| Woodstock itself wasn't the life-changing event. The life-changing event was the Woodstock movie. What made Woodstock great was the fact that we were told that Woodstock was great. | | | | |  | Sly Stone at the Harlem Cultural Festival, New York, June 29, 1969. From "Summer of Soul."
(Searchlight Pictures) | | | | | "Woodstock itself wasn't the life-changing event. The life-changing event was the Woodstock movie. What made Woodstock great was the fact that we were told that Woodstock was great." | | | | Soul Asylum
Toward the end of SUMMER OF SOUL, his phenomenal new documentary about a summer music festival so buried by history that even some of the people who were there had a hard time convincing themselves it actually happened, QUESTLOVE plays a clip of NINA SIMONE's famous quote about how "an artist's duty is to reflect the times." Simone, as it happens, was there at the summer-long HARLEM CULTURAL FESTIVAL in 1969. As were STEVIE WONDER and SLY & THE FAMILY STONE and MAHALIA JACKSON and the STAPLE SINGERS and GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS and MAX ROACH and ABBEY LINCOLN and a summer's worth of other stars, performing for a heavily Black audience in a Harlem park in a watershed year in Black history. A year when, to quote the REV. AL SHARPTON, "the Negro dies and Black was born." The cultural revolution was reflected that summer in New York in a dizzying array of performances that obeyed Simone's dictum in an equally dizzying number of ways, from the Staples' gospel blues to the Family Stone's psychedelic soul (and fashion choices) to RAY BARRETTO's Afro-Caribbean syncopation to the 5TH DIMENSION's almost radically colorless pop. ("How do you color a sound?," the 5D's MARILYN MCCOO wonders today as she looks at footage of her own performance for the first time in more than 50 years.)
A somewhat more famous music festival happened 100 miles away that summer, and on the same day that Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and DAVID RUFFIN were tearing it up in what was then called MOUNT MORRIS PARK, history's most celebrated landing of a manned craft happened some 239,000 miles away. Both of those events have been remembered on reels and reels of film. The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed, too, but almost all the footage spent the next half-century in filmmaker HAL TULCHIN's basement, unprocessed and unseen, having been rejected by networks who assumed no one would watch. It was considered too Black. (Whoever decided no one would want to watch Mahalia Jackson and MAVIS STAPLES duet on an Earth- and Heaven-moving version of "PRECIOUS LORD TAKE MY HAND" has no soul, no heart and no relationship with any spiritual being. It may be one of the greatest live music performances ever filmed.) Few people knew the footage existed, and over time, as a result, fewer and fewer people knew the festival had existed.
Questlove's "Summer of Soul," which opened over the holiday weekend in theaters and on Hulu, is many things at once. It's a concert film that restores highlight after highlight of spectacular, previously unseen footage. From the CHAMBERS BROTHERS, whose "UPTOWN" serves as a sort of opening musical theme, to the extended time given to Wonder and Simon toward the end, the performances are consistently great, chosen with a connoisseur's (or, considering the filmmaker, a DJ's) ear. It's also sort of a filmed version of Questlove's music-nerd Instagram feed, pairing the footage with amazing—and telling—anecdotes about many of the performers. And a civil rights documentary that itself lives up to Simone's dictum by placing the summer's events squarely in the context of contemporary Black history, much of which resonates loudly in the #BlackLivesMatter era. Journalist CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT tells Questlove how she persuaded the New York Times to stop using "Negro" around that time and to start using "Black" instead. It's only within the past year, you may find yourself remembering, that the Times and other news sites began capitalizing that B. In a lighter take on the cultural revolution, Questlove uses some editing magic to follow Gladys Knight & the Pips, with their matching outfits and tightly choreographed dance steps, with Sly & the Family Stone, who had actually played three weeks earlier. The Family Stone's stage presence was aggressively loose, from their clothing to their casual sense of starting times to not bothering to tune their instruments before they arrived onstage. "My group of four guys, we were suit and tie guys," one man who was in the audience tells Questlove. "Then we saw Sly. And we were no longer suit and tie guys. The change was in effect." So much history embedded in the music, and in the presentation.
Finally, "Summer of Soul" is a festival-sized reclamation project. By simply telling the story, Questlove has written it into history where it belongs. The Harlem Cultural Festival, once forgotten, is no more. That change is in effect, too, with the permanence that film is uniquely suited to offer.
(Congrats, once again, to my friend JOSEPH PATEL, who produced along with ROBERT FYVOLENT and DAVID DINERSTEIN. A monumental work.)
Etc Etc Etc
A TRIBE CALLED QUEST did not partner with ROYALTY EXCHANGE to sell a share of the royalties of its five albums via NFT, as originally reported last week. The seller was an unaffiliated rightsholder who acquired a small piece of those royalties without the group's knowledge, according to an ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD Facebook post... BRITNEY SPEARS' longtime manager, LARRY RUDOLPH, has resigned, and the court-appointed lawyer who represents Spears in her conservatorship has asked the court for permission to do the same... RADIOHEAD, FOALS and GLASS ANIMALS have helped the British music magazine NIGHTSHIFT raise the £12,000 it needed to stay afloat... Brooklyn experimentalist L'RAIN and Oakland producer/composer SPELLLING live on KEXP, in separate, compelling sessions... What was the earliest music?
