Soul Asylum

Toward the end of SUMMER OF SOUL, his phenomenal new documentary about a summer music festival so buried by history that even some of the people who were there had a hard time convincing themselves it actually happened, QUESTLOVE plays a clip of NINA SIMONE's famous quote about how "an artist's duty is to reflect the times." Simone, as it happens, was there at the summer-long HARLEM CULTURAL FESTIVAL in 1969. As were STEVIE WONDER and SLY & THE FAMILY STONE and MAHALIA JACKSON and the STAPLE SINGERS and GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS and MAX ROACH and ABBEY LINCOLN and a summer's worth of other stars, performing for a heavily Black audience in a Harlem park in a watershed year in Black history. A year when, to quote the REV. AL SHARPTON, "the Negro dies and Black was born." The cultural revolution was reflected that summer in New York in a dizzying array of performances that obeyed Simone's dictum in an equally dizzying number of ways, from the Staples' gospel blues to the Family Stone's psychedelic soul (and fashion choices) to RAY BARRETTO's Afro-Caribbean syncopation to the 5TH DIMENSION's almost radically colorless pop. ("How do you color a sound?," the 5D's MARILYN MCCOO wonders today as she looks at footage of her own performance for the first time in more than 50 years.)

A somewhat more famous music festival happened 100 miles away that summer, and on the same day that Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and DAVID RUFFIN were tearing it up in what was then called MOUNT MORRIS PARK, history's most celebrated landing of a manned craft happened some 239,000 miles away. Both of those events have been remembered on reels and reels of film. The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed, too, but almost all the footage spent the next half-century in filmmaker HAL TULCHIN's basement, unprocessed and unseen, having been rejected by networks who assumed no one would watch. It was considered too Black. (Whoever decided no one would want to watch Mahalia Jackson and MAVIS STAPLES duet on an Earth- and Heaven-moving version of "PRECIOUS LORD TAKE MY HAND" has no soul, no heart and no relationship with any spiritual being. It may be one of the greatest live music performances ever filmed.) Few people knew the footage existed, and over time, as a result, fewer and fewer people knew the festival had existed.

Questlove's "Summer of Soul," which opened over the holiday weekend in theaters and on Hulu, is many things at once. It's a concert film that restores highlight after highlight of spectacular, previously unseen footage. From the CHAMBERS BROTHERS, whose "UPTOWN" serves as a sort of opening musical theme, to the extended time given to Wonder and Simone toward the end, the performances are consistently great, chosen with a connoisseur's (or, considering the filmmaker, a DJ's) ear. It's also sort of a filmed version of Questlove's music-nerd Instagram feed, pairing the footage with amazing—and telling—anecdotes about many of the performers. And a civil rights documentary that itself lives up to Simone's dictum by placing the summer's events squarely in the context of contemporary Black history, much of which resonates loudly in the #BlackLivesMatter era. Journalist CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT tells Questlove how she persuaded the New York Times to stop using "Negro" around that time and to start using "Black" instead. It's only within the past year, you may find yourself remembering, that the Times and other news sites began capitalizing that B. In a lighter take on the cultural revolution, Questlove uses some editing magic to follow Gladys Knight & the Pips, with their matching outfits and tightly choreographed dance steps, with Sly & the Family Stone, who had actually played three weeks earlier. The Family Stone's stage presence was aggressively loose, from their clothing to their casual sense of starting times to not bothering to tune their instruments before they arrived onstage. "My group of four guys, we were suit and tie guys," one man who was in the audience tells Questlove. "Then we saw Sly. And we were no longer suit and tie guys. The change was in effect." So much history embedded in the music, and in the presentation.

Finally, "Summer of Soul" is a festival-sized reclamation project. By simply telling the story, Questlove has written it into history where it belongs. The Harlem Cultural Festival, once forgotten, is no more. That change is in effect, too, with the permanence that film is uniquely suited to offer.

(Congrats, once again, to my friend JOSEPH PATEL, who produced along with ROBERT FYVOLENT and DAVID DINERSTEIN. A monumental work.)

Etc Etc Etc

A TRIBE CALLED QUEST did not partner with ROYALTY EXCHANGE to sell a share of the royalties of its five albums via NFT, as originally reported last week. The seller was an unaffiliated rightsholder who acquired a small piece of those royalties without the group's knowledge, according to an ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD Facebook post... BRITNEY SPEARS' longtime manager, LARRY RUDOLPH, has resigned, and the court-appointed lawyer who represents Spears in her conservatorship has asked the court for permission to do the same... RADIOHEAD, FOALS and GLASS ANIMALS have helped the British music magazine NIGHTSHIFT raise the £12,000 it needed to stay afloat... Brooklyn experimentalist L'RAIN and Oakland producer/composer SPELLLING live on KEXP, in separate, compelling sessions... What was the earliest music?

Rest in Peace

Mahavishnu Orchestra bassist RICK LAIRD... Uriah Heep and Lucifer's Friend singer JOHN LAWTON... Italian pop star and actress RAFFAELLA CARRÀ... Armenian duduk player and composer JIVAN GASPARYAN... Rockabilly and country singer SANFORD CLARK... JAMES DUKES JR., bass singer for '70s Chicago soul group Heaven and Earth.