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#Stevie Wonder #Motown #soul #R&B #pop soul #funk #rock #gospel #jazz #progressive soul #1970s #PBS TV broadcast #music video
Introduced by smooth-talking host Gerry B, Stevie Wonder's 50-minute 1972 live set for PSB show Soul! was never broadcast in the UK. It documents a period when Wonder's creativity was so rampant that nothing Soul!'s producers threw at him could crush it: not a contemporary dance interpretation of You And I, nor a surfeit of low-budget psychedelic effects, nor the deadly patter of Gerry B ("You used to be Little Stevie Wonder. What was it like being Little Stevie Wonder?"). He shifts between My Cherie Amour and Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind with breathtaking slickness, interpolates Superwoman with passages of intricate afro-funk and ends a frantic Uptight with a wall of dive-bombing synthesized noise. Meanwhile the studio audience provide delightful period detail: when Wonder plays a vocorder, they gasp in awe, as if he's just donned a jet pack and flown around the studio. From: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/sep/30/dvdreviews.popandrock
Oh boy. It just doesn’t get much better than this. Stevie Wonder at the height of his powers playing on the PBS show Soul! with his band Wonderlove. The episode was broadcast on December 20, 1972, just two months after his landmark album Talking Book was released. One month later, “Supersitious” would be the number one song in the country. As you watch this footage, try to wrap your brain around the fact that the man was all of 22 years old. From all indications Soul! was a wonderful show indeed. Produced by Ellis Haizlip, it ran from 1968 to 1973 and featured a wide array of incredible black performers and personalities, including Al Green, Kool and the Gang, the Staple Singers, Richie Havens, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Herbie Hancock, and Gladys Knight and the Pips as well as fascinating individuals like James Baldwin, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Louis Farrakhan, Nikki Giovanni, James Earl Jones, Melvin Van Peebles, and Stokely Carmichael. On occasion people like Curtis Mayfield or Wilson Pickett would take over the hosting duties. Nobody can say they put on a dull program. There’s so much astounding stuff in this video. Stevie sings a chunk on “My Cherie Amour” in Italian, while “You and I” is accompanied by a fully choreographed ballet. Stevie covers Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone”—on this last number, Stevie uses a vocoder to arresting effect. There’s a brief, amusing interview with host Gerry Bledsoe. Like any good show, things heat up steadily, and by the end things are well-nigh out of control, up to and including the kaleidoscopic video effects (which actually make use of a kaleidoscope).
Track listing:
For Once in My Life
If You Really Love Me
Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)
You and I (We Can Conquer the World)
What’s Going On/My Cherie Amour
Blowin’ in the Wind
With a Child’s Heart
Love Having You Around
Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours/Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone
Superstition
Maybe Your Baby/Superstition Outro
Uptight (Everything’s Alright)
From: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/higher_ground_transcendent_stevie_wonder_pbs_tv_special_from_1972
Today we take it for granted that Black culture is mainstream American culture. But, before the age of hip-hop, cable TV, the internet, streaming, and mobile phones, African Americans basically had to crowdsource their own entertainment guide. Forget about Black stories being told — so few Black artists were even accepted on TV that the African American community found out via word of mouth when a beloved performer would make a guest appearance on a sitcom, drama, or talk show. One appearance was treated as an important event. During the Civil Rights Era, negative representations of violence were easy to find on the nightly news, but positive portrayals of Black culture were hard to come by. Just one movie, TV episode, or live appearance was treasured. Sammy Davis Jr. starred in a 1967 TV war thriller, The Enemy, where he figures out that a fellow GI is really a German soldier and kills him before he can sabotage American troops. Audiences were shocked; Black audiences were shocked in a very good way.
As seen in the Mr. SOUL! documentary, that was the landscape that Ellis Haizlip wanted to change with his groundbreaking, often thrilling, public television series SOUL! (exclamation point included!) SOUL! showed the Black community in a positive, highly diverse light. Haizlip did not represent the Black artistic community as a monolith but as a mosaic with only excellence and originality as the connecting threads. That community could be classically trained or church-taught, rural or urban, come with exact theatrical diction or speak with a Spanish accent.
Starting in September of 1968, Haizlip produced and eventually presented, the very best of Black art, from dance and poetry to cultural icons and thought leaders. But the glue that held Haizlip’s venture together was music. Haizlip selected R&B sax legend King Curtis as the show’s musical director and even stepped aside to have soul legends Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield present a number of episodes. Like its namesake, SOUL! featured the greatest R&B artists of the day — many of them the greatest artists of all time. Caught right at the start of his career, the unstoppable vocal talent of future Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award-winner Al Green just bursts out of the screen. The same can be said for Patti Labelle, who performed on SOUL! a rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that shows how naturally the Hollywood standard fit into the Civil Rights movement.
Ellis Haizlip, a black, openly gay intellectual, may have been a theatrical producer but he could spot musical talent a mile away. The songwriting team Ashford & Simpson had just scored a huge hit for Diana Ross with “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)” but Haizlip asked them to perform the song on his show. SOUL! features the duo’s very first performance and they knock it out of the park. Ashford & Simpson became stars while some artists on the series never broke through. Watching Novella Nelson’s searing rendition of “Cold Water Flat” may have you scratching your head as to why she didn’t become a household name.
The single greatest performance on SOUL! may just be Stevie Wonder’s marathon version of “Superstition.” Wonder was so thrilled to be on the series, and the audience was so into it, that Stevie would not stop playing. They literally ran out of tape - not film, tape! - and had to change cassettes to keep capturing Wonder in motion. As seen in the Mr. SOUL! documentary, when Questlove mentions the joy of watching the studio audience watching Stevie Wonder perform for them. They knew magic was being created in front of them. From: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/listen-up-music-was-heart-of-soul/
