What the Record Didn’t Play
Some revolutions had soundtracks. Others were silenced before the first note began.
In 1960, sixteen new African nations took their seats at the United Nations. The air was electric, the “Year of Africa,” they called it, a time of new flags, new languages, new promises. But beneath the speeches and parades, another rhythm pulsed: the syncopated heartbeat of jazz.
It wasn’t just music. It was a weapon.
As Louis Armstrong toured the Congo under the banner of “cultural exchange,” the CIA dined in nearby hotels, orchestrating the quiet removal of Patrice Lumumba. Jazz, once born from the improvisations of Black resistance, had been recruited by the empire as the soundtrack of freedom, sold as proof of democracy.
And all the while, Satchmo blew.
Scene I – When Freedom Became a Soundtrack
Johan Grimonprez’s documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’État replays that era like a broken record. It cuts between CIA memos, saxophone solos, and footage of Armstrong’s wide grin under the African sun.
Jazz was the language of diplomacy. It was seductive, modern, improvisational. Everything the United States wanted newly independent nations to believe it was.
While Armstrong played in Congolese stadiums, Lumumba was being silenced just a few miles away.
History, like music, can play in two keys at once: one public, one secret.
Jazz was supposed to sound like liberty. But in Congo, it masked the bassline of control.
Scene II – Improvisation as Empire
Grimonprez edits like a trumpet solo, cutting from melody to chaos, never resolving. The result feels less like a documentary than a fever dream about sound and silence.
What makes it haunting is the double exposure of its images: Armstrong smiling as CIA agents exchange files; trumpets flaring over blacked-out memos.
It’s a performance of freedom underwritten by surveillance.
As scholar John Lowney once wrote, “jazz diplomacy blurred the lines between commerce and war.” In the Congo, it blurred the line between representation and replacement between the art of a people and the propaganda of a state.
Yet even within this orchestration of power, resistance hummed beneath the noise.
Scene III – Revolution Without Soundtrack
Somewhere between the brass sections and the backroom deals, another story was missing from the record:
Andrée Blouin.
My great-grandmother.
A woman whose voice should have been among the loudest in Pan-African history but wasn’t.
Born in colonial Ubangi-Shari to a Congolese mother and a French father, Blouin was raised between worlds designed to reject her. She became an organiser, strategist, and adviser to Lumumba, a woman who believed that liberation without women’s liberation was only half a revolution.
But her name slipped out of history’s chorus. She was too radical, too transnational, too loud.
Men were remembered as leaders; women like her were edited out of the track.
Her revolution didn’t have a soundtrack. It was silenced before it could play.
Scene IV – The Volume of Silence
When I first saw her appear, briefly, in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, her image moved me in a way theory couldn’t.
There she was, speaking to crowds, her voice cutting through static.
Not a footnote, not a muse, not someone’s wife.
A conductor.
She was called dangerous. A courtesan of statesmen. A Madame de Pompadour of Conakry.
The language of power always knows how to disguise fear.
Her erasure wasn’t an accident. It was a decision, one made in the editorial rooms of history, where men curated memory like playlists.
Andrée Blouin wasn’t forgotten because she was a minor. She was forgotten because she wasn’t.
Scene V – Listening Backwards to Hear the Future
Sound, in politics, is never neutral. Who gets the microphone determines who gets remembered.
Grimonprez’s film doesn’t offer closure. It scratches the record, replaying the Cold War as dissonance: jazz solos alongside executions, trumpets echoing over silences history refused to break.
Through that dissonance, Blouin returns.
Her story resists harmony. It’s not a neat melody about triumph or tragedy. It’s an improvisation: layered, fractured, unresolved.
Because sometimes the most radical thing a woman can do is refuse to fade out.
What does politics sound like?
Not always an anthem, not a flag, not a speech.
Sometimes it sounds like a trumpet masking a coup.
Sometimes it sounds like silence, sharpened into strategy.
And sometimes, if you listen closely, it sounds like a woman the world tried to mute, finally tuning herself back in.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s reclamation: a reminder that what the record didn’t play still echoes.