Music and Musicians Still Echo 35 Years Later

A partial list, in alphabetical order, of the reasons to see “Soul Power” might go as follows: James Brown, Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, B. B. King, Miriam Makeba, the Spinners and Bill Withers. A partial list, as I say, of performers captured with remarkable sonic brilliance and visual immediacy on an outdoor stage in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Congo), in 1974.

If you have any knowledge of these musicians, you will by now have stopped reading and gone off to order tickets to this extravagantly entertaining documentary, assembled by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte from a trove of hundreds of hours of footage captured by some of the world’s finest cinéma vérité camera operators some 35 years ago.

The number of people who say they were at Woodstock has long since grown beyond any plausible estimate of attendance, and the release of “Soul Power” may lead to a rash of unlikely, passionate claims to have been in Zaire when this monumental and now half-forgotten concert went down. It’s not too late. And if for some reason you think of James Brown and Bill Withers as dusty names in the annals of popular music, this movie will help you complete your education.

But beyond — or rather by way of — the sheer pleasure it affords, “Soul Power” offers a vivid glimpse of a fascinating moment in musical history, racial politics and global pop culture. The Zaire ’74 festival was originally conceived as a companion to the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Just before the concert was scheduled to begin, and too late for postponement, Mr. Foreman injured his eye. The bout was pushed back six weeks, but the show went on.

Both events were recorded on film, though it took a long time for the images to see the light of day. “When We Were Kings,” Leon Gast’s unforgettable account of the Ali-Foreman fight, was released in 1996 and included only glancing mention of the concert. Mr. Levy-Hinte’s film complements Mr. Gast’s, though its approach is a little different. There are no ex post facto talking-head interviews with witnesses and interpreters (though George Plimpton does show up drunk at a party). Instead the music and the musicians speak for themselves.

Not only them of course. Mr. Ali is there, vain, shrewd and witty as ever, cooling his heels and running his mouth, expounding on the legacies of colonialism and slavery and presenting himself, hyperbolically and in sly earnest, as a global ambassador of freedom and justice. The promoter Don King is also on hand, spinning rhetorical webs that link his own commercial interests with the causes of liberation and self-determination. He sometimes has a point, though Brown makes it more succinctly and with a bit more credibility when he observes that “you can’t get liberated broke.”

Financed by a group of Liberian investors and authorized by the Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, a corrupt and brutal strongman with a touch of theatrical flair and unusual fashion sense, Zaire ’74 may not stand up very well as the expression of a political cause. But the preparations, in New York and in Kinshasa, illuminate the complexities and contradictions of organizing a modern media spectacle in a third-world country, and suggest that some of the perks and stresses of show business are pretty much the same wherever you go.

And the music itself tells a deeper and more exalted story. Various strands of African, African-American and Caribbean musical expression collide and commingle, providing enough research material for a course in ethnomusicology. The beats of Ms. Cruz and her salseros bounce off the rhythms of Zairean dancers, while the sounds of Memphis and Philadelphia both echo and feed the songs of Mali and South Africa.

Manu Dibango walks the streets of Kinshasa, performing a call and response with a group of children. Other children are shown doing marching exercises, which look like versions of the crisply choreographed stages moves executed by the Spinners. At the end Brown, a musical cosmos unto himself, sums it all up and breaks it all down.

A tremendous amount of work clearly went into the Zaire ’74 festival and into winnowing its bounty into a feature film. (I’m hoping for a DVD boxed set that lets the viewer live through the whole three-day lollapalooza in real time.) And the intense labor of the performers is also in evidence. You understand the effort and practice involved in making something that seems so spontaneous, natural and free. “Soul Power,” as aptly and succinctly titled a movie as I have ever seen, takes you to a place where the discipline that produces great popular art is indistinguishable from the ecstasy that art creates.

“Soul Power” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some swearing and sexual references.

SOUL POWER

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte; based on an original concept by Stewart Levine; directors of photography, Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, Albert Maysles and Roderick Young; edited by David Smith; produced by Mr. Levy-Hinte, David Sonenberg and Leon Gast; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.