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Still Bill | After 35 years, audiences can finally see Bill Withers’ awesome set at Zaire 74 in the film Soul Power.

SOUL POWER
Directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte. Starring Muhammad Ali, James Brown, Celia Cruz, B.B. King, Don King, Bill Withers. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Fri-Wed, Oct 2-7.
****

1974’s Rumble in the Jungle, the much-publicized world heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, looms large in boxing history. What’s lesser known, however, is the three-day music festival, dubbed “Zaire 74,” that took place alongside it, bringing the heavyweights of American R&B — James Brown, Bill Withers, and B.B. King, to name a few — to Africa along with the fighters.

The footage that director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte shot exactly 35 years ago this month has now been assembled into Soul Power, a thrilling and intoxicating blast of vintage soul that also fits nicely into the genre of will-they-get-it-together-in-time concert documentary. Scenes of the stars casually jamming together on the plane trip over are intercut with crew members and financiers

scrambling to get the massive stage in working order before showtime. Ali and his notorious promoter Don King make extended appearances too.

Levy-Hinte is smart enough to recognize that the musicians aren’t always the most interesting people to listen to, and most of the film’s first half is spent with the various techs and suits behind the scenes. Watching the festival’s coordinators describe problems as ridiculous as the president of Zaire telling his press corps the wrong start date, or that the musicians’ luggage coming over weighed a staggering 32,000 pounds beyond the plane’s weight capacity, you begin to wonder: has there ever been a festival that went off smoothly?

And that’s not even mentioning the extra headaches that come with staging the festival in conjunction with the Ali-Foreman fight. At one point, management toys with delaying the whole thing, all because Foreman has a cut on his face and might not be ready in time. This, one of the promoters says wearily, is not a problem you usually have to deal with.

From the performers’ point of view, Zaire 74 was also a chance to re-connect with their collective homeland. The festival featured a mix of Afro-American and African acts, and while there’s a fair amount of goofing off — including a memorable scene where a doughy member of The Spinners challenges Ali to spar, which ends about a minute later with the man yelping from the ropes, “Ah! Let me get a mouthpiece!” — many of the artists also speak movingly about freedom and their conflicted relationships with slavery and oppression. Levy-Hinte includes a long shot of a telling billboard in Kinshasa that reads, “Black power is sought everywhere, but it is already realized here in Zaire.”

The festival itself lasted 12 hours, spread over three days, and it’s just as rewarding as what leads up to it. Watching a heavily moustachioed Brown doing the splits repeatedly is always fun, but for my money the best moment is Withers’s heart-wrenching solo version of “Hope She’ll Be Happier,” in which I swear you can see a tear streak on his otherwise-sweat-soaked face. And the film’s music and politics come together during the South African singer Miriam Makeba’s set, where she explains to a cheering crowd that white people dubbed her hit “The Click Song” because they couldn’t pronounce its original title, “Qongqothwane,” in her native Xhosa.

Nowhere is it properly explained why it took so long for this footage of Zaire 74 to surface; it’s very clearly stated up front that the financiers paid for both the festival itself and an accompanying film. But whatever the delay, Soul Power marks an important moment in Afro-American musical history — one that should never have been forgotten in the first place.