{"id":683182,"date":"2026-06-04T04:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T04:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/683182\/"},"modified":"2026-06-04T04:24:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T04:24:10","slug":"earth-wind-fire-to-be-celestial-review-joyful-questlove-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/683182\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial…)’ Review: Joyful Questlove Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFrom the moment he unleashed \u201cSummer of Soul (\u2026Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),\u201d it was clear that Ahmir \u201cQuestlove<\/a>\u201d Thompson was a born documentary filmmaker. But there\u2019s a special quality to Questlove\u2019s music films that only emerged fully in his second one, \u201cSly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius).\u201d And I felt it even more stirringly in \u201cEarth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That\u2019s the Weight of the World),\u201d the Questlove jawn that opened the Tribeca Festival<\/a> tonight on a note of rousingly nostalgic but timeless joy.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat Questlove brings to his movies isn\u2019t just his outlook as a musician but as a scholar of pet sounds. He knows and understands the music from the inside out, the way every note of it can echo through our pleasure centers. And that has a unique resonance in the case of Earth, Wind & Fire, since their music was its own delectable synthesis (as Lionel Richie puts it in the film, \u201cThe funk was the funk, but the chords were jazz, classical. Meanwhile, it\u2019s sitting on this tribal African beat\u201d). EWF created some of the most ecstatic songs of their era (their secret sauce was the fusion of funk\/soul and pop), and Questlove illuminates that magic.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI always like it when a music doc includes the voices of critics (as Lisa Cort\u00e9s\u2019s \u201cLittle Richard: I Am Everything\u201d did). And while there are no official music critics in \u201cEarth, Wind & Fire\u201d (though there\u2019s lots of sprightly commentary from the likes of Barack and Michelle Obama and Jimmy Jam and Stevie Wonder and Flea), Questlove fills that crucial space in a different way. The key critical voice in the movie is his. He\u2019s analyzing the music, capturing what was bold and beautiful about it, scrutinizing how it sounded and what it meant, and he\u2019s doing that with every cut and needle drop and impeccably observed detail about how the music was created (the film\u2019s ace editors are Andrew Morrow, Matt Cascella, and Tim Ziegler). As a documentarian, Questlove isn\u2019t an innovator; he\u2019s a classicist, almost conventional in his approach. Yet he\u2019s such a sharp director, with such an intoxicating appreciation of his subject, that he\u2019s able to put the audience right inside the music.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat matters a lot with Earth, Wind & Fire, since as popular and cherished as the group has always been \u2014 they sold 100 million albums, had 16 Top 40 singles, and won six Grammys \u2014\u00a0there\u2019s a way that EWF never totally occupied the place in the critical canon they deserved. Here\u2019s why I say that. The leader of Earth, Wind & Fire, to the point that it was always his group, was Maurice White, the drummer, lead singer, composer, and producer who put EWF together and guided them with a virtuoso vision. White, who died in 2016, was a pop-soul giant. Yet if you listed the following artists \u2014 James Brown, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Michael Jackson, Prince \u2014 I doubt there are many who would jump up in protest and say, \u201cWhere\u2019s Maurice White on that list?\u201d He was the force of Earth, Wind & Fire, but part of his design for the band was to present them as a collective. And while White was a sexy dude, he wasn\u2019t necessarily rock-star sexy (as those other artists were). With his receding hairline and amiable grin, he had a glorified everyman quality; he came off like the backstage soul scientist of EWF, not the demigod star. But he was a guiding light of genius. And in \u201cEarth, Wind & Fire,\u201d Questlove tells the band\u2019s story, and Maurice White\u2019s story, in a way that\u2019s at once thrilling and haunting. He captures their rightful place in the pop cosmos.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhite was born in Memphis, in 1941, to a 17-year-old single mother who left him to go to Chicago when he was just five. He was raised by someone named Big Mama, but the trauma of being abandoned never left him. Ten years later, he joined his mother in Chicago, where she had another family; suddenly, he had eight brothers and sisters. He plugged into the Chicago music scene, becoming the house drummer at Chess Records (where he collaborated with the composer and producer Charles Stepney, who would figure into EWF), and this led to his joining the Ramsey Lewis Trio as its drummer when he was just 15.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhite wrote jingles for commercials (a gig that informed his future compositions as much as Lou Reed\u2019s dabbling in pop songwriting at Pickwick Records did his). But as prized a place in the jazz world as he now occupied, he walked away from it all to move to L.A. and pursue his dream of a band called Earth, Wind and Fire, which he named after elements in his astrological chart (changing \u201cAir\u201d to \u201cWind\u201d). White was into astrology and meditation and numerology and Egyptology and a lot of the hippie metaphysics that flourished in California in the \u201970s. What he embraced was the vision behind it all \u2014 the utopian image of one world, which his multi-piece band would be an expression of. The original Earth, Wind and Fire were jazzy and free-form; they sounded like Sly and the Family Stone crossed with Sun Ra. But White, who craved success, realized they weren\u2019t going anywhere, so he fired the entire band and rebooted it, starting all over (and now using two of his siblings).