Category: Music

Summer of Soul is excellent

Summer of Soul won a well-deserved Academy Award last night. Questlove did an outstanding job on this film.

There’s lots of great music. The film includes gospel, jazz, and Latin music as well as R&B. The performances are great. You see Stevie Wonder on the verge of greatness. Sly and the Family Stone were dynamic. As far as I know, they were the only musicians to perform in Harlem and Woodstock in 1969. I saw them in Philadelphia that year and they were great. Nina Simone’s performance was one of the highlights.

Questlove has incorporated interviews with performers and people who worked on the concerts. Some of them are seeing the footage for the first time. One great move was his inclusion of interviews with people who attended the concerts.

The best thing Questlove did was place the concerts in the context of the larger world in 1969. He rightly focuses on the fight for racial equality and even includes the moon landing (which is an indelible memory for those of us old enough to remember it).

I watched it on DVD. Now that it won an Oscar, I hope it is released on Blu-ray. The old film is in surprisingly good shape.

Questlove on ‘Summer of Soul’ Secrets, The Roots’ Future, His Sly Stone Documentary 

Mable John

Mable John is a great underappreciated R&B singer who recorded for Motown and Stax in the 1960s. There are CDs of her output on both labels and her Stax singles are on the first singles box set. Some excellent recordings were not released back then.

updated 8/26/22

Mable John passed away this week at 91 years old.

her most successful single

The cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti (1975)

The same building was used in the video for “Waiting on a Friend” by the Rolling Stones.

R.E.M.’s New Adventures in HiFi (1996) was reissued in 2021.

An excellent album.

Banjos were created by Black Americans

From the description of the video below:

“The banjo’s sound is synonymous with country, folk, and bluegrass—music as “white” as it gets. For many, it’s the quintessential American instrument. Its origin, though, lies in Africa, in various instruments featuring skin drum heads and gourd bodies. Slaves fashioned them into the modern version in the colonial Caribbean, from where it traveled, via 19th-century minstrel shows, into the very heart of American popular culture. Duke University historian Laurent Dubois, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Caribbean, traces the banjo’s extraordinary trajectory and the part it has played in the very concept of America.”

The Baltimore Museum of Industry had an exhibit on banjos in 2014 that featured a concert by Tony Trishka and Dom Flemons which I saw.

From West Africa to Baltimore: New Exhibit Explores The History Of The Banjo