Rest in Peace
Mahavishnu Orchestra bassist RICK LAIRD... Uriah Heep and Lucifer's Friend singer JOHN LAWTON... Italian pop star and actress RAFFAELLA CARRÀ... Armenian duduk player and composer JIVAN GASPARYAN... Rockabilly and country singer SANFORD CLARK... JAMES DUKES JR., bass singer for '70s Chicago soul group Heaven and Earth.
| | | | Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| | |  | | The New Yorker |
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| | 'It's Fan Fiction For Music': Why Deepfake Vocals of Music Legends Are on the Rise | | by Thomas Hobbs | | Faux songs created from original vocals by star artists are becoming more popular (and more convincing), leading to murky questions of morality and legality. | |  | | VICE |
| | Vinyl Is More Popular Than Ever. Surprisingly, That's a Problem | | by Josh Terry | | Pressing plants can't keep up with unprecedented demand, and big box chains are selling LPs now, resulting in devastating delays. | |  | | The New York Times |
| | Jam & Lewis Shaped Pop History. They're Working on Its Future, Too. | | by Wesley Morris | | The writing and production duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis helped give Janet Jackson and others decades of hits. Now they're bringing their "newstalgic" sound to their own LP. | |  | | Culture Notes of an Honest Broker |
| | How Thomas Edison Changed Singing | | by Ted Gioia | | The great inventor helped launch the jazz and blues revolution—but that was the exact opposite of what he intended. | |  | | MTV News |
| | Jxdn Wants To Be Pop-Punk's Poster Child | | by Aliya Chaudhry. | | Until two years ago, the marquee TikToker had never heard punk. Now, with a little help from Travis Barker, he's leading the genre's pop resurgence. | |  | | NPR Music |
| | Caroline Shaw Is Not Here To Save Classical Music | | by Elena Saavedra Buckley | | The Pulitzer-winning, Kanye-collaborating composer began her career with a creative blank check, but she's spent much of the past decade moving sideways. Her latest trick: reinventing as a songwriter. | |  | | The Information |
| | Spotify Explores Expansion Into Events | | by Jessica Toonkel | | Spotify is considering entering the events business, using data about consumer interests gleaned from its music-streaming service to host virtual and possibly live concerts, according to people familiar with the situation. | |  | | Los Angeles Times |
| | Op-Ed: Help people like Britney Spears by reforming conservatorship laws | | by LaDoris Hazzard Cordell | | Britney Spears' plight shows that conservatorship laws need reform to ensure that they don't harm those they are supposed to protect. | |  | | Salon |
| | Being a pop star once meant baring skin -- now, for some artists, it's all about emotional stripping | | by Kristin J. Lieb | | Demi Lovato and other pop stars are increasingly opening up about their trauma. | | |  | | Music Industry Blog |
| | Emerging markets may be about to change the superstar business | | by Mark Mulligan | | The emerging markets opportunity has the western music and investment sectors salivating, but there is another layer many have missed: this shift is going to change how western record labels operate, not least by challenging the very notion of the global superstars which they trade in. | |  | | Music Business Worldwide |
| | Queen's music is making crazy money. Could it be worth over a billion dollars? | | by Tim Ingham | | MBW digs behind the finances of a band with true evergreen appeal. | |  | | Mixmag |
| | "The sound of injustice": Muqata'a turns the noise of warfare into protest music | | by Zab Mustefa | | Zab Mustefa speaks to Palestinian artist Muqata'a about life under occupation, sampling weapons of war and fighting back through music. | |  | | The Daily Beast |
| | Little Walter's Song That Changed Everything for the Blues | | by Bobby Rush | | According to blues great Bobby Rush, his mentor Little Walter's single "Juke" was like "before Jesus" and "after Jesus" for the blues world. (Excerpted from "I Ain't Studdin' Ya: My American Blues Story" by Bobby Rush with Herb Powell.) | |  | | Loud And Quiet |
| | After the freeze: what's next for Britain's DIY music scene after the pandemic? | | by Dominic Haley | | A host of independent voices from across the UK share their thoughts on what now. | |  | | NME |
| | Gig, festival and nightclub bosses talk masks, testing and COVID safety for re-opening | | by Andrew Trendell | | Figures from the worlds of gigs, festivals and nightclubs have spoken to NME about what COVID safety measures music fans in England can expect from the 'freedom day' of July 19 onwards. | | | | The New Yorker |
| | The Urge to Destroy a Violin | | by Jennifer Gersten | | An Instagram account reveals both our reverence for and our loathing of classical instruments. | |  | | The Guardian |
| | Witch: the glory and tragedy of Zambia's psych-rock trailblazers | | by James Balmont | | Influenced by British bands, the Zamrock movement dominated the 1970s until social unrest and Aids dismantled it. As a new documentary is released, Witch frontman Jagari takes a break from gemstone mining to tell his extraordinary life story. | | | | Music Business Worldwide |
| | Hipgnosis has 36 songs in Spotify's billion-plus streaming club… and more stats from the firm's annual report | | by Murray Stassen | | The 84 new catalogs acquired by the company in the 12 months ending March 2021 were bought for an aggregate purchase price of $1.089 billion, the company said. | |  | | theartsdesk.com |
| | An Oral History of Glastonbury Festival 1992 | | by Thomas H Green | | There is never one Glastonbury Festival. There are as many Glastonbury Festivals as there are people who attend. Thus it ever was, even back in 1992 when the capacity was only 70,000 (plus multitudinous fence-jumpers!). | |  | | Synchtank |
| | Could This Automated Advertising Platform Drive $3 Billion in Revenue for Catalog Music? | | by Emma Griffiths | | Westcott Multimedia gives music rights holders access to hyper-targeted programmatic advertising in order to drive recording, publishing, ticketing, and merchandise revenue. | | | |  | | | Music of the day | | "Uptown" | | Chambers Brothers |  | | YouTube |
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| | | | | Music | Media | Sports | Fashion | Tech | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in
everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" | | |  | | | Jason Hirschhorn | | CEO & Chief Curator | | |  |
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