American filmmaker and musician and songwriter Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson discusses his Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), about the star-packed but shamefully mothballed Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, with Academy Award-winning doc director Asif Kapadia (Amy, Senna, Diego Maradona).
Summer of Soul, featuring the likes of Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone and Nina Simone, is short-listed for a Doc Feature Academy Award and long-listed for a Doc BAFTA.
Click here to see the whole conversation between Questlove and Kapadia.
When did Questlove first hear about the 1969 festival, Kapadia wanted to know, and how did he get involved in the doc project? It all started in a restaurant in Japan back in 1997, Questlove answers, when he and his band were on tour, and classic footage of Sly and the Family Stone was being played on a big screen.
“My translator for my press day marveled at my Afro and said you might like to have dinner at the Soul Train cafe. It was like a restaurant with a Soul Train theme in Tokyo, and basically they show these vintage performance videos on the screen on the walls. So that’s the first time this visualization of it [the Harlem festival] came to me,” Questlove remembers.
“Initially, you know, I was just under the impression that America really wasn’t big on festivals,” he continues. “I knew about Woodstock, of course, we all know about Woodstock, Live Aid and Farm Aid and, you know, Lollapalooza. Like, you could name all of America’s festivals on one hand. So naturally I thought it was a European festival…So it wasn’t until 20 years later in which I had gotten word that these two producers, David Dinerstein and Robert Fyvolent, [were] interested in having me look at some of this festival from Harlem to see if I wanted to direct it. And my immediate reaction was, it’s not on Google, so it didn’t exist…”
Questlove elaborates: “It’s weird, for those that are really familiar with my life as a musician and producer, especially if they follow me on social media, I’ve pretty much established myself as a three Michelin star, five-star music snob. So there’s always two or three guys every year trying to trap me into something that I didn’t know about, like, you know, ‘do you have this Prince sound check from Germany 1986, Amir?’…People were always trying to, like, one up me. So I clearly thought this was the case [he laughs]. Like these two guys…trying to convince me that there was one point in time when Sly and the Family Stone and Stevie Wonder did this concert for 300,000 people – [but] not one person can tell you about it!”
Questlove further tells Kapadia that he had to think hard before taking on the project, but when he embraced the idea it was more than just to present a record of a festival held over half a century ago. “I instantly went from, ‘hey, this might be a cool idea to this might be above my pay grade, because at this point I’m seeing that history has to be restored.”
“Not just me put putting together a documentary… but really in my heart, this was my chance to correct history.”
