USA for Africa: "Soul to Soul"

Here's a good example of a leftfield yet complementary reissue: a 1971 concert film less frequently spoken about than its contemporaries Woodstock, The Last Waltz and Soul Power, not out of any dip in quality or absence of comparable star names, more likely that the rights expired and it dropped out of general circulation. Soul to Soul retains its intriguing origin story. In March 1971, while Paul McCartney was mulling the contradiction of being supremely famous yet suddenly unemployed and Elvis was scooping up divorcees from the front rows of his Vegas residency gigs, a small band of African American musicians set out from New York to Ghana for a day-long concert to mark the country's first decade of independence, an event through which some of the travellers hoped to reconnect with their roots. The title came from a song by the second-billed act Ike and Tina Turner. The director was the workmanlike documentary pro Denis Sanders, passing the midpoint of a career that spanned paranoid Hoover-era shorts on the dangers of marijuana (1951's Subject: Narcotics) and early user guides for home computers (Computers: The Friendly Invasion and Computers Are People, Too!, both 1982); more pertinently to this project, he'd just wrapped on Elvis: That's the Way It Is, outtakes of which have now found their way into Baz Luhrmann's EPiC. A crack team of cameramen - including DoP Erik Daarstad and Les Blank - were sent out to preserve on celluloid the colours, moods and textures of this cultural mission: the curtains in the plane carrying these readily smoking troubadours to their destination (Tina is spotted getting some much-needed shuteye), the visible culture shock that awaited everybody on landing. The music here would be only one element; equally relevant are the people, the history, the customs, the fashions and the attitudes. When headliner Wilson Pickett launches into "In the Midnight Hour", he does so before a sea of delighted kids, but also one beaming policeman, evidently enjoying his most relaxed posting in years; by the time of "Land of 1000 Dances", the locals are kicking off their sandals onstage in order to better bust a thousand moves.

The era being captured is pre-entourage and pre-footage approval: these musicians can be seen mucking in, in a spirit of adventure, learning and open-mindedness. It's a two-way street. Before the concert, the locals put on their own performance for the visiting dignitaries (Tina joins in; Ike looks on, unsmiling) while Sanders and crew prove as interested in Ghana as a place as they are in its latest visitors. This version restores an audio interview with Mavis Staples in which the singer describes the eerie experience of touring a storage facility once used to house slaves at the height of the slave trade, while the exteriors describe a land found in the middle of a makeover. (A billboard advertises the so-called "007 Shirt", promising to combine "comfort with elegance".) Increasingly, though, the focus is on the concert itself, presented without obvious hiccups as proof Ghana could both attract and successfully stage such an event. (Zaire, site of the future Rumble in the Jungle and its attendant Soul Power concerts, had to have been watching on enviously.) Santana's rhythm section, for one, had clearly absorbed what could be heard going on around town, to the extent the film's Wikipedia page cites their performance as a formative influence on today's Afrobeats: here, that two-way street becomes an active back-and-forth, a cultural dialogue that apparently shaped an entire genre. Les McCann and Eddie Harris - representing the jazz contingent - take the politics up a notch via "The Price You Gotta Pay To Be Free". Then insouciant Ike (letting the guitar do all his talking) and Tina (in diaphanous outfit) give "River Deep, Mountain High" another runout, this time to a vastly more receptive audience than the US record-buying public. One possible cavil: there's an awful lot of drumming for a 96-minute movie. (Of course, if you love percussion, you'll be quids in.) Yet even before Pickett's last-reel efforts to convert the stage into a level playing field, what strikes the 2026 viewer is the unity on show. Time and again, Sanders returns us to the sight of performers and crowd simultaneously lost (or otherwise caught up) in the music; both are a source of curiosity and fascination for this camera. That apt title reflects how, unlike Woodstock or (heaven help us) Altamont, this modest gathering really was soul to soul: American superstars and Ghanaian spectators connecting, with no steeper hierarchy than a well-lit raised platform, amid a vastly more idealistic climate. Contemporary musical megastars can have their three-hour concert movies - shot on quick-and-easy digital, with tie-in Slurpee cups and elevated ticket prices - but I worry they're not going to tell future generations much about our world, beyond that we lost our heads for celebrities.

Soul to Soul is now touring selected cinemas nationwide.