About the Hosts
Soul! had a number of hosts, from producer/host Ellis Haizlip, Harvard Professor and psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, to poet/spoken word artist Nikki Giovanni, and Curtis Mayfield, and many many more. We’ll post more about them here shortly.
Links:
* Article in Jet magazine, March 1970, mentioning Curtis Mayfield as the host of Soul!.
* Obit for Ellis Haizlip, Jet magazine, February 1991.
God dawg! I don’t believe it! Thank you for making this available again to the public. When I was a kid growing up in the South Bronx, Soul changed my life. Particularly the the EW & F episode and the two part Shades of Soul which Felipe Luciano hosted and featured maestros Tito Puente, Willie Colon and Mongo Santamaria whom I would later play drums and timbales for when I became an adult. Over the years I’ve told many people about this show but now they can finally experience it for themselves. PBS was so ahead of their time it boggles the mind. I’ve already e-mailed several of the episodes as learning tools for my students at the Manhattan School of Music and The New School University where I teach in their jazz departments and to many of my friends. Thank you for bringing the last age of hipness on TV back!!! With our new President and now this, maybe we’ll be able to initiate a new age of cultural enlightenment. Thank you PBS for remembering. Double God dawg!!!
Ache’ (positive energy),
Bobby Sanabria
Many would absolutely LOVE to see the 11-Feb-1971 Soul episode with the late, great ANDREW HILL — the very earliest known film/video performance of Hill. AND, Woody Shaw was in that band too — and that clip would ALSO be the very earliest known film/video performance of Shaw. The full line-up of the group was Andrew Hill, Carlos Garnett, Woody Shaw, Victor Sproles, & Roy Haynes. Please, please, PLEASE make this episode available for viewing — many thanks!!!
THANK YOU, THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!! I own many scratchy bootleg versions of many of the shows but I’d been hoping and praying that someday someone would go digging in the vaults! I grew up watching SOUL and one of my favorite episodes that I hope will see the light of day again will be the Five Stairsteps one. There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t see it in my mind…….and now I may get my wish! KUDOS, PBS for bringing back the show that was as important as going to the Apollo Theater to see what needed to be seen!
My mother Vertamae Smart Grosvenor aka the Geechee Gal…would drag us…My sister Kali of Poems By Kali to the soul taping where we would be fillers…in the audience. I wish i could remember of the wonderful experiances we had on the set… one day Mommy asked in lieu of her stipend would they fly a young magician in from Ohio, whom she had just met and noticed his talent and gift of entertainment…they did and that young who got his debut on national TV for the first ever was
ARSENIO HALL….THANK YOU CHANNEL 13…PEACE TO UNCLE ELLIS HAZLIP SOUL…he mentored my sister and I. I loved to be around him, was a gentle man with a powerful force and a visionary….that helped move the Black Arts Movement to a whole differant level