Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Sweet sound of soul
SUMMER OF SOUL Cert 12A ★★★★★ In cinemas now and on Disney+ from July 30
The summer of 1969 was known for Woodstock and the Apollo 11 moon landing. But a different kind of cultural revolution was playing out in New York’s Mount Morris Park.
While the Woodstock festival was immortalised in a 1970 documentary, footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival has, until now, languished in a basement.
“The powers that be, or are, didn’t consider it significant enough to consider it a part of history,” explains Stevie Wonder.
Like all concert documentaries, Summer Of Soul is powered by its performances.
Here, highlights include lovingly restored footage of a spinetingling Nina Simone, a funky Stevie Wonder and a rousing Sly And The Family Stone.
But what makes the film so compelling is the way director Ahmir Khalib Thompson (aka Questlove) deftly sketches in the concert’s cultural context.
Staged in the aftermath of the assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, New York’s Republican mayor may have seen six weekend concerts as a way, to quote one attendee, of “stopping folks tearing up the streets”.
But, while Simone was calling for a full-on revolution, BB King, The 5th Dimension and Jimmy Ruffin were expressing a new outward-looking black identity.
“69 was the pivotal year where the Negro died and Black was born,” declares civil rights activist Al Sharpton.
The film charts how African and Hispanic influences came to soul music, and shows new fashions such as the dashiki arriving in Harlem.
And, at the time, Neil Armstrong’s historic first step for mankind was seen by many as a controversial use of money, so we see footage from the TV newsmen who flocked to Mount Morris Park to hear an impoverished but empowered community decry it.
Summer Of Soul is, says one interviewee, “like a rose coming through the concrete”.
‘‘ The powers that be didn’t consider it significant enough as a part of history