SUMMER OF SOUL
Cert 12A ★★★★★ In cinemas now and on Disney+ from July 30
Joyful and belatedly triumphant, this compelling documentary takes us back to the hot summer of 1969 and a long-ignored cultural revolution.
While Woodstock was immortalised in a 1970 documentary, footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival has, until now, languished in a basement.
TV networks and film distributors decided there was only room for one ground-breaking music festival in the public consciousness. And that wasn’t the one that spoke of the hopes, dreams and rightful indignation of New York’s beleaguered black community.
Like all concert documentaries, Summer Of Soul is powered by its onstage performances. Highlights include lovingly restored footage of a spine-tingling Nina Simone, a politicised Stevie Wonder and a rousing Sly and the Family Stone who dressed and sounded like they had beamed down from a future decade or perhaps even another solar system.
But what makes the film so fascinating is the way it deftly sketches in the concert’s cultural context and reinstates the event to its rightful place in Africanamerican history.
“69 was the pivotal year where the Negro died and Black was born,” says civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton, one of many fascinating figures interviewed by director Ahmir Khalib Thompson, aka Questlove.
Staged in the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, New York’s mayor may have seen six weekend concerts as a way, to quote one attendee, of “stopping folks tearing up the streets”.
But riots weren’t on the minds of the performers on the stage or the tens of thousands of people packed into Harlem’s Mount Morris Park.
Jesse Jackson, The 5th Dimension and Gladys Knight recall the giddy feeling of black empowerment that was gaining ground in that tumultuous year.
The film also shows how fashion was in a state of flux. The sharp suits of The Pips are giving way to the Afrocentric styles of the dashiki and the Afro.
Summer Of Soul is, to quote one nostalgic interviewee, “like a rose coming through the concrete”.