‘Black Woodstock’ finally hits screens
Questlove turns footage of 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival into powerful musical documentary
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson remembers his astonishment when producers David Dinerstein and Robert Fyvolent approached him about making “Summer of Soul (… Or, How the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” his Sundance Film Festival awardwinning documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969.
They told him about a lineup that included Stevie Wonder, the Fifth Dimension, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Mongo Santamaria, San Francisco’s own Sly and the Family Stone, and other popular acts of the era. Dinerstein and Fylovent also told him about how Hal Tulchin, a TV producer and director, was brought in to shoot the sixweekendlong event, and yet, beyond a pair of New York affiliate television specials, there was no interest in the footage of what came to be known as the “Black Woodstock.”
The footage — 40 hours’ worth — sat undisturbed in storage for 50 years. Thompson could scarcely believe it.
“You’re trying to tell me that these people did this performance in Harlem and no one was interested?” Thompson recalled of his initial reaction in a recent interview with The Chronicle. “I thought there must be a glitch in the audio or maybe the video footage is a little shaky.”
But neither of those things was a factor, nor was the potential landmine of music rights clearances. Thompson finally conclud
“Summer of Soul (… Or, How the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” (PG-13) opens Friday, July 2, in theaters and begins streaming on Hulu.
ed that those with the power to greenlight a documentary or a national TV special back then simply decided that, despite the star wattage on stage, there would be no interest in an event starring Black entertainers performing for a Black audience.
“This sort of dogchasingitstail situation is one that most Black people find themselves in, whether it’s inventing slang or dances or fashions or music trends, then (that achievement) either being ignored or dismissed,” Thompson said. “I’m not saying there was ever a situation or a conspiracy to stop this from coming out, no matter what. It wasn’t that; it’s almost like the benign, polite level of a shrug and dismissal. That’s painful.
“But I will say that this film is powerful. I feel as though the potent nature of it will have an amazing effect on people. And its time is now.”
For Thompson, “Summer of Soul” also represents a new stage in his career. The drummer and frontman of his Grammywinning band the Roots, Thompson is also a television personality by dint of his job as bandleader on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” as well as a DJ, writer, and film and television producer. As a director before “Summer of Soul,” he had made only one music video, “Come Close,” for the song by Common featuring Mary J. Blige.
Despite that lack of directorial experience, Dinerstein and Fylovent had faith that Thompson was the right person to take on the challenge of taking that raw, 50yearold footage and transforming it into a documentary relevant to contemporary times.
“We’d followed Ahmir’s career for the last 25 years, and knew he was an extraordinary storyteller with his finger on the cultural pulse,” Fylovent said in a statement. “Not only did he have an encyclopedic knowledge of film, his voice in particular delivers an immersive quality that puts viewers in the moment of this historical event.”
Thompson likens taking the helm of a feature documentary with so little experience to driving an 18wheel semi across the country with only a learner’s permit. But that’s not evident in an assured debut where performance footage blends with interviews and archival materials without ever losing the immersive, percussive quality of the music. He credits his success to understanding what he wanted from the film. He remembers seeing Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack’s 2018 Aretha Franklin documentary, “Amazing Grace.”
In that cinema verité distillation of two 1972 shows, the Queen of Soul and a choir at the New Bethel Baptist Church in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts perform before an audience that includes Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts. The sight of two Rolling Stones in the film without any kind of context to their appearance piqued Thompson’s curiosity.
“Why is Mick Jagger 20 feet from Aretha Franklin?” he recalled wondering when he first watched the film. “But they never take you there, they keep you right in the moment. I knew that we should stay right in the moment.
“However, the film nerd in me wants to always have context and trivia … like my version of ‘PopUp Video’ on VH1 back in the day. So, for me, that was the trickiest thing. My first cut was like three hours and 35 minutes. It was a little too much information.”
When “Summer of Soul” premiered at Sundance in January, it was less than a year after the murder of George Floyd, only months after a summer of Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of his death and nine days after the Capitol insurrection. The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival took place a year after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and at the height of the Vietnam War, a time of mass protests. The parallels between eras were not lost on Thompson.
“Especially with trying to figure out where this film is going to land in the hearts of Gen Z and Millennials — my generation, Gen X, knows acts like Sly and the Family Stone because of sampling, and my parents and grandparents lived through the time period — it was important for me to show in context where we were and the circumstances that made this concert happen in a way that’s so glaringly obvious that I didn’t have to spell it out,” Thompson said.
“I didn’t have to use any Black Lives Matter footage or footage of the last administration, because it’s obvious, the mirroring of what hap
pened 50 years ago. It’s almost like a shared experience that connects us all together.”