Soul Power

A compelling glimpse at gathering of music greats

July 17, 2009|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

Everyone knows something about the Rumble in the Jungle. Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman in the country formerly known as Zaire in 1974. A documentary about the fight, “When We Were Kings,’’ won an Oscar. Less well known is that the Rumble had a soundtrack.

Before the fight, James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, The Spinners, Miriam Makeba, among others performed in a three-day concert, discussed at the time as the “black Woodstock.’’ It was a footnote in “When We Were Kings,’’ but one of that film’s editors, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, has pared 125 hours of footage into “Soul Power,’’ a 93-minute freeform film of the festival. It rides in the “When We Were Kings’’ sidecar, a random abridgement that entertains despite its tendency to wander through a lot of terrific material.

In a sense, you can’t blame Levy-Hinte and his collaborators. A reduction of 125 hours of anything is going to feel distilled. Better to be impressionistic than to leave no impression at all. So the film becomes a sampler of the weeks surrounding the concert and the fight.

The big acts are shown doing one song - Brown does several. We experience daily life in Kinshasa, the musicians’ flight to the capital (Cruz and her Fania All-Stars start their own festival in the main cabin), backstage rehearsals with Sister Sledge, press conferences, shots of a less than sober George Plimpton and a starstruck Stokely Carmichael, sidebars about how the stars would be paid, private pep talks, the show’s crew erecting the stage, the bloviations of the fight’s promoter, Don King, and, of course, the scene-stealing, exclamatory poetry of Ali. (Foreman remains as much a notional punching bag in this movie as he was in “Kings.’’)

The concert was the idea of two musicians, producers, and friends - Stewart Levine, an American, and Hugh Masekela, a South African instrumentalist, Makeba’s husband, and the man responsible for the still-excellent 1968 hit, “Grazin’ in the Grass.’’ With the help of King and the financial backing of Liberian investors, Levine and Masekela got the artists to town, and what a royal parade it turned out to be: the King of the Blues, the Queen of Salsa, the Godfather of Soul.