In his directorial debut, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson investigates forgotten scenes from a series of Harlem concerts in 1969, which featured a who’s who of black acts.
Few people know his name, but half a century ago, Tony Lawrence created something extraordinary in the middle of New York City. And few people know the name Hal Tulchin, but he documented the feat. It was called the Harlem Cultural Festival and, over six weekends in the summer of 1969, it exhibited more than five dozen acts and attracted 300,000 people, who did not pay a cent to attend – are you ready? – Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, BB King, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone. To name just a few of the artists, some at their peak and some innovative newbies, who graced the outdoor stage.
But this monumental line-up of the stars – what some would later call the Black Woodstock – generated little media attention, in part because it was overshadowed by the real Woodstock, which took place during the event’s penultimate weekend and just a few hours north, making Max Yasgur’s farm zero for a generation. Still, it is a lame excuse for the scarcity of headlines, or for the networks’ lack of interest in the cleverly filmed (under specification) footage of TV director Tulchin of high voltage programming. The local CBS station showed some highlights, but nationwide there were no buyers.
Thus, the subtitle of Summer of the Soul, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s electrifying documentary about these concerts and the political climate in which they took place – a caption that refers to an immortal phrase from the late great Gil Scott-Heron: Or, when the revolution could not be televised. The footage was kept for decades, until Summer of the SoulThe company’s producers began launching its long-awaited spotlight.
It is no surprise that Thompson, an accomplished and celebrated musician, has a knack for revealing the emotional core of performances. Ahead of a feature film for the first time, he also lends the material a long-lost look to a long-time director, approaching it in three eloquently intertwined narrative tracks: the knockout concerts themselves; a 1969 piercing capsule portrait as a turning point in black identity; and a collection of adorable Boomer reminiscences from those there, some on stage and some in the audience. The film captures several of them as they view the previously unseen footage, dazzling evidence of a moment in time that has apparently been eliminated from official history.
The result is felt deeply on both sides of the timeline, drawing clear parallels between two galvanizing historical periods, then and now. A selection on the opening night of the first virtual edition of Sundance, Summer of the Soul it is as thoughtful as it is stimulating, a welcome injection of adrenaline to start not just a film festival, but a new year.
From the evidence of the film, Lawrence, the producer and emcee of the Harlem festival, was an extraordinary schmoozer with a predilection for elegant suits and puffed shirts. (He is also a mystery, his current whereabouts are unknown, despite the filmmakers’ concentrated efforts to find him.) Lawrence secured the support of the city’s Parks Department and the sponsorship of Maxwell House (Thompson includes a revealing Africa-centric commercial) for the coffee brand). Even with financial support, however, there was no money for the lights, requiring the stage for the late afternoon shows to face west. The liberal mayor, John V. Lindsay, receives a warm welcome when introduced on stage by Lawrence as “our blue-eyed spiritual brother”. But relations with the NYPD were another matter, and the Black Panthers signed on to provide security.
Compared to familiar scenes from the countercultural convergence of Woodstock, the Harlem festival, with its audience of all ages, is an absolutely healthy event. The stage ads are about portfolios, not bad acid. For Musa Jackson, a child at the time who attended with his family, and whose delighted reactions to the filming ended the film perfectly, the party was “the ultimate black barbecue” and “the first time I saw so many of us.” this was also the case for the performers. Gladys Knight remembers being “totally, totally surprised” by the crowd he met at Mount Morris Park, a meeting that one participant described as “a sea of black”.
Among the highlights of Summer of the Soul it’s a chance to witness Billy Davis and Marilyn McCoo of The 5th Dimension, watching, for the first time, their group’s performance that far-away summer. In waves of love from the audience, the exuberance of their younger selves increases. The same is true of the couple’s emotions when they remember the feeling of doing their first show in Harlem. For a pop-oriented group deemed “not black enough” by some, connecting with that neighborhood crowd was deeply important. A strong sense of kinship between fans and artists pulsates in each frame of the doctor’s show scenes.
