The temptation to selectively build a narrative from various fragments of footage and sound ultimately patronises the era’s jazz titans
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a new documentary by Belgian filmmaker and artist Johan Grimonprez, maps a compelling history. At the film’s core is the story of Patrice Lumumba, who served as the first Prime Minister of a newly independent Republic of Congo (formerly the Belgian Congo) for just three months. In January 1961 Lumumba was murdered by firing squad, the bloody endpoint of a military coup incited by the governments of Belgium, the United States and Britain. The Republic of Congo was rich in mineral assets to which the Western states wanted access, while Lumumba was considered a destabilising presence: a proud Black leader of a former colonial state who was also a proponent of Pan-Africanism. To the Eisenhower administration in the US, unsure of how to deal with Civil Rights at home in general, and with figures like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X in particular, this set a dangerous precedent – especially as Lumumba was attracting the backing of Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. To protest his assassination, the jazz drummer Max Roach and his wife, the singer Abbey Lincoln, were part of a demonstration that aimed to disrupt proceedings at the UN Security Council in New York. It is this counterpoint, between geopolitics and jazz, that handed Grimonprez his subject.
The film opens with footage of Roach and Lincoln performing material from their then recently released album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, with Roach’s rapid-fire snare drum salvoes setting the high-velocity pace inside which the film will move, structured as a collage of archival footage and music without the glue of any underpinning spoken narration. There’s the inference, too, that given the manner of Lumumba’s brutal death, we’re supposed to hear Roach’s nifty drumming, which recurs throughout the film as an idée fixe, as an aural metaphor for gunfire. This literalist application of music to event, of sound to fury, might have served Grimonprez’s needs as a filmmaker; but too often in the film it trips up the flow of historical information, while showing scant respect to musicians as great as Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, whose music gets devoured in the process. As a director of videoworks often compiled from documentary and archive footage, advertisements, Hollywood films and home videos, Grimonprez is evidently interested in the role played by the media in the construction of both personal and political histories. He has previously dealt with the international arms trade in Shadow World (2016) and, in his 1997 Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, how mainstream news reports on television make a soap-opera out of realtime footage of airplane hijacks. Yet the temptation to selectively build a narrative from the various fragments of footage and sound seems at times to get the better of Grimonprez – often at the expense of the true context of his original source material.
At two hours thirty, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey and comes packed with extended, unmediated passages of period news footage assuming a depth of knowledge likely to leave the less clued-up struggling to find their way. It is a special sort of achievement to have so much top-notch and rarely-seen footage of Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, then to squander its majesty through not knowing when to leave well enough alone. Gillespie, with a big-band, toured Asia and South America in 1956, a tour sponsored by the American State Department. Armstrong had cancelled an earlier state-sponsored tour in protest against a notorious incident in Arkansas when nine black students were prevented from enrolling in school, but in 1960 he relented, flying to Congo where he played to an audience of 100,000 in the nation’s capital. Grimonprez has fun cutting between Armstrong performing and Gillespie’s uncanny impersonation of Louis, matching note-to-note. But his general reluctance to let this footage tell its own story is a wasted opportunity.
The butchering of late 1950s/early 1960s jazz in the name of film is unfortunately commonplace, clumsy editing that destroys musical syntax happens all the time; a BBC documentary notoriously showed Coltrane playing tenor saxophone with the sound of his soprano saxophone layered over the top. Bringing sound and film together, beyond music being used to ‘score’ and set the scene, is admittedly no easy task. But Grimonprez’s decision to push that already complex equation a stage further, cutting music to ‘respond’ to the action on screen, as though sounds had been made in direct emotional response to events in the Congo, is uncomfortably manipulative of both the original music and of the audience. The delicately structured and emotionally nuanced music of Coltrane, Ellington and Nina Simone can’t be pinned down to specifics in this way without reducing it to sonic wallpaper.
There’s a ‘shot heard around the world’ vibe to another piece of synchronous editing: footage of Gillespie tapping the floor with his foot to count in his band against that of Khrushchev’s notorious banging of his desk at the UN in protest to a speech by the leader of the Philippines. Khrushchev’s own speech to the UN, in which he pointed to America’s reprehensible and indefensible record on race, added its own special kind of shame for the US; when even the leader of Soviet Russia says you have a problem with racism, it’s likely you have a problem. Editing here brings a welcome moment of clarity.
Whenever Grimonprez twists music into being more of an active commentary, though, the problems accumulate. We see Thelonious Monk – who never made any public comment on politics – playing ‘Just A Gigolo’ and a characteristically Monkian juddering, splintering discord is diverted from being an exquisitely imagined sound object into being suspended in time and then drenched in reverb as a convenient transition point between scenes. Footage extracted from a considerably longer improvisation by Eric Dolphy, playing bass clarinet with Charles Mingus’ group in 1964, is dropped in out-of-musical-context, presumably because Dolphy’s solo was hitting a peak of cry-tone contortion, having already transitioned through a kaleidoscope of other moods, the sweeter and more reflective moments apparently the ‘wrong’ emotional temperament. John Coltrane, who is seen performing with his quartet, has his sonically intense solo on a live version of ‘My Favourite Things’ diced and spliced around footage of the tanks rolling through Congo at the height of the military coup. His long and digressive musical thoughts are reduced to little more than scene-setting and sound effects, and Grimonprez even has the music drop out altogether at one point, leaving Coltrane’s face – the pain and ecstasy of creation – as carrying the emotional weight of events in the Congo, a misapprehension that is misleading at best.
That word ‘soundtrack’ in the film’s title gives the game away. Coltrane, Monk and Dolphy undoubtedly engaged with the world around them, dominated by the Civil Rights movement and the struggle for parity of educational and voting rights, a process that informed their music. But the chain of events between great musicians listening into their situation in the United States and the actual sound they produced on their instruments is an unfathomably complex equation of musical and social phenomena, with each musician finding a way of their own, and Grimonprez barely scratches the surface. Lumumba’s story and its aftermath, on the other hand, is related with considerable care. Grimonprez wraps up with a sombre reflection on the Congo’s contemporary legacy, especially as the source of coltan, the mineral which powers the batteries of smartphones and laptops all over the world. Once regarded as a threat by the West, Lumumba’s assassination was supposedly in the name of greater safety and stability; yet today two million children live in famine, while coltan extraction has been linked to extensive human rights violations and swathes of environmental destruction.
An argument might be made (not that Grimonprez specifies either way) that this film itself is, in essence, a grand improvisation, the energy of cutting together multiple visual and aural stimuli creating an impetus and form of its own. It’s unfortunate that the improvisational sprit of the music that inspired Grimonprez was trampled underfoot through taking soundbites to suit the film without taking care to hear the music. Jazz was an extraordinary intellectual musical achievement in its own right; its own story in sound. It was the soundtrack to nothing.
Philip Clark is a music journalist. His next book Sound and The City, a history of the sound of New York City, will be published in 2026
