Review of 'Soundtrack of a Coup': Jazz, African Politics

Decolonization gets the ultimate needle treatment in the documentary “The Soundtrack of a Coup” by Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez. It is a dazzling, melody-filled collage of images, words and sounds, chronicling the moment during the Cold War when Congolese independence, sizzling jazz and geopolitical tensions made a sound heard around the world. But also how that music was muffled by the lethal instruments of capitalism and control, which continues to be a factor on the global stage.

Built around the influential actors of the era, both famous (the righteous Malcolm era, the soul of an activist march. and the fast-paced energy of a swashbuckling thriller. It's a story told with rhythms, blues and vocals, but also in on-screen text with quotes, as if the pages are turning. The effect, although long at two and a half hours, is dreamlike but propulsive, a timeline optimistic and sinister at the same time. (A nonchalantly candid interview with swaggering CIA chief Allen Dulles makes him sound like a Bond villain.)

The film's organizational narrative oscillates between the machinations at the UN, where Khrushchev's taunts accompanied an emerging Afro-Asian bloc, to the violent chessboard that was the newly independent Congo and the brief, spy-ridden rule of its first prime minister. . , Patrice Lumumba, the lightning rod of African independence. What “Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat” makes clear through Grimonprez's analysis of his own country's colonial remains is that Belgium – with the help of American and British intelligence – had no intention of giving Lumumba the chance. to establish itself.

Along the way we meet key figures such as the feared and maligned Pan-African activist and advisor Andrée Blouin (musician Zap Mama reads excerpts from her memoirs) and hear the poetic recollections of Congolese author In Koli Jean Bofane (the only original document with many clips) . interview), a child at the time when his country was dividing.

We also get a wide and electrifying sample of the Freedom Jams of the era, whether from the turntables and radios of our coast or the African rumba scene. Abbey Lincoln howls in Max Roach's “Freedom Now” suite, Nina Simone's urgent sound is heard throughout, and significant fragments of Monk, Coltrane, Duke, Dizzy, and Miles are illuminated, often in meaningful juxtaposition with events and emotions. in the narrative.

After all, it was a time when jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Melba Liston were sent as cultural ambassadors to the post-colonial regions of Africa, only to realize that they were smokescreens for covert operations aimed at undermining movements like the of Lumumba and protect multinational interests in the region's valuable minerals such as uranium. It was music as message, artists as distractions. But Lumumba's assassination in 1961, after months of plotting by American, Belgian and Congolese agents (and tacitly approved by President Eisenhower), marked the end of the Western façade. It was the beginning of a new and ardent human rights effort.

The following month, Roach and Lincoln helped organize a protest before the UN Security Council. That furious convergence between jazz and politics is what caps Grimonprez's vault-driven, media-aware investigation and sets the tone for the connective tissue of who's who. In its audiovisual whirlwind of indignation, “The Soundtrack of a Coup” – one of the best documentaries of the year – is nothing more than deep cuts.