Summer of Soul, directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, is an Academy Award-winning documentary film that tells the story of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Hosted and organized by Harlem lounge singer and promoter Tony Lawrence, the Harlem Cultural Festival was held on weekends from June 29 through August 24, 1969. Funding from local New York government officials, such as John V. Lindsey, the Republican mayor, supported Lawrence's six-week festival where more than 300,000 attendees experienced music and fellowship free of charge. Thompson's first film explores this Black music festival as a site for diasporic cultural expressions of Black and Latinx Americans amid the intense cultural shifts of the late 1960s. Juxtaposing archival footage with contemporary interviews, Thompson explores Black sonic and communal expressions in live music settings as they continue to influence and define generations of American popular music. Summer of Soul beautifully pieces together festival producer Hal Tuchin's “lost” footage of Harlemites experiences and reflections of mid-twentieth-century Black popular music artists from across the United States.In the film, festival attendees of various ages describe the intergenerational multiweek concert event. Viewers first meet an adult Musa Jackson, who attended the festival as a young boy with his family, and Dorinda Drake and Barbra Bland Acosta, who were nineteen-year-old high school graduates at the time of the event. In the film, their recorded testimonies are brought to life with cutaways of faded school and graduation photos, creating the effect of layered pages in an old family scrapbook. Their memories address the day-to-day life of young Black people in 1960s Harlem. Through these and other interviews, festival goers voice a racial pride based in Black consciousness as well as their grief and rage at racist treatment in housing and education. These recollections structure a sociopolitical arc where the unrest of the Black and Latinx Harlemites, foregrounded by the riot of 1968 and the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, are sounded by Nina Simone and Sly and the Family Stone. Tuchin's footage blends well with film from news outlet archives depicting the striking dissonance between media coverage of world events from the Vietnam War to NASA's moon landing and festival attendees’ negative sentiments toward the nationwide failure to redress issues facing Black and Latinx communities.Thompson's interviews with the artists about their experiences at the festival reveal deeper structures within the architecture of Black popular music and performance history that make for intimate vignettes. For instance, remaining members of the 5th Dimension, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., light up as they watch their younger selves through grainy footage, grateful for having had the opportunity to share their music with a majority Black audience. Originally billed as the St. Louis-based Black pop band with a white sound, McCoo asks curiously during her interview “How do you color a sound?” pointing to the invisible yet ever present sonic color line shaping US listeners’ timbral and racial expectations. Feeling alienated from their roots in Black music, the McCoo and Davis segment draws upon Black artists’ desires to make music beyond essentializing racial stereotypes while also expressing reverence for their cultural heritage. Under Thompson's direction, these artists’ memories offer priceless scenes that visually and intellectually blur the lines between personal and collective listening.Musical lineages are refashioned through bright, kaleidoscopic montages where each performance is given room to shine between musicultural analysis. For instance, Greg Tate offers new ways to hear psychedelic R&B evangelism in Sly and the Family Stone's and Sonny Sharrock's performances. A young B. B. King sings and sweats in a powder blue suit moving the crowd of Harlemites into song and dance. Mavis Staples's disembodied voice shares musical insights stemming from her father's Great Migration story. His journey as a sharecropper in Mississippi to a touring musician based in Chicago confirms the shared roots of blues and gospel music as Mavis hints at the differences between the Harlem Cultural Festival's demographic and that of mainstream jazz and folk music festivals. The three scenes highlight what make Summer of Soul so compelling, especially for younger generations of viewers who have been taught Southern Black musical genius primarily through black-and-white still images or filmed performances of prominent blues and gospel musicians as older adults. The 1960s Black death, whether accelerated by police violence, the heroin epidemic, or the Vietnam war, denied many Black people the privilege of youth let alone having one's youth documented in vivid, expressive film and photographs for generations to come. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson recounts Dr. King's last words to saxophonist Ben Branch, which Thompson uses to facilitate a moving musical moment between Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples. Viewers get to sense Jackson symbolically passing the baton to Staples as a keeper of collective grief in tribute to Dr. King and together their voices ripple through the crowd of fifty-thousand Black folks.In present-day interviews, Motown artists Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight discuss their strait-laced bootcamp training based on genre bending, spirit, racial uplift, and political commitment. In between scenes of virtuosic playing, Stevie Wonder is shown advocating for various kinds of Black political action including voting rights, ending poverty and homelessness in minoritized communities, and petitioning for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday to become a national holiday. In Knight's interview, she expresses an eagerness to share her musical talent with thousands of Black fans. There are rare photographs sprinkled throughout her section of the film, where viewers learn of the process through which she, and other beloved Motown acts, crafted their legendary set lists and choreography under the leadership of Cholly Atkins. The US South's chitlin circuit provided solace for Black performers; however, a musical event of this magnitude had yet to be documented in this way in the northern states despite having established large intergenerational populations of Black American and Caribbean communities. The Harlem Cultural Festival proved to be the perfect opportunity for midwestern, West Coast, and southern musicians to fellowship through food, the latest fashions, and sounds of the era.Summer of Soul is more than a Black music film; it is a historical record of Black leisure facilitated by a music festival that simultaneously presents issues of archival research and ethnography concerning the documentation of Black American music. The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival footage proves that Black American popular musics hold both sacred and secular purpose foundational to everyday lives of Black folk across the nation. It is essential viewing for those working in ethnographic filmmaking, African diasporic musics, and festival studies. Additionally, Summer of Soul is a critical resource for those who teach global and US popular music courses and performance practices within Black American popular music ensembles. This documentary is a work of thoughtful contemporary Black music research, because Thompson invites us to see in color how to validate and preserve sonic memories while also addressing the ephemerality of Black American life in film and archives.