“Masque is about identity: Who am I? Really, that question has informed everything I’ve done, from the beginning of my solo career.” Vernon Reid is speaking one recent morning as his band bus idles outside the hotel. The night before, of course, anyone in the crowd would have had no trouble answering his query: He is, among other things, a profound instrumentalist, one of the world’s great guitarists — a player so advanced, in fact, that the estimable Robert Fripp has admitted to aspiring to meet Reid’s standards “as a guitarist, musician, and human being.”

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