Other Planes of There: Critical Notice of Graham Lock's Blutopia

Abstract

Graham Lock's Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton explores several di­ mensions of cultural critique in the writings and music of three highly in­ fluential musical artists. The book extends Lock's pursuit of related topics in Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-Reality of Creative Music (1988), an engaging and highly informative account of Braxton's career as a composer, instrumentalist, and bandleader. Forces in Motion featured ex­ tensive interviews with Braxton and the members of his 1985 touring quar­ tet, Marilyn Crispell, Gerry Hemingway, and Mark Dresser, along with Lock's own commentaries and research findings. Lock is also the author of Chasing the Vibration: Meetings with Creative Musicians (1994), a collection of interviews with jazz composers and improvisers, and the editor of Mixtery: A Festschrift for Anthony Braxton (1995). Blutopia does not focus its attention on written scores, the sonic dimen­ sions of recordings, or the sonic and social dialogism of live ensemble per­ formances. Lock instead seeks to elucidate some of what Ra, Ellington, and Braxton said and wrote in their books, interviews, liner-notes, poems, and elsewhere about their music and its social and philosophical connota­ tions. When he turns to specific musical examples, Lock is usually in search of particular extramusical and programmatic implications embed­ ded in lyrics, titles, and other linguistic cues. Scholars expecting formal musical analyses may be thrown off by Lock's critical method but they may also be surprised by how far his archival and interview research and his in­ terpretive tools can take readers into the distinctive conceptual worlds of Ra, Ellington, and Braxton. Three interlocking themes frame the book's six chapters. First, Lock considers how the three artists approached (and in Braxton's case, of course, continues to approach) their own music as an "alternative form of history" (2). As Sun Ra once remarked, "history is only his story, you Current Musicology. nos. 71-73 (Spring 2001-Spring 2002) © 2002 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York