Questlove On Summer Of Soul (Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) — An Empire Podcast Interview Special

The Empire Film Podcast

Bauer Media

Tv & Film, Film Reviews

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson's BAFTA and Oscar-nominated Summer Of Soul (Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is one of the finest directorial debuts in years, as the Roots drummer/musical maestro crafts a powerful and profound documentary that charts the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, a music festival that took place in the same summer as Woodstock, and yet didn't receive nearly the same cultural cachet. In fact, footage of the festival lay, untouched, for almost 50 years before Questlove was clued in as to its existence, resolving to make this movie. The resulting documentary, one of the favourites to win Best Documentary on both sides of the Pond, is part celebration of the amazing artists who played at the Festival, but also a compelling deep dive into Black history, Black culture, Black joy and, as he tells Chris Hewitt in this exclusive interview, the notion of Black erasure. They also talk about Questlove's relationship with the material, finding interviewees for the movie, and how he's going to handle attending the Oscars, as a former Musical Director of the ceremony. Enjoy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, Paul, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to yet another Empire podcast interview special.
0:19.8	This one is dedicated to a fascinating chat I had earlier this week with a legendary
0:24.2	musician Amir Thompson, perhaps better known as Questlove about his directorial debut,
0:30.5	the excellent documentary Summer of Soul, or when the revolution could not be televised.
0:37.7	It's an account of the Harlem Cultural Festival, which was an event that took place in the
0:42.4	Harlem community of New York across several Sundays in the summer of 1969.
0:48.6	Despite attracting crowds of around 300,000 people, despite featuring artists like Stevie
0:53.8	Wanderer, Slian the Family Stone, the Fifth Dimension, Nina Simone, BB King, and many, many
1:00.4	more, it was overshadowed significantly by Woodstock, which also took place at summer and became
1:07.0	a cultural touchstone while the Harlem Community Festival became little more than a rumor,
1:12.5	scarcely believed even by people who actually attended.
1:16.8	Even when it was nicknamed Black Woodstock, the needle barely moved on the cultural
1:20.9	dial. In fact, Questlove hadn't even heard of it until a few years ago when he was in
1:25.3	Japan and someone showed him footage of the festival, sparking in him a desired chronicle
1:30.0	this incredible happening. But when he sat down to assemble the 40 hours of footage that
1:35.1	existed of the festival, he found his goals and his aims changing.
1:40.2	What emerged is an astonishing documentary that is at once a celebration of music and
1:46.6	the incredible artists who performed there that summer. It's a time capsule of sorts,
1:52.1	but it's also a timely movie, a time's eerily so about the Black experience and Black
1:57.1	history.
1:58.1	And in our wide-ranging chat, Questlove, who was in the dressing room he uses as his
2:02.0	base for his day job, being the bad leader slash drummer of the Roots, the amazing band
	...

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