Documentary ‘Soul Power’ gives music element short shrift

The soul is powerful in “Soul Power.” Unfortunately, there’s not enough of it.

James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, the Spinners, salsa queen Celia Cruz and its other artists only perform during about half the length of this documentary about “Zaire ’74.” The three-day concert in Kinshasa, Zaire, preceded the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and heavyweight champ George Foreman.

The other half of the film consists of behind-the-scenes wrangling about event logistics, random street scenes and sometimes redundant comments by participants about the relevance of the event to the black power movement of that era.

Observers then were joyful about what they called a homecoming: African-American musicians returning to the motherland to celebrate with their African brothers and sisters. But except for the eloquent and brazen Ali, who opines in clips about the ongoing struggles of blacks in white America and the greater appeal of the black African culture, the long talky sections of the film aren’t nearly as compelling as the music.

But the exciting onstage groovin’ gets short shrift. Except for Brown, the godfather of soul at his sizzling peak, we only get to see one live number sung by each act. Meanwhile, the discussions of the festival’s socio-political importance interrupt the celebration in sound bites recorded at the time, without context for modern audiences about how the race issue was manifesting 35 years ago.

“Soul Power” is a pastiche of original footage only, lacking narration or even captions identifying who’s whom. Director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte mines the same archives that Leon Gast used to make 1996’s far superior Oscar-winning documentary “When We Were Kings,” which focused on the Ali-Foreman fight itself.

Aside from Ali, Don King also overlaps the two documentaries, as colorful a presence here as he always has been. The unrepentant egoist was the promoter of both the “Rumble” and the concert a few weeks before it.

Indigenous African artists such as Miriam Makeba appear alongside the more famous purveyors of American-bred rhythm and blues. Their juxtaposition highlights the influence of the former as the roots of the latter. The beat goes on, as they say.

And today’s thrown-together cinematic scrapbook preserves it, a forgotten chapter of intercontinental fusion in music history. So when King croons his classic lament “The Thrill Is Gone” in “Soul Power,” at least we know that his old thrills endure here in all their glory.