In his 50 years, percussionist and DJ Ahmir-Khalib "Questlove" Thompson from The Roots has made toy instruments sound cool when he, Jimmy Fallon and The Roots have accompanied everyone from Carly Rae Jepsen to The Who on "The Tonight Show." He has also used his platform as a professor at New York University to introduce younger audiences to James Brown and other musical giants out of their current frame of reference.
Despite playing to legions of fans and selling countless recordings, Thompson seemed a bit tired during a Zoom news conference last week. There's the old saying that most musicians don't know there are two 10 o'clocks in a day. He also confessed, "Of all the things that I've done creatively, this is the one that I've been really, really nervous about, and by nervous about, I mean scared, partly because I'm a perfectionist."
Before we wondered if he needed time on the couch, he quickly added, "This film has really brought out an awareness and a confidence I never knew that I ever had. Without being all touchy feely with it, this project more than anything has helped me as a human being. For all the journalists out there, you know that artists can be really neurotic, living inside our heads."
The documentary in question is "Summer of Soul (... Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised)," which unearths footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival at Mt. Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in the Big Apple. Questlove whittled down nearly 40 hours of footage from six concerts recorded during the summer of that year, including one show that took place while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon.
The film opens in theaters and on Hulu today.
The two-hour film presents performances by Sly & the Family Stone, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight & the Pips and gospel giant Mahalia Jackson. The film also presents the context that led to the breathtaking performances. While Stone and the Staples Singers may have both had their roots in gospel, the sounds could not be more different. The performances were also overtly political. Because Laura Ingraham wasn't around to tell the performers to shut up and sing, Simone called for revolution from the stage, and gospel performers like The Edwin Hawkins Singers made their ministry to the catchiest beat possible.
The free concerts drew nearly 300,000 people and earned a mention from Walter Cronkite during a broadcast where he was discussing Apollo 11. For over five decades, the footage that New York television veteran Hal Tulchin shot sat in storage. Some of the music aired on New York television, but a little music festival that took place 100 miles to the north called "Woodstock" got all the attention.
Not to diminish the performances by Carlos Santana and Jimi Hendrix (whom the Harlem Cultural Festival rejected) at the, um, other festival, seeing a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder deliver a jaw dropping drum solo or B.B. King giving his guitar Lucille a workout are also classic moments.
Tulchin, who died in 2017, tried to sell the 2-inch videotape footage as "Black Woodstock" but found no takers. Time has proved his confidence in the performances was justified. "Summer of Soul" won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and the movie currently has a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Thompson first saw footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1997 in Japan but had no idea that it was shot in America (the only angle was from the sky) or that it would later become a passion project when the rest of the footage became available 20 years later.
According to Thompson, the neglect of the event and the performances that took place there is all too common.
"This is a step forward. This if the first time I'm seeing conversations that were never had before, especially post-pandemic," Thompson explained. "This isn't the only story out there. Probably the most shocking thing I've learned in the last month, I've gotten DMs (direct messages) from professors at universities that blah-blah-blah-blah-blah shot concert for 20 hours for something they did in New York," he recalled.
"This (Tulchin's) isn't the only footage that's lying around unscathed. There's about six to seven others. Perhaps maybe this film can be a sea of change for these stories to get out or to acknowledge that even something as minuscule as content on social media or something as giant as one of the first Black festivals is important to our history."
He added, "This is not my last rodeo with telling these stories. If anything, I'm even more obsessed, more than ever, to make sure that history is correct so that we don't forget who this artist is or what that event is.
One key part of the story was interviewing attendees and surviving musicians. Thompson also made sure that the film acknowledged that gospel was an integral part of the civil rights movement as well as the music played that summer in Harlem.
"I see gospel and free jazz as one-in-the-same thing," he explained. "I wanted people to know it's more of a therapeutic thing than anything. If there's a gospel singer that's catching the spirit or if it's Sonny Sharrock doing one of the most destructive, violent guitar solos I've ever seen. I wanted people to know that this just isn't black people acting wild and crazy. This is a therapeutic thing. For a lot of us, gospel music was the channel because we didn't know about dysfunctional families and therapy and life coaches we have now."
Pioneering comedian Moms Mabley appeared at the festival, but blink, and you'll miss her in the movie. Thompson lamented, "The one genre that I truly left out was comedy because it would have taken me a good 20 minutes for me to make sense of how the humor of the day worked for the audience, why they were killing."
If Tulchin did anything to make Thompson's job easier, it was in using 2-inch video tape, which stayed crisp and had what the rookie director called a "soap-opera" look. Nonetheless, getting it digitized took months and simply lifting the material was another matter.
"One of those canisters had to have been about 17 pounds, so even when we show you that scene at the very end where we show, like, all the tapes piled onto each other, that was a damn workout," Thompson said.
Nonetheless when asked about getting the sound upgraded to where it was worthy of an IMAX auditorium, Thompson admitted, "There's two million dollar questions of this film that are still unanswered: One, as hard as I tried, I could not get any direct connection to Tony Lawrence (who founded, organized and hosted the festival). I don't know if he's alive or dead. The only paper trail of him is other people that we found. The other thing was: How could that audio be so pristine? The audio that you hear in the movie -- this is not to discredit our wonderful sound team, including Jimmy Douglass. He's the only engineer I've used on my albums, which I never had to micromanage. We had to do 2% adjustment on the audio. The reference mix, it sounded perfect."
His time as a drummer has clearly influenced his filmmaking. The film ends with Musa Jackson, who was all of 5 when he saw the Festival, discover that his vivid memories were real and not a fantasy. It's easy to share his overwhelming emotions.
"Usually the last 10 minutes of a show or presentation is your chance to 'Men in Black' flashy thing your audience. I've had disastrous Roots shows where I knew if I do these last few songs, they'll forget about what happened in the middle of the show. That happens a lot. That's a trick I play."