TREASURE trove
‘Summer of Soul’ is a stirring documentary
I lost count of how many times my jaw dropped while watching “Summer of Soul: (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).” ● Let’s just say a lot. The documentary, directed by Ahmir-Khalib Thompson (better known as Questlove), has that effect. Combining stunning performances and contemporary interviews with people like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Chris Rock, the film tells the story of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival — six consecutive Sundays of Black music and culture that attracted huge crowds.
And somehow it disappeared under the radar, despite being filmed with several cameras and recorded with pristine audio. Instead, the footage sat on a shelf for 50 years. Now Thompson has edited it into a film that is inspirational, educational, downright essential — and yes, it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.
Does it ever.
Many acts are great.
Mahalia Jackson and
Mavis Staples are transcendent
On the jaw-dropping front, if the total number escapes me, I do know the first time — immediately, right at the start, when a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder is introduced to the crowd and starts singing with joyous clarity.
Certainly when Sly and the Family Stone sauntered onstage in a kind of dress rehearsal for Woodstock, held upstate a couple of weeks later. It always seems faintly ridiculous when someone describes a performance as “incendiary,” but if it ever fits, this is the time.
Without question when Nina Simone played, sang, spoke and generally tore things up with her intensity and challenge to the audience to fight for themselves, and for their culture — for their lives.
But when Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples duet on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” it’s not jaw dropping. It’s not even great.
It is transcendent. It’s stand-up-andcheer stuff.
How has this never been seen? Truly, that performance alone, and its introduction, in part by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who talked about how Mahalia Jackson had sung the song several times for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been assassinated months before, makes the movie worth seeing. Both Mahalia Jackson and Staples, in contemporary interviews, talk about the performance. Jackson wasn’t feeling well, Staples says, and asked if she could help her out.
What a moment. What a movie.
The concert series hit at just the right time, as the Black Power movement was gaining strength. But that brought a backlash. King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. It was a time both fraught and promising. Somehow, the performances capture that dichotomy. The interviews, some with performers, others with people who were in the audience,
drive it home.
The movie is about music, yes, but also about Blackness
The subject is music, yes, but it’s also Blackness, and the importance of one to the other and beyond. The 5th Dimension perform — like everyone else, the sonic clarity is amazing, especially since Questlove has said he had to do very little work to clean it up. They sing the “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”
medley from “Hair” that was a No. 1 hit. As he does with others, Questlove shows band members Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., the performance on a monitor, and then films their reactions.
That alone is interesting. McCoo gets choked up, and it’s moving. But so, too, is McCoo’s saying that some people in the Black community didn’t think the Fifth Dimension was Black enough — they sounded like a white group. That was not by design, she assures. It’s just what their voices sounded like.
And that is why this performance, in this setting — a Black group singing for Black fans in Harlem — was so incredibly important to them. It was proof, she says, that they belong. It’s another type of inclusion.
Of course, you could just watch this for the performances and it would still be one of the best movies of the year. But why sell yourself short? Watch it for everything that it is, a kind of miraculously unearthed treasure trove of music and politics and culture and soul. So much soul.
Whatever it takes to get you there. It doesn’t really matter, as long as you arrive.