Blu-ray Review: Soundtrack to a Coup d'État | Under the Radar Magazine Under the Radar | Music Blog for the Indie Music Magazine
Saturday, February 8th, 2025  

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État

Studio: Kino Lorber

Jan 21, 2025 Web Exclusive Photography by Kino Lorber

The fascinating documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’État tracks the timeline and multiple threads in the early 1960s involving Africa’s colonial racism, keen interest in Congo’s uranium mining and political upheaval, and how Congo leader Patrice Lumumba landed in the crosshairs of outside interests. Along the way, jazz ambassadors including Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie are unaware, as they travel to perform, of the movements of covert CIA operatives.

“This is what you might call a cool war,” says Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. about how key jazz figures might have a cultural impact on the Cold War. Dizzy Gillespie, holding up his trumpet, adds, “And the weapon we would use is the cool one.”

The film presents a vast collection of period clips in telling the detailed story and setting its tone, with the music and footage of jazz luminaries at times meeting and punctuating the tenor of the narrative. Appearances by international figures of the period include U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Malcolm X, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, while clips of eyewitness accounts and those with direct involvement add riveting detail. Andrée Blouin, Lumumba’s speechwriter & Chief of Protocol in 1960, recounts how she smuggled a controversial document in her hair bun, and mercenaries discuss with jarring detachment their desensitized approach to killing. How the CIA turned a Louis Armstrong concert, without his knowledge, into a Trojan horse to prevent 1500 tons of uranium from falling into the hands of the Soviets is but one of the events leading up to the murder of Lumumba and its explosive reaction.

(www.kinolorber.com/product/soundtrack-to-a-coup-d-etat-2)




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