frameworks vis-a-vis certain forms of musicking; delineates the dynamics involved in a blues ontology and improvisational performances; explores literacy and nonliteracy on the production of musicking; provides the reader with a very insightful reading of classical music in relationship to issues of the infrastructural workings of industrialism; and, more.But why the term musicking"? For Small, musicking says something about the active process of music making, though the active dimensions of musicking can be tethered and arrested by certain concepts of music that are linked directly to a certain political economy. To music or musicking implies an active and performative movement. Music is not a static object, but a protean process. Music, according to Small, is not primarily a thing or a collection of things, but an activity in which we engage (50). Hence, there is no decontextualized music-object about which we can pose questions; rather we can only ask about musicking as it is enacted within a uniquely given context. The meaning of a musical piece, therefore, is not found in the musical work, but in the musical event. The idea is to pose ones question with the total musical situation in mind: What does it mean when this performance takes place at this time, in this place, with these musicians, before this audience? (51-52). Hence, the process of musicking, Small reasons, provides a matrix within which identities are formed; for the process of musicking always takes place within a social context that involves various identities in relationship (55-56).Musicking is not only concerned with the expression of identity, who one is, but expresses ones relationship to other people, to the natural and even to the supernatural world, and musicking is concerned with the exploration, the affirmation and celebration of relationships (56). With phenomenological overtones, Small realizes the sheer active dimensions of African-American musicking as a process of existential meaning formation. For it was through the process of musicking (spirituals, blues, jazz, rap, and other forms) that African-Americans found new ways of surviving and being. They had to create new and hybrid (African-European) modes of existential musicking and being-in-the-world which would give meaning to the apparently meaningless nightmare into which they had been thrust (34). It was music, dance, and folk tales that carried the spiritual and metaphysical temper that enabled/enables African-Americans to survive (35).Smalls thesis is that African-Americans, as a protean people, a people forced to narrate and create a semiotic stream of self-meaning, enacted processes of musicking that were disruptive, improvisational, and non-static. African-American musicking is a process of deconstructing images imposed upon them. Their musicking involves counter-narratives that say, This is who I am, and This is where I belong, against those who would say, That is who you are, and That is where you belong (463). Improvisational forms of African musicking enabled African-Americans to move and bend according to the oppressive conditions that they faced. Improvisation also allowed for a decentralized and democratic sense of community and being. Like a Jazz piece, African-Americans brought with them flexible structures (cognitive, aesthetic, etc.) that allowed for improvisational and (decentralized) democratic enactments,