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Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat review – superb study of how jazz got caught between the cold war and the CIA
Johan Grimonprez’s fascinating documentary uses the assassination of DRC prime minister Patrice Lumumba to launch a dizzying look into the politics of jazz in the 1950s and 60s
And now there’s Belgian film-maker Johan Grimonprez’s dazzling Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a breathtaking, ideas-packed journey that weaves together American jazz and the geopolitical machinations of the 1950s and 60s. It’s almost reductive to describe this extraordinary essay film as a music documentary – it’s about so much: the cold war; the bloody fingerprints of colonialism in Africa; the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo; Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe. There are snippets of adverts for iPhones and Teslas, acknowledging how the mineral resources of the DRC made it such a prized target for colonial powers, and tying the country’s past to the unfolding story in the present day.
Or read this on The Guardian
