Summer of Soul (2021)
dir. Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2021 Searchlight Pictures
The immensely talented musician and writer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson has righted a historical injustice with his debut directorial film Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). The documentary, about an, until now, almost completely forgotten music festival that took place during the same summer as Woodstock, is a work of infectious exuberance as well as a contemplative examination of why the festival was forgotten in the first place.
Focusing on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove’s picture would be a significant achievement for its restoration and presentation of the festival performances alone. Forty hours of videotape footage of the event sat in a basement for fifty years before producer Robert Fyvolent secured the rights and brought it to Questlove’s attention.
Questlove and his restoration team’s attention to detail can’t be overstated. The featured performances, picked from the six festival concert dates, look pristine. They sound even better. Legendary performers like B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, and Gladys Knight & the Pips rock both the on-screen crowd and the documentary audience. Every number that Questlove selected for his film sizzles.
Summer of Soul contains the kind of material we’ve come to expect in any documentary as far as the hard facts of the event it’s chronicling. But Questlove handles this obligatory information with enough pizazz that it never feels pro forma. His introduction of the festival’s producer, promoter, and host, New York night club singer Tony Lawrence, paints an endearing portrait of an artist dedicated to making the concert series a success.
No one in the film ever utters the phrase “Harlem Renaissance” – although the name of one of its luminaries, Langston Hughes, is invoked – but the connection between that massively influential cultural period and this music festival is almost impossible not to make. The film also features a passage focusing on the Latinx musician community’s contribution to the event. (Hamilton fans will perk up when Lin Manuel-Miranda shows up to talk about Spanish Harlem’s artistic contribution to the 1960s/70s NYC music scene.)
Questlove makes a case through his film for the kind of multicultural pluralism that, when it’s able to flourish, produces a better, healthier, more jubilant society. The movie also spends a few minutes on the novelty of the few white musicians in this mostly Black-themed event. From an anthropological lens – not to mention my own white perspective – it was interesting to pick out the few rare white faces in the dozens of shots of the festival’s crowds.
One of the most touching additions to Summer of Soul are the interviews Questlove secured with a few attendees of the Harlem Cultural Festival. One of these, a man named Musa Jackson, who was four years old when he attended the fest at Mount Morris Park, describes his impression of the concert’s friendly and cheerful vibe as being “the ultimate Black barbecue.” Musa gets emotional in a clip near the film’s end when he thanks Questlove for confirming that the concert wasn’t only in Jackson’s own mind. The festival was, in fact, a part of history, and through this project, Questlove has preserved it as such.
Many of Summer of Soul’s most electric moments come from its examination of the struggle for Black liberation, a topic that both the festival and several of its performers put front and center. The inimitable, incomparable Nina Simone’s performance, which comes late in the film, is revelatory. The firebrand singer’s set – which features a triumphant performance of a song called Are You Ready Black People – is a vision of an artist at the zenith of her power.
An archival interview with Simone includes her observation that “an artist’s job is to reflect the times.” The wake of the bloody and hard-won victories of the civil rights era saw, in the space of five years, the assassinations of JFK, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jr. – footage of the Rev. Jessie Jackson on stage at the festival, recounting his eye-witness account of MLK’s assassination is featured in the doc – and Bobby Kennedy. Simone and others reflect their times and use their talent to advance the never-ending struggle for true equality.
The film also covers how New York City mayor John Lindsey was instrumental in helping make the festival a reality, as well as the Black Panthers stepping up to provide event security when there were concerns that the NYC police department wouldn’t. Host Tony Lawrence, Mayor Lindsey and others involved in the event’s promotion saw the weeks-long festival as a way to ease tensions and reduce the chances of Black-led revolts, which had engulfed much of the country that summer. In a direct (but unspoken) tie to the aesthetic of the summer heat in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, one concert attendee comments on the apprehension he felt at the time. “I always related summertime to the potential of violence.”
If there is a critique to be made about Summer of Soul, it’s that Questlove might have had too much material with which to work. It would be easy to imagine his documentary as a longer form limited-series jawn, to use the slang term that Questlove applies to his film. (Jawn is a Philly term – Questlove’s hometown – and is used “to refer to a thing, place, person, or event that one need not or cannot give a specific name to,” according to one dictionary definition. Jawn is also believed to be derived from the word “joint,” which is what Spike Lee uses to describe his own films, as in, “A Spike Lee joint.”)
Questlove weaves all this historical context and social commentary through some extraordinary musical performances. The rhythm he establishes throughout Summer of Soul is masterful. During one of the documentary’s many emotional and artistic crescendos, in which the legendary Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples belt out a stirring rendition of Take My Hand, Precious Lord, I thought to myself, “where can it possibly go from here?”
The answer is Gladys Knight & the Pips and Sly and the Family Stone, among others. Sly Stone and his band’s set is a highlight of the film, and Questlove stops the proceedings briefly to introduce the audience to Stone’s immeasurable psychedelic-infused influence on funk and soul.
I could go on.
There is an interesting backstory sequence about the history of the group The 5th Dimension, and their struggles to be taken seriously in the Black community, as well as their performance of their biggest hit, the Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In medley. There is also an extended sequence about the gospel/Christian influence of many of the performers at the festival. I resisted the message of those performances, but the energy and talent contained therein were, even to this atheist, totally irresistible. Every bit of music contained in Summer of Soul is breathtakingly good.
It would be easy to say that Questlove’s preservation of this once-forgotten festival is his greatest achievement. The film covers how the original producers tried to sell their footage as the “Black Woodstock” in the wake of that festival’s popularity, only to be met with indifference from distributors.
Questlove’s film does so much more than only preserve. He acts as an incisive curator by adding context and commentary while securing a place in history for a significant, but neglected event.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Summer of Soul is just about everything you could want in a music documentary. It’s a rollicking good time, the musical performances are electric, and director Questlove dives deep into the times and culture that made the festival he’s covering what it was.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I must confess, before watching Summer of Soul, I had no idea that the members of The 5th Dimension weren’t white.
- Anybody else out there immediately think of Sister Act during the Oh Happy Day performance?
- I loved the footage of people mocking the moon landing with the argument that there are so many people on earth who still live in poverty. At least that space race was a collective, government-funded effort, instead of a few billionaire assholes trying to convince us with their metaphorical dicks how big their actual dicks are.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this at a late-afternoon screening on a Friday. There were probably a dozen or so people in attendance. The screening ended with a round of applause from the audience.