Across four documentaries — the Oscar- and Grammy-winning “Summer of Soul,” “Sly Lives,” “Ladies and Gentlemen, 50 Years of Saturday Night Live Music” and the new “Earth, Wind & Fire (to Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World),” which arrives on HBO Sunday night — Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer and leader of the Roots and musical director for “The Tonight Show,” has established himself as one of the greatest music documentarians of this era.
When artists who are also fans embark on such projects, the results can be too admiring, too fanboy, too hagiographic. But Thompson’s films are clear-eyed portraits of artists or situations — both of which are, of course, created by human beings in all their greatness and imperfection — and while they come out positive, they’re also very realistic about the dark sides as well, which is what also makes them great stories.
“Earth, Wind & Fire” centers around Maurice White, the creator of one of the most influential R&B groups of all time, his troubled upbringing in the segregated South, and crucially, how his mother left him when he was just five years old to seek opportunity in Chicago. She always said she would come back for him, and 13 years later she did, but the hurt never left him — even as he overcame one obstacle after another, beginning as a drummer for the iconic blues label Chess (where he drummed on songs for Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin Wolf and countless others), moving to his work with jazz legend Ramsey Lewis, and finally risking it all to form Earth, Wind & Fire. The group’s first incarnation didn’t gell, so he split it up and started over, integrating magic, mysticism, Egyptology and positive thinking into the group’s pioneering, deceptively complex sound. And as they became one of the biggest groups in the world, he gradually lost hold of it. By the early ‘80s, the group was over, just when their career should have been reaching even greater heights.
