Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

Artist Johan Grimonprez’s new film essay stems from detailed research about some of the machinations the Western colonial powers, such as his native Belgium or the US, came up with to undermine the African decolonisation movement. It specifically reexamines the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire) and its struggle for independence in the context of the CIA’s history of arts patronage, telling how the US Foreign Intelligence agency sent Louis Armstrong as a jazz ambassador to distract from their involvement in the assassination of newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Nina Simone was sent on a similar tour of Nigeria by a CIA front organisation, yet other jazz greats got involved less unwittingly. Dizzy Gillespie briefly ran for president in 1964 and promised that the White House would be renamed the Blues House, while Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashed the UN Security Council to protest Lumumba’s assassination. Both a historical pamphlet and a swinging musical composition, SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT unfolds like a record’s extensive sleeve notes, as the jazz sounds propel and carry along facts, figures and footnotes of major and minor histories with them at dizzying speed. (Antoine Thirion)

Johan Grimonprez: DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), DOUBLE TAKE (2009), SHADOW WORLD (2016), BLUE ORCHIDS (2017)