A 2025 Madison Jazz Festival Event
Madison Jazz Festival 2025 and MMoCA Cinema present the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, 227 State Street, on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at 7:00pm. Free admission.
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat | Johan Grimonprez | Belgum, France, Netherlands | 2024 | 150 minutes
Director Johan Grimonprez captures the moment when African politics and American jazz collided in his magnificent essay film, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo’s leader Patrice Lumumba.
A 2025 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature. United Nations, 1960: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. Richly illustrated by eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba himself, and a veritable canon of jazz icons, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate. (Kino Lorber)
