“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 ... Read moreJohn Cage to Dr. Funkenstein “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 recognizing and furthering the music’s blutopic studies.”—Nathaniel Mackey, University of California, Santa Cruz “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 “Blutopia is a lucidly written, expansively annotated exposition of ‘an African American visionary future stained with memories.’ ”
Julian Cowley
The Wire
“Blutopia is a wonderful book. Lock lays out each man’s life and ideas in a readable and informative fashion. In addition, his thorough research and reasonable analysis shed new light on previously unexamined aspects of these artists’ careers. in fact, his chapter on Sun Ra is perhaps the best summation of his philosophy that exists. Additionally, his techniques for uncovering the idea-worlds lurking in the interviews and other effluvia generated by an artist living a public life, point the way for future researchers into the world of jazz studies.”
John Howard
American Studies International
“[Lock’s] book offers a very fertile line of thought, and he must be right that it could be applied to other African American music from Scott Joplin to Cecil Taylor. There’s copious annotation but while the scholarship is formidable, the presentation is clear and readable. Blutopia is an important and novel addition to the jazz literature.”
Andy Hamilton
Jazz Review
“[Lock] is a lucid writer, intelligent and incisive, and Blutopia displays the sterling qualities we’ve come to expect from him. . . . Lock should be congratulated for recontextualising the music of Ra, Ellington ,and Braxton, and enhancing our understanding of it by way of social, cultural, and historical perspectives. Blutopia makes their musical philosophy more comprehensible, and their vision seem more profound. That’s no small achievement.”
Brian Marley
Avant Music News
“It seems odd to lump together the greatest jazz showman, Sun Ra; the greatest Jazz orchestrator, Duke Ellington; and the greatest contemporary Jazz experimentalist, Anthony Braxton. But Lock illuminatingly argues that the three men’s cultural motivations are similar. . . . Explicating music-as-sociology rather than music per se, Lock is utterly enthralling, even in the notes.”
Ray Olson
Booklist
“Lock deserves praise for his explication of the influence Ellington’s race-conscious secondary school education had on his racial-uplift agenda and epic sense of pageantry; ditto for his comparisons of Ra with the Yoruba trickster god Esu, and for elucidating the mystical content of Braxton’s diagrammatic song titles. . . . Throughout Blutopia, Lock makes the most of his research. . . [He] is good at teasing out the subtle and not so subtle patronizing tone many white observers have taken regarding the highfalutin artistic aspirations of jazz’s African-American experimenters.”
Greg Tate
Bookforum
“Lock explains [the musicians] from the inside out. His 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. . . . ”
Scott Saul
TLS
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