By Tom Jozwik
In 1969, summer of the iconic Woodstock festival in rural New York state, another music fest played out about 100 miles away, in New York City’s Mount Morris Park.
The former festival gave rise to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Woodstock” the following year. The latter, officially called the Harlem Cultural Festival and nicknamed “the Black Woodstock,” is now, after five decades, the subject of a doc as well. “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” will open in theaters, and begin streaming on Hulu, July 2.
Its publicists describe “Summer of Soul,” helmed by first-time director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, as “part music film, part historical record created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion.” The Harlem Festival consisted of six free Sunday afternoon concerts. The concerts were videotaped by TV professional Hal Tulchin, who tried subsequently to sell his handiwork to moviemakers. There was little interest in a cinematic counterpart to “Woodstock,” however, and Tulchin’s videotapes languished for some 50 years in the basement of the home he shared with his wife. Recovered after Tulchin’s 2007 passing, the footage (already of surprisingly good quality for 1969 tape recordings) was enhanced by colorist Yohance Brown and edited by Joshua L. Pearson. (Kudos also to “Summer of Soul” music supervisor Randall Poster and sound man Jimmy Douglass.)
The result is a crisp, contemporary look to a two-hour PG-13 movie combining celebrity performances/crowd reactions with interview excerpts and newscast snippets. Those snippets and comments by interviewees—Festivalgoers, performers and latter-day celebs—effectually bring back 1969 and earlier years of the ’60s. It was an era of great hope as well as great despair, an era of space exploration and political and civil rights heroes like the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, yet an era which saw the assassinations of those same heroes and warfare raging not only in far-off Vietnam but on the streets of cities across America.
Viewers hear from the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Chris Rock, and they revisit the Harlem Festival presentations of numerous groups and individuals. Personal favorites include The 5th Dimension’s “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In,” The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day” and David Ruffin’s “My Girl” (although I prefer the earlier rendition by David Ruffin and The Temptations). Among the other performers shown are Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Gladys Knight & the Pips, B.B. King and Sly & the Family Stone.
More than 300,000 people, the great majority of them people of color, attended the Harlem Festival and listened to what one “Summer of Soul” speaker calls “a cross section of the music that was happening at the time”--blues, jazz, gospel and Latin, among other genres. Finally, folks of all races can see and hear at least a fraction of what those audiences did.
We wouldn’t be surprised if, after another several months, “Summer of Soul” follows “Woodstock” as a documentary Oscar nominee. The film whose subtitle recalls an old Black Power slogan won a couple of prizes at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.