May 8, 2009
POSTED BY Jay Babcock
Following are five YouTube clips which appear to form the whole of NINA SIMONE’s blazing knockout masterpiece set at HARLEM FESTIVAL ‘69.
Other performers at the Harlem Festival—six free weekend, outdoor concerts held at the Harlem end of Central Park in the summer of 1969—included Stevie Wonder, the Staples Singers, Sly and the Family Stone (click here to watch on YouTube), B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, The Chambers Brothers, Dizzy Gillespie, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Max Roach…the list goes on and on. It’s a host of magnificent artists, many at the peak of their powers, playing to a predominately black audience at a super-charged, awful-yet-hopeful moment in American history.
Makes you wonder: Why do we all know about Woodstock, but not about Harlem, which took place the same year?
After all, all of the performances were filmed by a professional crew led by director Hal Tulchin. But aside from four songs from Simone’s set, released in fall 2005 on a little-noticed dual-disk entitled The Soul of Nina Simone, which Arthur’s pseudonymous reviewers C & D went apeshit for way back in Arthur No. 20, none of this footage has ever been made commercially available in the United States.
Which is awful. Shameful, actually. This footage has been kept from public view for long enough. Even in this recession, there are interested people around who have the money, competence, resources and profile to make this monumentally important footage commercially available, in the way that it deserves, for all to see. Watch Simone’s remarkable, incendiary heart-soul-voice performance, especially the stunning “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” and the closing “Are You Ready, Black People?” and you’ll see why…
Previously on Arthurmag.com:
Amen!
Seems like that Smithsonian piece ends on a weird anti-accessibility note, considering the archivist source.
[...] Magazine please for the release of footage of Nina Simone performing at the Harlem Festival in 1969. Though it hasn’t been released in the U.S. on DVD, the post compiles various Youtube clips [...]
[...] on from our recent post on NINA SIMONE’s all-time-winner from-the-soul performance in Central Park, su…l, here’s some grainy/blurry nth gen footage of Sly and the Family Stone’s performance [...]
[...] From Jay Babcock of arthurmag.com….. [...]
[...] “ARE YOU READY, BLACK PEOPLE?”: NINA SIMONE’s all-time knockout performance at the Harlem Fest…Five YouTube clips which appear to form the whole of NINA SIMONE’s blazing knockout masterpiece set at HARLEM FESTIVAL ‘69(Via http://www.arthurmag.com ) [...]
ah…love of my life…Nina of the voice piano and attitude…first heard first album never got over her…nobody does it better.
Hearing her sing young, gifted and black is truly something!
[...] and boy would you be wrong. Even though 50 hours of footage were shot, nothing has been released beyond a few scraps, such as this segment from Nina Simone’s blazing performance, which turned up a few years ago [...]