New Film – Coup soundtrack: Archie Shepp wrote a provocative piece in which, he compared his tenor saxophone to a machine gun in the hands of fighter: Videos

This film, a French-Belgian-Dutch production, should be released in Europe during the next year (In Great Britain it is present in independent circuits), it is not known if also in Italy.

The only hope is placed in Amazon Prime (!), because it is already present on the same platform but exclusively for subscribers in the United States. I borrow an article by Richard Williams from his notable blog TheBluemoment.com to provide some additional elements for the knowledge of a story that the younger ones would hardly know. The conclusions that Williams reaches are historically proven and make us reflect on how the media still have a decisive role in distorting, not to say falsifying, everything that happens in the world that does not reflect the interests of the West.

Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine are just the latest examples in chronological order. It pains me to say that nowadays, at least in the music field, there are no longer the Shepps, the Roaches, the Coltranes capable of raising protests and pointing out lies.

1960: Sixteen African countries are admitted to the United Nations, sparking a political earthquake. To maintain control over the riches of the former Belgian Congo, King Baudouin finds an ally in the Eisenhower administration, which fears losing access to supplies of uranium, vital to the production of atomic bombs.

As ambassador, jazz musician Louis Armstrong unwittingly becomes a front for the first post-colonial coup in Africa, while other artists such as Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie face a difficult dilemma: how to represent a country where racial segregation still prevails? The Cold War reaches its peak when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounces the UN’s complicity in the removal of Lumumba to the General Assembly. A masterful, multi-voiced, syncopated account of how African self-determination was undermined in the 1960s.

Sixty years ago, Archie Shepp wrote a provocative piece for Down Beat magazine in which, if memory serves, he compared his tenor saxophone to a machine gun in the hands of a Vietcong fighter. In the early 1960s, jazz’s New Thing, or whatever you wanted to call it, seemed to have a powerful political dimension, typified by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” and Shepp’s own “Malcolm, Malcolm — Semper Malcolm.” Even music that wasn’t explicitly political, like Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz,” seemed to express revolutionary sentiment in some way.

It’s with great brilliance that Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez turns that music (and indeed those pieces, plus others) into an integral component of his award-winning documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’état . The subject of the two-and-a-half-hour film is the 1961 assassination of activist and politician Patrice Lumumba, whose tenure as prime minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo, formerly the Belgian Congo, was ended after just three months by a military coup fomented by those with interests in the country’s rich rare-mineral deposits, particularly Belgium, the retreating colonial power, President Eisenhower’s U.S. government, and Harold Macmillan’s British government.

Lumumba was a symbol not only of the independence of former colonies, but also of Pan-Africanism. Given the activities of the CIA and British and Belgian intelligence services, it is not surprising that he welcomed the support of Castro’s Cuba and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, or that he had to pay the ultimate price for it, his body being chopped into pieces and dissolved in acid by the mercenaries who killed him. Names familiar to those of my generation—Moïse Tshombe, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, Dag Hammarskjöld—dot the narrative, while Grimonprez deploys archival interviews of varying degrees of overt or subtle self-incrimination with participants including CIA station chief Larry Devlin and MI6 officer Daphne Park.

What makes this film different is the use of music. Grimonprez has identified the US government’s soft-power use of jazz during the Cold War through State Department-sponsored international tours. In 1956, Dizzy Gillespie and an 18-piece band spent 10 weeks touring Europe, Asia, and South America. A year earlier Louis Armstrong had pulled out of what would have been his inaugural tour to protest racial segregation in schools in the Southern states, but in 1960 he went to the Congo, where he played to an audience of 100,000 in Léopoldville (as Kinshasa was then known) in the midst of political unrest, before returning to Africa in 1961 to perform in Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and the United Arab Republic.

Sixty years ago, Archie Shepp wrote a provocative piece for Down Beat magazine in which, if memory serves, he compared his tenor saxophone to a machine gun in the hands of a Vietcong fighter. In the early 1960s, jazz’s New Thing, or whatever you wanted to call it, seemed to have a powerful political dimension, typified by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” and Shepp’s own “Malcolm, Malcolm — Semper Malcolm.” Even music that wasn’t explicitly political, like Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz,” seemed to express revolutionary sentiment in some way.

It’s with great brilliance that Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez turns that music (and indeed those pieces, plus others) into an integral component of his award-winning documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’état . The subject of the two-and-a-half-hour film is the 1961 assassination of activist and politician Patrice Lumumba, whose tenure as prime minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo, formerly the Belgian Congo, was ended after just three months by a military coup fomented by those with interests in the country’s rich rare-mineral deposits, particularly Belgium, the retreating colonial power, President Eisenhower’s U.S. government, and Harold Macmillan’s British government.

Lumumba was a symbol not only of the independence of former colonies, but also of Pan-Africanism. Given the activities of the CIA and British and Belgian intelligence services, it is not surprising that he welcomed the support of Castro’s Cuba and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, or that he had to pay the ultimate price for it, his body being chopped into pieces and dissolved in acid by the mercenaries who killed him. Names familiar to those of my generation—Moïse Tshombe, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, Dag Hammarskjöld—dot the narrative, while Grimonprez deploys archival interviews of varying degrees of overt or subtle self-incrimination with participants including CIA station chief Larry Devlin and MI6 officer Daphne Park.

What makes this film different is the use of music. Grimonprez has identified the US government’s soft-power use of jazz during the Cold War through State Department-sponsored international tours. In 1956, Dizzy Gillespie and an 18-piece band spent 10 weeks touring Europe, Asia, and South America. A year earlier Louis Armstrong had pulled out of what would have been his inaugural tour to protest racial segregation in schools in the Southern states, but in 1960 he went to the Congo, where he played to an audience of 100,000 in Léopoldville (as Kinshasa was then known) in the midst of political unrest, before returning to Africa in 1961 to perform in Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and the United Arab Republic.

The film features Armstrong in Africa, but more innovative and powerful is the juxtaposition of the avant-garde jazz of the time with footage of political events: less a soundtrack than an active commentary. So we hear Abbey Lincoln’s anguished screams, Max Roach firing blasts of snare drum, Eric Dolphy’s twisted bass clarinet (with Charles Mingus’s band, shortly before his death), Nina Simone simmering through Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” and Coltrane, ablaze in “My Favorite Things” and intoning the pain of “Alabama.” Fast editing is usually the enemy of comprehension, but Rik Chaubet’s cleverly paced editing creates a seamless tapestry of emotion, making the rhythms and screams of the music mirror the events depicted.

Direct action also played a role, and if you see this extraordinarily compelling film, you won’t forget the spectacle of Lincoln, Roach, and dozens of others bravely interrupting a session of the United Nations Security Council in New York to protest the assassination of the figure Malcolm X called “the greatest black man who ever walked the continent of Africa.”

Lumumba’s death was a crime and tragedy of enormous magnitude. Grimonprez hints at his enduring importance by reminding us that the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose mines produced the uranium for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remains the world’s leading source of coltan, the rare and precious commodity that powers our iPhones. In other words, a country of 100 million people, whose mineral deposits are said to be worth $24 trillion, but where two million children are at risk of starvation, and which currently ranks 179th out of 191 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index, is safe for civilization.