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe new EWF literally found its groove during a performance at the Uptown Theatre in Chicago, where White started playing the small African harp called a kalimba, and the rest of the music was layered on top of it. In the documentary, you see them, and the crowd, catch fire. Yet even that was just the baseline sound. There\u2019s a terrific clip of the group\u2019s early hit, \u201cMighty Mighty,\u201d inspiring dance moves on \u201cSoul Train,\u201d but they didn\u2019t become the Earth, Wind & Fire we know until 1975, when White was invited to record the soundtrack for a movie called \u201cThat\u2019s the Way of the World.\u201d He brought in Charles Stepney to collaborate on composing and arranging, and when you listen to the title song, it\u2019s breathtaking, because you literally hear a whole new world. The sound is a balm. And the lyrics, laid against those percolating cadences (\u201cChild is born, with a heart of gold,\/Way of the world, makes his heart so cold\u201d) was the entire Civil Rights era distilled into two lines, which felt as transformative, in its way, as a speech by MLK.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the same album was \u201cShining Star,\u201d and if you want to hear the difference between Sly and the Family Stone and Earth, Wind & Fire, it\u2019s right there in that song. The groove of \u201cShining Star,\u201d built on that chicken-scratch intro, is nasty hot-house funk; it\u2019s pure Sly. But if it had been a Sly song, it would have just gone on like that. The EWF vibe kicks in during the chorus (\u201cYou\u2019re a shining star, no matter who you are\u201d), with the chords suddenly bopping around, talking to each other as if on happy pills. The verse is tethered to the earth; the chorus glides like a 747. In the movie, Stevie Wonder shocks Questlove, who is interviewing him, when Wonder admits that \u201cI Wish,\u201d which came out one year later, was heavily influenced by \u201cShining Star.\u201d You can hear it; but how often do you hear Stevie Wonder admit that he ripped someone off?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was White\u2019s dream, which he made manifest, for Earth, Wind & Fire to become bigger, tighter, more enraptured, more melodically grand, more embracing of the cosmic wonders of Afro-futurism (their album covers started to resemble Afrocentric dioramas crossed with alien visitations), in ever more spectacular chest-baring costumes. He added a horn section, and he pumped up the group\u2019s stage show by recruiting George Faison, the great Broadway choreographer of \u201cThe Wiz,\u201d to orchestrate their moves, and Doug Henning, the world\u2019s preeminent magician, to create such stunts as Verdine White, the group\u2019s leonine bass player, levitating on his side while continuing to play the bass (an amazing effect, actually). This was transcendent spectacle. And the artists who came and saw it all included Michael Jackson (who would come to a show with a legal pad to write down ideas) and Prince.<\/p>\n

\n\tMaurice White preached a New Age vision of no drugs and alcohol, but we get a fascinating glimpse of his complexities from his longtime partner, Marilyn White, who still views him with affection. During the last third of the film, his problematic side begins to creep in. He was a horndog who insisted on his right to sleep around on the road (\u201cI\u2019m a star,\u201d he told Marilyn). He had several children out of wedlock and treated the other band members in a more and more exploitative fashion, chronically underpaying them and denying them credits. Philip Bailey, the great EWF singer with a shining star of a voice, is refreshingly candid about how angry he was at White. And the whole movie, while nothing short of celebratory when it comes to EWF\u2019s music, does not fall into that category of music-doc-as-feel-good-hagiography. Questlove is too much of a humanist to soft-pedal\u2019s Maurice White\u2019s contradictions. They only make the story the film is telling more indelible. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhite, at a certain point, became convinced that he was being visited by aliens. That was part of his \u201970s-mystical thing, but according to the film it was partly out of this conviction that he spun the song \u201cFantasy,\u201d which was eye-opening to me since it\u2019s my favorite Earth, Wind & Fire song. Questlove has it play over the closing credits (behold its supernal beauty). That said, he\u2019s right to have the movie culminate in a glorious group meditation on the majesty of \u201cSeptember,\u201d which it presents as the quintessential EWF song. Just watch this sequence! It\u2019s such a great song, but it\u2019s also intoxicating filmmaking, doing justice to a pop miracle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From the moment he unleashed \u201cSummer of Soul (\u2026Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),\u201d it was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[266415,88,206,67617,257087],"class_list":["post-683182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-earth-wind-fire","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-questlove","tag-tribeca-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}