Three music docs for a new summer of love
IN AHMIR “QUESTLOVE” THOMPson’s radiant documentary Summer of Soul, an account of a star-studded concert series that took place in a Harlem park during the summer of Woodstock but received far less attention, a 50ish gentleman who attended the shows as a kid, Musa Jackson, describes the experience as if it were a dream. Only when he saw footage of the performances, stored away for some 50 years, did he realize how overwhelming this event—a showcase of great Black performers, staged for a nearly all-Black audience—had been. “You put memories away,” he says, “and sometimes you don’t even know if they’re real.”
If part of a musician’s skill is knowing just where to put which notes, the other, more elusive gift is knowing how to spin a dream between performer and listener. This summer, as musicians and audiences alike reacquaint themselves with the pleasures of live music, three documentaries help connect us not just with what it means to be an artist, but also with the equally crucial act of being a listener, of becoming part of the crackling circuit between artist and audience. To be a fan is to be part of a community, and Questlove’s Summer of Soul, Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers and the Hulu docuseries McCartney 3,2,1 remind us of the ways music unites us, whether we’re nestled shoulder to shoulder with like-minded people or plugging in more intimately via headphones or AirPods.
In the six-episode premiering July 16, superstar record producer Rick Rubin sits down with once-and-forever Beatle Paul McCartney to
