AHMIR THOMPSON: In the beginning, I was like, OK, let me watch Woodstock.
CORNISH: But a few years back, Thompson, best known as drummer and composer with The Roots, was asked to direct a music documentary about another legendary concert, one you probably haven’t heard about – the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of free shows at the city’s Mount Morris Park that ran six weekends in the summer of 1969.
GLADYS KNIGHT: Baby, baby, baby, about your plan to make me blue with some other girl you knew before.
Black artistry and how it’s defined, seen and embraced – those are some of the ideas that preoccupy Questlove Thompson.
I spoke to him and some of the producers on the project after a Sundance screening earlier this year.
JOSEPH PATEL: The tape itself is this – in this gorgeous Tiffany Blue case.
And the producers approached Questlove, an author, DJ and composer who had not yet added director to his list of titles.
And so I would say in the very beginning, I felt like, oh, well, this is too historical for a first-time driver to be at the wheel, so maybe you don’t want to, you know, leave it in my hands.
Like, the first thing that I will ask any of my agents, be it a Roots gig or something that I curated or even a DJ gig, I want to know the makeup of what the audience is because it’s almost like I don’t trust people’s mind to be that open.
But I can’t help but wondering had there been, you know, 200,000 people that crashed the gates, that were just tripping the whole time – like, if that would have happened at the Harlem Cultural Festival, would that had the same sort of romantic revision of, you know, a moment of a generation that Woodstock had? And the answer, sadly, is no.
THOMPSON: One of the key reasons why I felt kind of a sense of purpose for this film was that back in the late ’60s, you know, Bill Withers and Curtis Mayfield weren’t, like, billion-dollar industries.
And I’m not saying that the burden has to fall on us as a people to always say the right thing and to say the most politically correct thing and to always have – you know, no one has to be a straight-A student to that level.
CORNISH: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is the director of “Summer Of Soul,” out tomorrow in theaters and on Hulu.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR.