Can't Wait to Watch This

I consider myself to be a bit of a rock & roll know-it-all, but until a few days ago I'd never even HEARD of the The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Thankfully it's finally getting it's due to a wide audience 50 years later, thanks to Questlove. And it sounds fucking amazing:

It was certainly never forgotten by the hundreds of thousands of people who attended it, many of whom are still with us and some of whom appear in Questlove’s film. What the festival has not been is available to watch, even though a professional film crew filmed it; the footage sat unreleased for 50-plus years before Questlove brought it to the screen.  

Summer of Soul includes some wonderful retrospective testimonials from performers, including Gladys Knight, Mavis Staples, and Stevie Wonder. But even more affecting are present-day interviews with audience members, many of whom were adolescents at the time and seem profoundly moved by the opportunity to revisit such a formative musical experience. Their recollections are affecting, charming, and frequently funny—one attendee recalls his shock at discovering that Greg Errico, the monstrously funky drummer of Sly and the Family Stone, was a long-haired white guy.

And of course there are the performances themselves, some of which capture absolutely legendary artists at fascinating points in their career. Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples, representing two generations of musical royalty, duet on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” notably the late Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite gospel song. A 19-year-old Stevie Wonder performs “Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day” and takes a blistering clavinet solo through a wah-wah pedal, a preview of what would soon become one of the signature sounds of Wonder’s 1970s reign. And if Summer of Soul finds Wonder on the cusp of his imperial period, it finds Sly in the full flower of his own, delivering jaw-dropping renditions of “Sing a Simple Song” and “I Want to Take You Higher” with the irresistible force of the Family Stone behind him.

The article (and I'm guessing the doc too) informs us why something this was unavailable to the general public for long and yes, it's mostly because white people suck.

ON HULU STARTING TODAY PEOPLE!!!