SOUL POWER (Jeffrey Levy-Hinte). 92 minutes. Opens Friday (July 24). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN
While Muhammad Ali and George Foreman were training for their historic Rumble In The Jungle in Zaire, 1974, promoter Don King was putting together a massive soul music festival to accompany the match.
James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz and the Spinners were among the acts King brought to Kinshasa for his three-day fest – which went on as planned even though the Ali-Foreman fight had to be postponed when Foreman injured his eye sparring. As a result, the show has been largely left out of the official history of the fight it was barely acknowledged in Leon Gast’s Oscar-winning 1996 documentary When We Were Kings.
Director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, who worked as an editor on Gast’s film, built Soul Power out of footage that didn’t make the final cut. This new movie stands both as a marvellous companion piece and as its own invaluable slice of history.
The concert footage is terrific. It’s electrifying to watch James Brown sing Say It Loud (I’m Black And I’m Proud) to an African audience rather than an audience of African Americans. But it’s the more candid moments that really dominate, when American soul superstars hang out between rehearsals and wander around Kinshasa, discovering an Africa they’ve only imagined.
It’s a revelation, for them and for us.[rssbreak]
