Graham Lock's Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton is a thought-provoking and serious work in Jazz Studies. Anytime one can encounter a serious work on jazz that takes the musicians themselves seriously and endeavors to engage with their ideas should be applauded. Lock also manages to impressively integrate an analysis of Sun Ra and Anthony Braxton with Duke Ellington, despite vast differences in style, thought, and age among these titans of jazz. However, Lock raises more questions than he answers in much of the text.
First, Sun Ra. It's been a number of years since I've read Szwed's Sun Ra book, but much of Lock's analysis felt 'new' or 'fresh' to me. In a literature class over the last several months, Sun Ra came up more than once and we discussed the parallels of his work with Negro spirituals, but because I know very little about spirituals, Lock connecting spirituals and Sun Ra's chants (in addition to the ring shout and the way the Arkestra moved counterclockwise around the audience) was informative. However, I was at times struck by how Lock seems to take Ra's mythology too much at face value, as if there are not several troubling implications from Sun Ra's Astro Black Mythology. I think Lock came closest to grappling with this issue by identifying Ra as someone who chose to identify with Pharaoh over Moses.
Wilson J. Moses has written about the Pharaoh-Moses dialectic with regards to African American black nationalists and intellectuals, but it seems as if the despotic aspects of Pharaoh are left out of the discussion while the 'authoritarian collectivism' of Moses (and, by extension, Christianity) are rightfully included by Lock's discussion of Ra's opposition to Christianity. As a result, Sun Ra's ideas of the past and future, not to mention the present, are not fully considered since the Moses-Pharaoh conflict is never resolved or rejected (are African Americans stuck with only Moses or Pharaoh? What of Legba?).
As for Duke Ellington, a composer I have not listened to seriously in probably 5 or 6 years, these two chapters were a breath of fresh air. Ellington's fight for jazz to be taken seriously and the complexity and nuance of African American music to escape essentialist and condescending treatment in the eyes of white America are still relevant, as are his attempts to fight minstrelsy, blackface, and 'Uncle Tom' depictions of black life in popular culture. I think Lock also hit the nail on the head about Duke Ellington's view of black America's history as (mostly) based in the US, and his race pride was inseparable from his patriotism. Such a sentiment is lacking in Sun Ra's revisions of the black past and black present, and Duke Ellington's views are probably the most 'mainstream' when it comes to African American perceptions of their nation.
Nonetheless, I was a little surprised that Duke Ellington's middle-class background and support for respectability politics was not integrated into the two chapters (Duke believed African Americans must behave in ways that command respect, according to Lock, plus he opposed the confrontational aspects of the Civil Rights Movement). Given the climate around respectability politics among those in African American Studies today, what are the limitations of Duke Ellington's revisions of the past and future? How does his Blutopia fall short? In what ways are Duke Ellington's US-centered black history and future limited by exclusion of Africa? What do we make of the 'world music' aspirations of his later LPs?
Last but certainly the most confusing and perhaps less relevant to Blutopia, Anthony Braxton. I do not entirely buy the argument of Mackey about Legba's limp and jazz swing or syncopation. It seems too fanciful and impossible to 'prove,' plus it may neglect the ways in which Legba's limp may be more a product of dances and music rather than the other way around. I have no evidence for my own assertion either, but I remain skeptical of a Legba interpretation of Braxton's multiformity. Lock is right about Braxton's synesthesia and the heterogeneity of black creativity (not to mention the critiques of jazz critics), but the Legba interpretation and the chapter on Trillium operas was somewhat less successful or convincing. Braxton's 'vibrationism' and spirituality were fascinating, but one must visit his esoteric writings directly to get a more detailed 'feel' for his views. Lock, to his credit, admits this and acknowledges that the chapters on Braxton did not go in depth.
Overall, however, this is a provocative and insightful reading of three significant jazz artists. Jazz musicians as intellectuals is a growing interest of mine, and Lock has increased my appreciation for artists like Ra, Braxton, and Ellington. Some recent readings of mine on AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago have tangentially included Braxton, but I think an interesting project would be to focus solely on the differences between Braxton and Art Ensemble of Chicago's approach to "Great Black Music" and revisions of the past and future. Perhaps that will be my next rambling post?
