You
won’t often hear this about a jazz musician, but this year, Robert Glasper is
the toast of the Tribeca Film Festival. He participated in two all-star
post-screening concerts, one for the soon to be reviewed Blue Note Records
documentary, which prominently features him in performance and the doc-profile
of African American broadcaster Haizlip and his PBS-produced variety show Soul!, which Glasper also scored. Soul! featured many jazz guests, but
filmmaker (niece) Melissa Haizlip and co-director Samuel Pollard mostly focuses
on, you know, soul. The music still moves and groves, but the rhetoric sounds awfully
dated in Haizlip’s Mr. Soul, which
screens during the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
Of
course, there was a huge, under-served market for Soul! when it premiered on New York’s (then) NET public educational
network (if you think it is hard finding an African American in the big three’s
programming from this era, just try looking for an Asian). Supposedly, the idea
was to do a show celebrating African American arts and culture, but politics
was conspicuously high in the mix, right from the start. Perhaps that is
inevitable to some extent, but when you chose up partisan sides, it makes you
fair game for some hardball.
Be
that as it may, it is pretty incredible how many great artists appeared on Soul!, including Max Roach, Lee Morgan, Horace
Silver, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Hugh Masekela, Billy Preston, Al Green,
Kool and the Gang, Ashford & Simpson, Lebelle, and Earth Wind and Fire.
Yet, it wasn’t just music. Soul! often
showcased modern dance, including dancers affiliated with Alvin Ailey and
George Faison. There is no major network talk or variety show currently broadcasting
today that gives air time to dance as a serious artform, which has truly
impoverished our culture.
However,
Haizlip interviewed guest like Louis Farrakhan and members of the Black
Panthers, largely leaving their extremist views unchallenged. The contention
Haizlip prompted Farrakhan to concede gays and lesbians (the term LGBT wasn’t
yet in the lexicon) were still human beings on some basic level, but not
necessarily socially acceptable, is embarrassingly underwhelming. You can get
far better than that from the most conservative Evangelical clergy, without any
effort. The show clearly chose a side, so they can’t act surprised when Nixon
appointees declined to continue using tax dollars to produce interviews with radicalized
militants. Had they also invited more conservative African Americans of the era,
such as Jackie Robinson, Lionel Hampton, and George Schuyler for balance, it
might have been a different story, but apparently, they didn’t.
Regardless,
the music and the dance were great—then and now. In the post-screening concert,
formatted in the style of a vintage Soul!
episode, with musical performances alternating with interview segments,
Glasper and his band laid down a strong grove backing up the acts. Alas, the
Last Poets sound like relics from a bygone era, but Kyle Abraham performed some
lovely choreography for Stevie Wonder’s “You and I.” However, Lalah Hathaway really
lived up to the show’s name with a rousing closer that definitely upheld her
soulful family tradition.
Mir. Soul! is well worth watching
just to get an eye and earful of all the great artists who performed on its
stage, but its racial-cultural politics are certainly debatable. An intriguing
time capsule (even if it is somewhat insular in perspective), Mr. Soul! screens tonight (4/23),
Wednesday (4/25), and Thursday (4/26), as part of this year’s Tribeca Film
Festival.
