Woodstock, Apollo-11, Country Joe McDonald and Neil Armstrong. For the United States, for the rest of the world, the summer of 1969 remains defined by these two celebrations, that of protesting youth and that of American technological supremacy. It took more than half a century for another major event of the period to resurface. It was also a free outdoor musical gathering. A gathering of around 300,000 people, gathered to listen to Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, BB King, Nina Simone, Max Roach or Sly and the Family Stone, in the middle of Manhattan.
The remarkable documentary by Ahmir Thompson, alias Questlove, drummer and rapper of the group The Roots, makes its rightful place at the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, which, in six concerts, from Sunday June 29, made New Yorkers hear this that African-American music offered the best. A stage had been set up in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park), in the heart of Harlem, entry was free (Woodstock only became a free concert because the organizers could not control entry). Around the park, street vendors offered fried chicken and iced tea. In 1969, the Harlem Cultural Festival, founded by the charming singer Tony Lawrence, was in its third edition, the most massive, funded by private patrons – including the Maxwell Café – supported by New York City Hall.
Give your time to music
Filmed on videotapes, under the aegis of producer Hal Tulchin, who has preserved them as best he could, the images found, restored and reassembled by Questlove and his team show this almost idyllic atmosphere. In the park, all generations come together in the rain or under a blazing sun, depending on the Saturday. The young people came to hear the stars of Motown, Stevie Wonder or Gladys Knight, their elders are there for the jazz of Abbey Lincoln, for the gospel of Mahalia Jackson. The effect is radically different from that evoked by the vision of the masses of Woodstock: in Mount Morris Park, it is a community which comes together, at her place; on the farm 300 kilometers north of Manhattan, gather a crowd of escapees breaking with the system, convinced, wrongly, to reach the goal – peace and love.
These sequences describe a reality of Harlem different from that which the films of blaxploitation or the Republican electoral arguments would propose.
If it were just those shots of the audience in Harlem, where pale faces are as rare as colored faces will be a few weeks later in Woodstock, Summer of soul would be worth seeing. These sequences describe a reality of Harlem different from that which the films of blaxploitation or the Republican electoral arguments would propose. The benevolence and patience of the public, the diversity of elegance, from Sunday dresses as we see in church to African-inspired dashikis, everything goes without saying.
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