Strike Up the Band
The politics of jazz, and vice versa, in Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack To a Coup d'État.
Hard to resist Dizzy Gillespie, even when he’s acting as a tool of the US State Department. In a 1956 newsreel excerpted in Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack To a Coup d’État, he’s about to embark on a government-backed tour of the Middle East, aimed not just at spreading the gospel of jazz but at improving America’s image in the region more broadly. His friend Adam Clayton Powell Jr, the Harlem congressman and civil rights advocate who cooked up the scheme, riffs to a reporter that this tour might be seen as part of the “cool war”. Gillespie plays along, holding up his trumpet with the modest but assured grin of a man who knows what’s required of him: “The weapon that we will use is the cool one.”
This is a story that’s been told often enough, sometimes with the implication that Gillespie and other musicians enlisted for such tours were caught up in a propaganda struggle waged over their heads. But there’s no reason to think most of them were as naïve as all that, a point Grimonprez’s film usefully brings out. It was, rather, a matter of tradeoffs: “I sort’ve like the idea of representing America,” Gillespie observed in his 1978 autobiography, “but I wasn’t going over there to apologise for the racist policies of America.”
Soon after, the notion was floated of sending Louis Armstrong to Moscow (at the behest of the newsman Edward R. Murrow, he had already visited the British Gold Coast Colony, soon to become Ghana, where he received a rapturous welcome from record-breaking crowds). But with segregated schools a national issue in the US, Armstrong declared publicly this was off the table “unless they straighten that mess down south”. Eventually he did go, but not till 1970*, after he had undertaken similar excursions to numerous other countries, and had also recorded The Real Ambassadors, a 1962 jazz musical devised by his fellow “jazz ambassador” Dave Brubeck and Brubeck’s wife Iola, with lyrics that reflected ironically on these experiences. “Remember who you are and what you represent/Always be a credit to your government…”
A bit surprisingly, The Real Ambassadors doesn’t make it into Soundtrack To a Coup d’État. But then Grimonprez, a Belgian multimedia artist who has been constructing sophisticated audiovisual collages since the 1990s, has a lot on his plate with this political essay film, which on the level of overt subject-matter isn’t primarily concerned with jazz at all. To the degree he takes jazz as a model formally speaking, he might be thinking of the “free jazz” of Ornette Coleman, never officially a “jazz ambassador” but given a cameo here all the same: figuratively speaking, there are often three or four melody lines going at once, with images, voiceover, music and superimposed captions all leading us in different directions. Still, it doesn’t take long for the primary theme to emerge: the downfall of Patrice Lumumba, the left-wing nationalist leader who became the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, only to be deposed in September 1960 and murdered in January 1961, less than a year after the end of Belgian colonial rule.
This too is not an entirely unfamiliar story. In 2002, Belgium publicly acknowledged “moral responsibility” for Lumumba’s death—and to put it as minimally as possible, it’s evident the American and British governments of the day were no less glad to be rid of him. What put more heat on him than was usual for “non-aligned” leaders at this period of the Cold War was his country’s wealth of natural resources, which his long-term successor, the CIA-backed dictator Joseph Désiré-Mobutu, allowed Western powers relatively free access to, meaning that Congolese copper wound up being used for millions of bullets fired by US forces in Vietnam. All this is set out in detail in Grimonprez’s film, which incorporates narration from the Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane among others, and gives special attention to power struggles at the United Nations, with Dag Hammarskjöld, the vacillating Secretary-General, portrayed as squandering the goodwill invested in him by newly independent member countries in Africa and elsewhere.
If this sounds like demanding as well as depressing viewing, the assumption isn’t wholly misplaced. Keen to prove that his freestyle approach entails no loss of rigour, Grimonprez incorporates on-screen citations complete with page numbers for viewers who want to check his facts (some of which have duly been contested). What this omits, however, is that the film is also extraordinarily entertaining, as numerous reviewers, in the US especially, have pointed out with amazed relief. “I don’t think I’ve seen a better movie-movie all year,” wrote Film Comment’s J. Hoberman, himself a distinguished essayist with a gift for fusing cultural history and the capital-H kind. Other critics have invoked the tradition of the spy thriller, employing adjectives such as “gripping” and “propulsive”. At two and a half hours, the film zips along in a manner hard to envisage had it been backed by Netflix, who would have commissioned half-a-dozen hour-long episodes padded out with talking heads and exposition, whereas Grimonprez relies largely on archival footage and trusts his audience to connect many of the dots.
All the same, Soundtrack To a Coup d’État is as slick a package as you might expect from its Oscar nomination (Hoberman takes note of the “snazzy ‘60s fonts,” one of which disconcertingly resembles the variant of Futura Bold favoured by Wes Anderson). For all the virtuosity of the editing, the “propulsive” quality derives primarily from the raw materials Grimonprez himself has access to, including a library’s worth of 1950s and ‘60s jazz, omnipresent on the soundtrack if often peripheral to the narrative as such. The links between the music and what it accompanies are sometimes direct, sometimes a matter of intuition more than strict logic—and sometimes satirically playful, as in the use of Thelonious Monk’s version of “Just a Gigolo” to suggest the level of commitment that might realistically be expected from the UN.
