There are perfectly serious record collectors who might lug an armload of vinyl home from a flea market. Then there are those whose passion for LPs tests the load-bearing limits of residential architecture, collectors like Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson, the drummer and d.j., and a co-founder of the hip-hop group the Roots, which since 2014 has been the house band for Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show.”
“I’m the guy you call when your college is about to throw out twelve thousand records from its jazz collection because it has no more space,” Thompson said the other day, over lunch in a friend’s restaurant in the Village. He had advised the friend on the place’s sound system and helped her amass what looked to be a comparatively paltry but well-curated collection of LPs, shelved along one wall. Stevie Wonder’s unjustly maligned 1979 flop, “The Secret Life of Plants,” was prominently displayed, a statement of intent. It was one of Thompson’s favorite records as a kid.
His own collection, he said, has more than doubled in the past six years, from ninety thousand records to two hundred thousand. Most of them are stored upstate, at a farm he bought last year, during the pandemic, partly because he and his girlfriend “thought it was the apocalypse,” and partly because he needed a bigger space to house all the tonnage. “I’m just trying to keep records from going in the trash,” he said. Asked how many of the two hundred thousand disks get listened to, he conceded: “It’s performative now. If I can get to five per cent of that in my lifetime . . .”
He enjoys challenging the breadth and the depth of his musical knowledge—“my version of the New York Times crossword”—by assembling such dauntingly specific playlists as “Funk Songs in E Major I Cringe At.” He checked his phone: that list runs to five hours and fourteen minutes. He went on, “I come from a world where a fellow-collector will FaceTime you at midnight and not say anything, just put on a record and be, like, ‘You don’t got that, do you?’ ” Often, he does.
He was surprised when a pair of movie producers approached him, three years ago, about directing a documentary on a series of outdoor concerts that took place in Harlem, in what is now Marcus Garvey Park, in 1969. The shows featured acts including Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, B. B. King, Nina Simone, the 5th Dimension, and Max Roach. The series was officially known as the Harlem Cultural Festival, and unofficially known as the Black Woodstock. A TV producer named Hal Tulchin had shot the concerts on spec but couldn’t attract financing to complete a film, so his footage, some fifty hours’ worth, wound up in his basement, in Bronxville, most of it unseen for nearly half a century. Without a film, without a soundtrack LP, the festival itself was largely forgotten.
Thompson was skeptical when the producers, David Dinerstein and Robert Fyvolent, who had acquired the rights to the footage, first came to him: “I got a note that ‘these guys want to talk to you about this festival that happened in Harlem, and there was Sly, Stevie,’ and I’m, like, ‘Wait a minute. This didn’t happen, because I would’ve known about it.’ ” But doubt vanished when Dinerstein and Fyvolent played him pristine video and audio of Sly and the Family Stone performing “M’Lady,” followed by Nina Simone doing “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” “I got humble real fast,” Thompson said. Although he was nervous about directing his first film, he agreed to take on the project, which is out this month, as “Summer of Soul.”
The music speaks for itself. But underlying the footage, Thompson said, he saw a chance to tell “the story of Black erasure”—the way that African-American art is often marginalized or discarded. Take “Soul Train.” Watching the show as a kid every Saturday in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties was a formative experience for Thompson, but for years afterward the old episodes were almost impossible to access. “All I had was memories,” he said. “I would go to bed nightly remembering, like, Did I see Leroy (Sugarfoot) Bonner of the Ohio Players? He did have a double-neck on ‘Soul Train.’ I remember that when I was three.” His power of recall got a boost in 1997, when the Roots were on tour in Japan, a country with pockets of deep reverence for Black American culture. Thompson was hanging out with his translator in her apartment, and she told him that his Afro reminded her of Don Cornelius, the “Soul Train” host. She showed him her collection of “Soul Train” videos. “I just started crying on the spot,” he said. “ ‘Yo, you have my whole entire childhood in your apartment.’ ” He returned to the States with dozens and dozens of VHS cassettes: “Over in Japan is where our history was.”
In that sense, “Summer of Soul” is like a major archeological find—a King Tut’s tomb of twentieth-century Black performance. At lunch, pinned to his baggy Nina Simone sweatshirt, Thompson was wearing a button that appeared to be one of the festival’s backstage passes. It was a replica. He and the producers had found four originals in Hal Tulchin’s basement, but he wouldn’t risk wearing one, he said, “because I’m the king of, ‘Oh, shit, it fell off.’ ” As if he could actually lose something. ♦
