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.

"“Blutopia is a lucidly written, expansively annotated exposition of ‘an African American visionary future stained with memories.’ ”" - 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.”" - 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.”" - 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.”" - 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.”" - 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.”" - 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. . . . ”" - TLS