Louis Armstrong’s visit to Congo was used by CIA station chief Larry Devlin and other U.S. intelligence officers as a smokescreen for a coup.

A thread 🧵 Trumpeter, singer and bandleader Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong was in the midst of a months-long tour across Africa, organized and funded by the U.S. State Department as part of an effort to improve America's image in newly independent nations emerging from colonial rule.

In 1987, The King of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, was invited to Burkina Faso by Marxist revolutionary and fellow Pan Africanist Thomas Sankara, a longtime fan of Fela’s music and a jazz musician himself.

A thread 🧵 Dubbed “Africa’s Che Guevara”, Sankara was an army man and a Marxist revolutionary who became president in 1983 after a people’s uprising. He launched an ambitious social and economic reform programme and became an icon of pan-Africanism with his anti-imperialist rhetoric. Sankara was also a fine jazz guitarist who founded several bands.

Afro-French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer Frantz Fanon addresses the reasons of gatekeeping in jazz.

A thread 🧵 As an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, and an existentialist humanist concerning the psychopathology of colonization, and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.

Sixty-three years ago today, freelance photographer Art Kane called together as many jazz soloists as he could for a photograph which has come to be known as "A Great Day in Harlem."

A thread 🧵 In all, 57 musicians duly assembled in Harlem between Fifth and Madison Avenues. The group included Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan and Count Basie.