maskings: the first masking

the first masking

In this research project, I use a mixture of methods to examine the practice of a vibraphonist who works within jazz+,¹ and explores the ways in which personal sound is developed, constructed and experienced within that practice. This mixture of methods follows the Africana polyphonic phenomenological tradition of combining ethnography, history, verse, diagrams, and creative practice to form a portfolio work. The portfolio is composed of a selection of recordings of improvised music, formalised text, and critical creative writing. The mixture of methods used in the research can be expressed through various action/practice research models. These commonly have a Eurocentric basis, and stem from outside the field of jazz+. However, models of practice research within jazz+ practice itself do exist; my attempt within this research is to make such a model clearer, through connecting it with philosophies and concepts with directly related social and cultural domains, and by using the model itself.

The research critiques the current models of performance and practice on the instrument and offers an alternative model of thinking about that practice within jazz+ practice. Most research into vibraphone performance takes a hierarchical, instrumentalist approach. My research considers this perspective, and presents the predominant models of this approach. I then examine vibraphone practice (as situated within jazz+ practice) as a phenomenon that is inextricably linked to the social behaviours and beliefs of the field. I reconsider the vibraphone not just as a musical object created by and used in jazz+, but also as a socially constituted musical "space of spaces" that acts as a conduit for orality and vocality: a mouth.

The vibraphone and the vibraphonist are set in relation to each other, and the hybridised spatiality between these two form the instrument that we call a vibraphone. The social constitution of that space is determined by the developmental trajectory of the player; those meaningful movements between socialries, which I define as a collection of social groups, modes and behaviours that are bound to or associated with a particular social or cultural practice. From these socialries emerge personalised knowledge, meaning making, and aesthetics. The music made by the improviser indicates the interactions the person has had with those socialries as Eero Tarasti says is "a sign by which the social emerges".²

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