It’s Time for Summer of Soul!

I know the first movie that will lure me back to a theater — Summer of Soul, the documentary about six magical days of music at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, featuring such brilliant performers as Stevie Wonder, the Staples Singers, B. B. King and Gladys Knight and the Pips. But it was the spotlighting of Sly and the Family Stone, one of my favorite acts of all time, that got me really pumped up for the San Francisco premiere of the film on July 4 weekend. New York Times critic Wesley Morris crafted a beautiful essay about the film, whose long-forgotten footage was unearthed and turned into a feature by Questlove. Here’s how he ends his review, and I wholeheartedly share his awe for Sly and his band:

“(Questlove) winds things down with Sly and the Family Stone doing ‘Higher.’ That band was male and female, Black and white — weird, rubbery, ecstatic, yet tight, hailing from no appreciable tradition, inventing one instead. It’s been more than half a century, and I still don’t know where these cats came from. They simply seem sent from an American future that no one has to mourn.”

Sly and his fellow musicians came from the East Bay — but it’s true they might have come from outer space, extraterrestrials sent to take us higher. They were racially and sexually ambiguous in the same way that two other West Coast musical phenomena of the time were — Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Lee, leader of the band Love. Like Hendrix and Lee — and the Chambers Brothers (also featured in the film) — they were African American and Native American and white hippie soul brothers who could play R&B, gospel, jazz, rock, flamenco, you name it. They were intergalactic shooting stars — here and gone in a flash. But I’m so glad that some of their lightning was caught on film. “Everybody is a star.” We need that inspiration again.