Gags aside, Grimonprez has two main alibis for yoking jazz and Lumumba together. The first is Armstrong’s goodwill visit to the DRC in October 1960, when Lumumba was under house arrest in the capital, a couple of months prior to his death at the hands of authorities in the Republic of Katanga, a shortlived breakaway state backed by the largely Belgian-owned mining company Union Minière. Katanga too was part of Armstrong’s itinerary, giving a group of CIA operatives a pretext for their own visit, though the film leaves room for speculation on just how significantly this wound up shifting the course of events. The second alibi is a February 1961 protest at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council in New York, organised in the wake of Lumumba’s death by a group including the singer Abbey Lincoln and her husband, the celebrated bebop drummer Max Roach, who played often with Gillespie among other jazz greats.
“The closer you get to the truth, the more you have to include contradictions,” Grimonprez has said. Taking this as axiomatic, the film depicts jazz as a force mobilised for a variety of conflicting purposes, sometimes simultaneously, while leaving open the question of how far the same could be said of any comparably potent artform (such as modernist painting—which, as we’re reminded briefly, was also of interest to the CIA). At the metatextual level, comparable paradoxes are implicit in the film’s manner of playing politics and aesthetics off against each other, inviting us to appreciate the rhythm of Khrushchev banging his fist at the UN alongside Gillespie tapping his feet and letting his cheeks inflate as he blows his horn. Similarly, Roach’s drum rolls are used as a recurrent motif to evoke the threat of machine gun fire, but also to increase our anticipation as Grimonprez gets his own show on the road.
As its title indicates, Soundtrack To a Coup d’État is a film built around a poetic conceit—a somewhat risky one, in that what Lumumba’s fate had to do with jazz was directly and literally not very much. Like most documentarians and essay filmmakers, Grimonprez allows himself a certain license to mislead, albeit without technically lying, or at any rate betraying what he takes to be the spirit of the truth; the image of “skydiving phonographs” being air-dropped behind the Iron Curtain is so striking it’s understandable that he couldn’t resist it, even if on investigation it turns out to be part of an earlier, unrelated propaganda campaign. Likewise, we’re led to suppose that Lincoln’s sustained screaming in Roach’s jazz protest suite We Insist! was in some fashion a response to Lumumba’s murder; in fact the album was released the month before this occurred, though Roach was all the same proposing that the US civil rights movement and the African independence movements of the era should be seen as two battlegrounds in the same war.
Many of the associative leaps in Grimonprez’s film depend on this latter premise, spelled out most explicitly through extracts from the 1960s speeches of Malcolm X, urging African-Americans to understand themselves as Africans first and last. “Don’t think you don’t look Congolese. You look as much Congolese as a Congolese does.” Broadly speaking, the point surely wasn’t lost on Armstrong either, nor on the crowds in the DRC who came to hear him play. But while it may be on record that John Coltrane was a Malcolm X admirer, it’s a leap too far when Grimonprez uses an increasingly frenzied live version of “My Favourite Things” by Coltrane to accompany an account of mercenaries slaughtering their way across the DRC, then has the sound drop out as the music nears its climax, leaving us to interpret Coltrane’s silent look of concentration as an expression of moral horror. In the words of the music critic Philip Clark, this is “misleading at best”; at worst, you could call it kitsch.
There’s also something unhelpfully cursory in Grimonprez’s brief use of Tesla and iPhone commercials as reminders of the West’s ongoing exploitation of the Congo’s resources, not an angle he elsewhere finds much time to pursue. (How he got copyright permission for these snippets I don’t know, supposing he did.) Still, this too is in tune with the film’s ruling principle of free association; once again, the question we’re faced with is how far making a coherent political statement is part of the responsibility of an artist, to whatever extent Grimonprez considers himself an artist in the same sense as Armstrong and Gillespie. But there’s limited scope to ponder the philosophical implications on first viewing, given the amount of attention called for just to process the many bewildering images that flash by. Where did the octopus come from? Who’s the guy in a luchador costume, apparently about to leap from a cement wall? What does a passion play in 1956 Belgium have to do with a water-skiing elephant?
Having looked into that last one, I can confirm that the literal answer is zero: the elephant is “Queenie,” who was captured in Thailand in the early ‘50s, acquired by a zoo in Vermont, and became a minor US celebrity performing alongside her owner’s teenage daughter, who was finally reunited with her old co-star at a theme park in Georgia decades on. Given that elephants are national symbols in the DRC, it might be that Grimonprez is asking us to equate the elephant with Lumumba, and to see them both as sacrificial victims; a later shot of an elephant being airlifted onto a boat might also be taken as a metaphor for the plundering of the Congo’s resources, though I’m reasonably sure it’s not the same elephant as the one on the water-skis.
Fretting too much about any of this might seem frivolous, given the weight of what Soundtrack To a Coup d’État as a whole asks us to take on board. But this is also partly a question of how much earnestness we attribute to the film itself, and whether we take it as a polemic or a “movie-movie” first of all. What comes through most clearly either way is that any pre-packaged narrative should be viewed with suspicion—but also that music remains a gift worth having, even when there are strings attached.
*Correction: An earlier version of this article wrongly stated that Louis Armstrong visited the Soviet Union in 1965. He did, however, tour behind the Iron Curtain for the first time that year, visiting East Germany and Czechoslovakia among other countries.