’s performance of Grazing in the Grass seems to transport the audience to another land, soaring from the parks of New York to distant plains. Elsewhere, Sly and the Family Stone embody the psychedelic Afrofuturist R&B vibe, with Rose Stone and Cynthia Robinson giving their bandleader a run for his money on keyboards and trumpet respectively, and the audience gradually accepting that a white drummer can kick it after all.
Gladys Knight recalls that “it wasn’t just about the music; we wanted progress”; the Edwin Hawkins Singers perform Oh, Happy Day in lime-green harmony; Ray Barretto and Mongo Santamaría bring the Latin-fusion beat; BB King cradles his guitar like a baby while he sings the blues; Rev Jesse Jackson speaks to the soul; and Stevie Wonder is on fire – on drums, keyboards and vocals – as he enters a new era of meaningful jazz funk.
The fact that the “rose coming through cement” of this festival was overlooked for so long served as further evidence that “Black history is gonna be erased”. Yet Questlove’s film begins and ends with festivalgoer Musa Jackson viewing the uplifting reclaimed footage (a sly counterpoint to the horrorshow bookending of Gimme Shelter) and tearfully thanking the film-maker for proving to him that “I’m not crazy!” – that this really happened. Thanks to this terrific film, we can all share in that sense of wonder”.
Whether purely a concert film or a music documentary that has a concert at its centre, what else can come close to Summer of Soul?! Questlove’s 2021 debut is a masterpiece! Not a minute wasted. You hope there is more footage somewhere that will come to light – so engrossing is the whole experience. I might have missed it altogether though, remembering Shaun Keaveny’s words and huge praise for Summer of Soul, I decided to watch it. It was a transformative experience! So, to him, I offer huge…
THANKS for that.