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Festival co-founder and host Chaz Ebert kickstarted the 2022 Ebertfest with “Summer of Soul,” directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. The film showcases newly restored footage of concert performances from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival featuring artists such as Stevie Wonder, B.B King, Gladys Knight and Nina Simone, among many others.
Heavily overlooked next to the Woodstock festival happening that same summer 100 miles north, the Harlem festival made a huge impact on its outdoor audiences and then basically disappeared for nearly 50 years. The festival was a celebration of Black history, culture, music, and politics highlighting prominent figures in the civil rights movement. The neglect of this video footage, found stored away in a basement, reflects the particular mistreatment of Black people and their stories. Films like “Summer of Soul” push against this treatment, placing Black musical artists as fully worthy of being archived in our cultural memory.
One of the film’s modern-day interview subjects, festival attendee Musa Jackson, calls the Harlem festival the “ultimate Black barbecue,” attended by thousands of men and women embracing popular late ‘60s attire including dashikis and headwraps. People embraced their African identity as resistance to conformity, with a display of their Black pride.
“Summer of Soul” covers a mix of genres of blues, jazz, gospel, folk, Latin music or a combination thereof, with a rich variety of artists expressing a full diversity of influences within the Black community, especially in the Harlem area. But “back then, musical was segregated,” Billy Davis Jr., a member of the Fifth Dimension, says in the documentary. “Pop groups weren’t playing Black music, and Black groups weren’t playing pop music. And so we were caught in the middle.” Fellow Fifth Dimension legend Marilyn McCoo, recalling how it stung when she heard complaints in 1969 about the group’s so-called “white sound,” says simply: “How do you color a sound?”
“Summer of Soul” pushes musical boundaries with gospel singers like Pop Staples and the Staple Singers, or bands indebted to Afro-Latino presence/influences. The film leaves us with the question of why Black voices, particularly those featured in this concert footage, are so often silenced. The empty Harlem park becomes a metaphor for the forgotten festival. At the Ebertfest screening, Chicago jazz vocalist Tammy McCann performed along with the multi-genre Ther’Up band. Songwriter Clem Snide also took the stage, and all the live performances underlined the significance of coming together as a community.
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