The vibraphone is one of the more unique instruments to infiltrate jazz. A holy mash-up of the piano and the percussive, it's the duck-billed platypus of musical instrumentation. In terms of cool, it's unfairly lodged somewhere between the tuba and the clarinet. Its old-school practitioners now exude a breezy novelty quality, and the truly mentionable modern players can be counted on one and a half hands. One standout is New York mallet-man Joe Locke. Jazz fans in Japan can catch the vibraphonist on his current tour, featuring a pit-stop at Yokohama Jazz Promenade this weekend. On rave-ups, Locke frenziedly bangs the bars; on the ballads, he calmly coos with a restrained minimalism.