Aretha doco a true joy
Amazing Grace (G, 88 mins) Directed by Sydney Pollack Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★★
In 1971, Aretha Franklin was at the first peak of her career. She dominated the radio airwaves in a way that few artists had ever achieved, with five consecutive top-10 singles, a brace of albums selling gold many times over, and a public presence that had her crowned the undisputed Queen of Soul.
Aretha perfectly bridged the gap between the great jazz divas who had come before her and the era of funk, soul and disco that was beginning to break.
She could take on music across the genres and bring the same incredible range, intensity and phrasing to all of it. But her heart and the foundations of that once-ina-generation voice were always in the church.
Her father, Clarence Franklin, was a Baptist pastor in Detroit. And it was in her father’s gospel choir Aretha first glimpsed the places her voice could travel to.
She embarked on a professional career at 18.
By the time she travelled to Los Angeles, to record an album of gospel standards at the New Temple Baptist Church, Aretha was 29 and had the music world at her feet.
Amazing Grace went on to become the biggest-selling disc of Aretha’s career, one of the biggestselling live albums of all-time and, of course, the greatest-selling album of gospel ever recorded. Amazing Grace is a milestone on many different roads.
But, because of a few people’s indifference to the importance of clapper boards and some unexplained reticence on Aretha’s part to it ever being shown, the documentary footage shot over the two nights Aretha performed has never been seen before. At least, not coherently edited together.
It has been worth the wait. Amazing Grace, the film, is a simple but expertly assembled gem.
The visuals – director Sydney Pollack shot 20 hours of footage on several, mostly hand-held 16mm film cameras – occasionally jump around the auditorium more than is strictly necessary, but the sound is sublime.
Aretha’s voice soars and swoops through these standards, lifting the songs straight out of church and into somewhere truly ethereal.
Sitting beneath her pulpit, the great arranger and accompanist James Cleveland lets Aretha and that voice take care of the melodies, while his great paw of a left hand roams around the rhythms and bass notes with joy and authority in every bar.
If God hadn’t found Cleveland first, one of the great jazz or funk acts of the day surely would have.
A glimpse of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts in the second-night audience just reminds us of how much Aretha – and the way she made gospel sound – influenced the generation of pop and rock stars growing up around her.
It’s a lovely thing to sit in a cinema and not be asked to follow a story, but just to let waves of glorious noise wash over us. Amazing Grace is a joy from first note to last.