‘Soundtrack to a Coup’ assessment: Jazz, African politics

Decolonization receives the definitive therapy within the documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup” by Belgian director Johan Grimonprez. It’s a blinding, melody-rich collage of pictures, phrases and sounds, chronicling the Cold War second when Congolese independence, scorching jazz and geopolitical tensions made their sounds heard around the globe. But additionally how that music was muffled by the deadly instruments of capitalism and management, nonetheless an element on the worldwide stage.

Built across the period’s influential gamers, each well-known (the righteous Malcolm interval epic, the soul of an activist march. and the pulsating vitality of a swashbuckling thriller. It’s a narrative instructed with rhythms, blues and vocals, but additionally by on-screen textual content with quotes, as if the pages have been being turned. The impact, although lengthy (two and a half hours), is dreamlike however propulsive, a timeline optimistic and sinister on the identical time. (An interview of blasé candor with huffing CIA chief Allen Dulles makes him sound like a Bond villain.)

The movie’s organizational narrative swings backwards and forwards from the machinations on the United Nations, the place Khrushchev’s gavel provocations accompanied an rising Afro-Asian bloc, to the violent chessboard that was the newly unbiased Congo and the temporary, espionage-ridden tenure of the his first prime minister. , Patrice Lumumba, the lightning rod of African independence. What “Soundtrack to a Coup” makes clear by Grimonprez’s reckoning along with his nation’s colonial catastrophe is that Belgium – with the assistance of US and British intelligence – had no intention of giving Lumumba the potential for gaining a foothold.

Along the best way we meet key figures reminiscent of the scary and maligned Pan-African activist and advisor Andrée Blouin (her memoir excerpts are learn by the musician Zap Mama) and hearken to the poetic recollections of the Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane (the one wealthy unique doc of clips) interview), as a toddler when his nation was dividing.

We even have a large and electrifying sampling of the liberty jams of the period, coming from the turntables and radios of our coast or the African rumba scene. Abbey Lincoln screams in Max Roach’s “Freedom Now” suite, Nina Simone’s pressing sound is heard all through, and vital snippets of Monk, Coltrane, Duke, Dizzy, and Miles are all highlighted, typically in significant juxtaposition with occasions and feelings within the narration.

After all, it was an period when jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Melba Liston have been despatched as cultural ambassadors to postcolonial areas of Africa, solely to comprehend that they have been smokescreens for covert operations supposed to undermine actions like Lumumba’s and to guard multinational pursuits within the nation. treasured minerals from the area reminiscent of uranium. It was music as message, artists as distractions. But the assassination of Lumumba in 1961, after months of plotting by US, Belgian and Congolese brokers (and tacitly authorized by President Eisenhower), marked the tip of the Western facade. It was the start of a brand new ardent dedication to human rights.

The following month, Roach and Lincoln helped manage a protest on the United Nations Security Council. That offended convergence of jazz and politics is what bookends Grimonprez’s vault-driven, media-conscious investigation and units the tone for the connective tissue of who’s who. In its audiovisual vortex of concern, “Soundtrack to a Coup” – probably the greatest documentaries of the yr – is nothing however deep cuts.