About the Book
In Blutopia Graham Lock studies the music and thought of three pioneering twentieth-century musicians: Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Providing an alternative to previous analyses of their work, Lock shows how these distinctive artists were each influenced by a common musical and spiritual heritage and participated in self-conscious efforts to create a utopian vision of the future.
A century after Ellington's birth, Lock reassesses his use of music as a form of black history and compares the different approaches of Ra, a band leader who focused on the future and cosmology, and Braxton, a contemporary composer whose work creates its own elaborate mythology. Arguing that the majority of writing on black music and musicians has-even if inadvertently-incorporated racial stereotypes, he explains how each artist reacted to criticism and sought to break free of categorical confines. Drawing on social history, musicology, biography, cultural theory, and, most of all, statements by the musicians themselves, Lock writes of their influential work.
Blutopia will be a welcome contribution to the literature on twentieth-century African American music and creativity. It will interest students of jazz, American music, African American studies, American culture, and cultural studies.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Blutopia
Part I: Sun Ra: A Starward Eye
1. Astro Black: Mythic Future, Mythic Past
2. Of Aliens and Angels: Mythic Identity
Part II: Duke Ellington: Tone Parallels
3. In the Jungles of America: History Without Saying It
4. Zajj: Renegotiating Her Story
Part III: Anthony Braxton: Crossroad Axiums
5. All the Things You Are: Legba’s Legacy
6. Going to the Territory: Sound Maps of the Meta-Real
Coda: House of Voices, Sea of Music
Appendix
Notes
Works Cited
Index of Compositions and Recordings
Index
About the Author :
Graham Lock is Special Lecturer in American Music at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and books, including Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music and Chasing the Vibration: Meetings with Creative Musicians.
Review :
"Blutopia ... is a discerning account of the battles over utopia in the jazz world ... [Lock's] achievement is to take the musicians seriously as theorists in their own right, then to draw them into the meshes of African-American musical and spiritual traditions... Lock's insights however, also whet the reader's appetite for an appraisal of the music itself ... Future scholars will have to find a language that can develop his Blutopian premises and bring them to a musical conclusion."--Times Literary Supplement, 27 October 2000 "Blutopia is an important and novel addition to the jazz literature... Throughout the book, the featured jazz masters are shown challenging European stereotyping of black history" - Jazz Review, June 2000 "Lock provides a welcome corrective to much writing about jazz over the last 70 years... This is a book to be read thoughtfully."--Choice "More than simply an overview of three remarkable musicians' lives, this stellar example of distinctive scholarship provides an invaluable commentary on American society. Lock relies on African American cultural practices and mythologies to support his underlying theme, which include the purpose behind each musician's works, how they dealt with misconceptions and misunderstandings, and the democratic nature of jazz, with an emphasis on its black roots and its methods of disowning previous racial stereotyping of the music."--Library Journal "Explicating music-as-sociology rather than music per se, Lock is utterly enthralling, even in the notes."--Booklist "Graham Lock's rightly-named book expertly and impeccably attends to the mission African-American music has been on. Its address of a utopic assertion shaded by blue, dystopic truth in the work of Sun Ra, Ellington, and Braxton knowingly shows how distinctly out music 'in the tradition' has long been. Entering the discourse advanced by such assertion with exemplary grace and discernment, ever the right tone and touch, it succeeds beautifully in recognising and furthering the music's blutopic studies." - Nathaniel Mackey, University of California, Santa Cruz "Explicating music-as-sociology rather than music per se, Lock is utterly enthralling, even in the notes."-Booklist "Blutopia ... argues that in their music [Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton], and in the conduct of their lives, these men have sought to counter the exclusion of African-Americans and their creativity from standard white accounts of history... Blutopia is a lucidly written, expansively annotated exposition of "an African American visionary future stained with memories".--THE WIRE, May 2000 "Graham Lock's "Blutopia" will stand as a pivotal text in the development of a serious consideration of African American creative music. Lock offers a range of fresh, new materials, and is at the same time approaching the problematic of the black musical intellectual tradition from an extremely exciting and original perspective". - John Corbett, author of Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein "Lock is upping the ante on the scholarship of music. He gently leads the reader into largely unknown territory with impressive lucidity and evenhandedness." - John Szwed, author of Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra "Lock's brilliant work first describes how ludicrous the notion is, that any of these musicians are somehow detached from and outside African American cultural valences, by showing how all their praxis is deeply imbued with cultural signposts to their black cultural history ... The interdisciplinary scholarship here is often remarkable and the prose has a fluidity and passion which more established academics could learn from. As Lock himself says, 'trying to reconcile the imperatives of the utopian impulse with those of the remembering song is no easy task'. That his book does this effortlessly is a testament to a lifetime spent unearthing the rich treasures of an improvisational tradition which renders up its multifarious and mutable meanings only to those willing to listen beyond the cliched obvious."--Alan Rice, New Formations
