Artist: Kevin Locke
Genre(s):
New Age
Discography:
Midnight Strong Heart
Year: 2004
Tracks: 13
The First Flute
Year: 1999
Tracks: 14
Open Circle
Year: 1996
Tracks: 14
Flash Of The Mirror
Year: 1996
Tracks: 15
Dream Catcher
Year: 1992
Tracks: 15
Love Songs Of The Lakota
Year: 1983
Tracks: 12
Make Me A Hollow Reed
Year:
Tracks: 14
A fellow member of the Hunkpapa band of the Lakota (or Sioux), Kevin Locke was elevated in an environment where traditional culture and faith had nigh disoriented the battle against the government-driven forces that best-loved either cultural assimilation or extermination to the preservation of traditional Native American shipway of life. Despite this clime, Locke began to memorise nigh his ancestral culture, learning the Lakota words and single-handedly rescuing the art of Northern Plains fluting from the threshold of extinction. Locke managed to accomplish these goals in spitefulness of antediluvian laws (since repealed) designed to make up Lakota cultivation illegal.
Locke (whose Lakota advert is Tokeya Inajin, significance "The First to Arise") acquired a Master of Arts degree in educational government activity from the University of South Dakota, where he outset intended to survey law of nature; he very quickly completed that jurisprudence studies were a mistake and switched vocation tracks. He maintains a strong interest in education, and loves to work with children, especially when it comes to the Hoop Dance (which he extends to girls as advantageously as boys; traditionally, the Hoop Dance is male only.)
Locke number 1 came to prominence as a Hoop Dancer, a true master of an intricate public presentation in which the basketball game stand for all elements of aliveness, the combinations existence secondhand for metaphor and story and as a way of depicting origination and the interweaving of life. In all, 28 basketball game hail into recreate during the dance, all of them approaching to be interlocked by the terminal.
Locke's fluting work has been acquiring attention since the seventies, with his main divine guidance having been the late Richard Fool Bull, a fluting shaper and performer. Locke developed much of his repertory from vocal performances, due to the deficiency of Native American fluting players during the 1970s. This advance informed the corporeal on Passion Songs of the Lakota, a 1983 release on Indian House Records.
John Locke has continued to perform and track record diligently o'er the age, gaining the regard of such transverse flute masters as R. Carlos Nakai, wHO has aforementioned that Locke is perchance the best of them all. His Hoop Dance sure as shooting should non be lost, nor should the floating, serene mantrap of his flute glass playing, with Open Circle (the cover up of which depicts Locke in the midst of the Hoop Dance) and Pipe dream Catcher organism essential listening aboard Love Songs of the Lakota.
Locke standard a National Endowment of the Arts Award in 1990.