The music spans the entire range: classic R&B (King), contemporary gospel (the Edwin Hawkins Singers, with the earthy contralto of Dorothy Combs Morrison), Motown (Gladys and those stimulating synchronized Pips; a fresh, scorching David Ruffin -out of Temptations), newfangled pop (The 5th Dimension), psychedelic soul (Sly and her utopian big-band constellation, complete with trumpeter and white drummer). Jazz ranges from bebop Roach legend to avant-garde Sonny Sharrock, Latin conductor Ray Barretto and South African innovator Hugh Masekela. There’s comedy, too: summarized stage routines and, in a post-credit coda, a little bit of false conflict between Stevie Wonder and her music director, Gene Key.
With 39 songs on the soundtrack, most are not played in full, but it is a testament to Tulchin’s dynamic footage (he implanted five video cameras), Thompson’s artful direction choices and Joshua L. Pearson’s exquisite editing with an uncomfortable “snippet-itis” feeling never intrudes. The music flows, intensified rather than hindered by the intercalation of new interviews and old documentaries.
The figures that appear in full are stunning, the detonator being a six-minute sequence that is likely to cause chills in the spine while rearranging the molecules in their terrestrial form. The gospel song in question, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”, was Martin Luther King’s favorite, and it had only been a year since his murder when Mavis Staples and his idol, Mahalia Jackson, dug up their verses and fired.
Even for non-gospel acts, the alchemy of regret and joy of this kind is expressed in many of the presentations. This is the fuse that blows Summer of the Soul, and possibly through much of black American culture: a resilient way to tackle deeply rooted violence and injustice. Journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of the film’s exceptional interviewees, recalls the strength and comfort that derived from Nina Simone’s records when she was being harassed by white students at the University of Georgia, where she was one of the first two black students to break the color barrier in 1961.
The doc ponders the long-term prospects of leading activists – among them Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson (a concert participant as Operation Breadbasket initiative leader) and Denise Oliver-Velez, ex-Young Lords – and delights in the arrival of memories deity. Sometimes they are one and the same. Writer and musician Greg Tate offers incisive comments on the fundamental shift among black Americans, around 1969, to identify themselves as “Negro”, and how it was expressed in music and fashion, as well as in politics.
Thompson and Pearson’s fluent interweaving of concert performances and the social backdrop reaches a sublime peak in a sequence that combines Staples’ “It’s Been a Change” with festival reactions, for a local story, landing on the moon, which coincided with the third weekend of the festival. Music and sounds mark the awakening of the bases.
what Summer of the Soul it looks and sounds as good as it is a considerable technical achievement. But more than that, the preservation of Tulchin’s 50-year-old images restores a vital piece for the chronicle of a period defined by social unrest, anti-war fervor, artistic pioneering spirit and liberation movements that still reverberate today. Tulchin, who died in 2017, hoped this documentary would be his legacy. There is no doubt about it, for him and for the high-spirited showman and showman Lawrence.
The Harlem Cultural Festival was a declaration of black pride. The power of Thompson’s film is the way he explores the urgency of the moment on a personal level, as well as on a broader scale, and his deep understanding that they are inseparable. “Are you ready, black people?” royal commander Simone asks the public. Get ready, music and cinema lovers: for two fascinating hours, the communion between the artists and a summer crowd leaps from the screen and over the years.
Location: Sundance Film Festival (US documentary competition)
Producers: Vulcan Productions, Concordia Studio, Play / Action Pictures, LarryBilly Productions, Mass Distraction Media, RadicalMedia
Director: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
Producers: David Dinerstein, Robert Fyvolent, Joseph Patel
Executive producers: Jen Isaacson, Jon Kamen, Dave Sirulnick, Jody Allen, Ruth Johnston, Rocky Collins, Jannat Gargi, Beth Hubbard, Davis Guggenheim, Laurene Powell Jobs, Jeffrey Lurie, Marie Therese Guirgis, David Barse, Ron Eisenberg, Sheila Johnson, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
Director of Photography: Shawn Peters
Editor: Joshua L. Pearson
Sales: Cinetic Media
117 minutes