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Posts tagged ‘Nina Simone’

Nov 17

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‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’état’

Sixty years ago Archie Shepp wrote a provocative column for Down Beat magazine in which, if memory serves, he compared his tenor saxophone to a machine gun in the hands of a Vietcong guerrilla. In the early ’60s it seemed that jazz’s New Thing, or whatever you wanted to call it, possessed a powerful political dimension, exemplified by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane’s “Alabama”, and Shepp’s own “Malcolm, Malcolm — Semper Malcolm”. Even the music that had no explicit political content, such as Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz”, somehow seemed to express revolutionary feelings.

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

Lumumba was a symbol not just of the independence of former colonies but of pan-Africanism. Given the activities of the CIA and the British and Belgian intelligence services, it was no surprise that he welcomed support from Castro’s Cuba and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, or that he should pay the ultimate price for it, his body hacked to 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 — stud the narrative, while Grimonprez deploys archive interviews of varying degrees of blatant or sly self-incrimination with participants including Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief, and the MI6 officer Daphne Park.

What makes this film different is the use of music. Grimonprez has spotted the US government’s soft-power deployment 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 the inaugural tour in protest against racial segregation in schools in the Southern states, but in 1960 he travelled to Congo, where he played to an audience of 100,000 people in Léopoldville (as Kinshasa was then known) in the middle of the political disturbances, before returning to Africa in 1961 to perform in Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and the United Arab Republic.

We see Armstrong in Africa in the film, but more novel and powerful is the juxtaposition of the avant-garde jazz of the time with footage of the political events: not so much a soundtrack as an active commentary. So we hear Abbey Lincoln’s anguished screaming, Max Roach firing off snare-drum fusillades, the contorted sounds of Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet (with Charles Mingus’s group, shortly before his death), Nina Simone simmering through Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown”, and Coltrane, on fire in “My Favourite Things” and intoning the sorrow of “Alabama”. Fast cutting is usually the enemy of understanding, but Rik Chaubet’s shrewdly paced editing creates a non-stop tapestry of emotions, making the rhythms and the cry of the music mirror the events being depicted.

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

Lumumba’s death was a crime and a tragedy of enormous significance. Grimonprez alludes to its enduring importance through reminding us that the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose mines produced the uranium for the atom bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remains the world’s major 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 in the UN’s Human Development Index, is safe for civilisation.

* Soundtrack to a Coup d’etat is being screened at various independent cinemas.

Oct 24

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Nina & Monk, etc

If you happen to be in Paris this week, you might wander along to the little bookshop and gallery of Robert Delpire, tucked away on a street beside the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to see a small show of photographs taken by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswater.

Nica, as she was known, took snapshots of many great jazz musicians during her encounters with them in the 1950s and ’60s. To them — the pianists Thelonious Monk and Barry Harris in particular, but many others, too — she was a friend, patron and benefactor, which means that her photographs, taken in dressing rooms and hotel rooms and kitchens, have a rare intimacy and candour.

The photo above, of Thelonious Monk and Nina Simone, is one of about a dozen of the original Polaroids framed and mounted on the walls of the gallery. Many more — of Hank Mobley, Sonny Clark, Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Pettiford, Billy Higgins, Paul Chambers and others — are included in a new book called Dans l’oeil de Nica (Through Nica’s Eye).

Her photos have the tonal richness and warmth characteristic of Polaroids. They were also badly stored for decades and are presented as found, many of them in a semi-distressed condition that inevitably enhances their romantic allure.

The new book is a follow-up to Three Wishes, published in English by Abrams Image in 2006, in which Nica’s photos were accompanied by the answers given to her by dozens of musicians when she asked them the question implied in the title. Many of them are very personal, others poignant, viz. Eric Dolphy: “1: To continue playing music all my life. 2: A home and a car in New York. That’s all!”

* The exhibition is at Delpire & Co, 13 Rue de l’Abbaye, Paris 6, until Saturday 28 October (Wed-Sat 12-6pm). Dans l’oeil de Nica is published by Buchet/Chastel (€44). Nica’s remarkable story is well told in The Baroness, a biography by her niece Hannah Rothschild, published by Virago in 2013.

Jul 16

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‘Summer of Soul’

So much has been written about the documentary based on unseen footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival that you won’t really be needing another recommendation from me. But among all the performances assembled by the director, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, from the series of concerts in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park — now known as Marcus Garvey Park — during that summer 52 years ago, there are some things in particular that I wouldn’t want you to miss.

The gospel sequence, which begins with the profoundly thrilling sound of Dorothy Morrison’s deep contralto leading the massed Edwin Hawkins Singers on “Oh Happy Day”, stands as the foundation of the whole thing. Its climax comes when Mahalia Jackson, feeling unwell, invites Mavis Staples to start off “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”, which the younger woman does beautifully. But then Mahalia, evidently revived by what she has heard, comes forward to join Mavis — and you can sense the bedrock of Manhattan Island shaking to the majestic roar of their voices.

It’s like one generation handing the torch to another, and there’s quite a lot of that feeling throughout the film: the elaborate stage costumes of the Fifth Dimension and the straw-thin David Ruffin giving way to the hippie threads of Sly and the Family Stone being one example, the contrast between restrained mohair-suited blues of B. B. King and Nina Simone’s closing recital of a challenging poem by the Last Poets’ David Nelson being another. As someone says, this “was when the negro died and Black was born.” (Ruffin, by the way, had just left the Temptations and sings “My Girl” magnificently, wringing the neck of his extraordinary falsetto.)

The director uses standard documentary techniques — a strong gallery of talking heads and the deployment of newsreel footage — but there were times, particularly in the opening sequences, when I thought he’d been influenced by the video montages of Arthur Jafa, whose shows in London and Berlin I’ve written about. That’s a good way to go, although Thompson doesn’t overdo it. The stories parallel to the music are well chosen. The activist Denise Oliver-Velez talks about the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault gives a shattering description of her experience in 1961 as the first black female student to be enrolled at the University of Georgia; she went on to become the first black female journalist in the New York Times newsroom.

Of course the deepest impression is left by the knowledge that here are black artists performing to black audiences numbered in the tens of thousands, on their home turf — something on a different scale from the Apollo Theatre a few blocks away. (Harlem was thought to be dangerous territory for white people then, and there are very, very few non-black faces to be seen in these vast crowds.) Sly Stone was also a star at Woodstock that summer, but you can’t watch his “Everyday People” in Harlem without thinking that this spine-tingling performance has gained an extra dimension from the context. And you can see very clearly why Miles Davis (who is not in the film) wanted this audience rather than those who came to see him in European-style concert halls, expecting to hear “My Funny Valentine”.

I remembered, too, the times I’d seen Nina Simone at Ronnie Scott’s or the South Bank, and been irritated and even infuriated by the distance she’d chosen to open between herself and her all-white audiences, expressed in bouts of brusqueness and truculence generally ascribed to a diva’s temperament. To see her in a Harlem park, gently crooning the brand-new “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” to her people, so centred, so serenely beautiful in her Afrofuturist hair and robes and jewellery, made me feel ashamed of those responses from 30-odd years ago. Sure, I loved the music in Summer of Soul, but I also came out of the cinema into a warm London night with a lot to think about.

* Summer of Soul is in cinemas and on the Hulu streaming platform now. Here’s the trailer.