Blue Salience: For Yusef Lateef is Jason Robinson’s expansive tribute to the late Dr. Yusef Lateef, featuring his 17-piece Janus Orchestra—a remarkable ensemble of distinctive figures from the jazz and creative music scenes of New York, Boston, and western Massachusetts, Lateef’s longtime home.
The work began as a simple idea with expansive implications: Where do the sound worlds of the legendary musician and scholar Dr. Yusef Lateef lead us today, and how might they help us understand our current world? Robinson’s kaleidoscopic response ranges from abstract soundscapes to heavy grooves, from intricately notated passages to graphic notation and open improvisation.
“The composition is magnificent. The range of instrumentation is staggering. The orchestration is splendid. The individual performances are riveting. And the collective creative output is enthralling.” – Keith Flint, All About Jazz
A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.
The music of American composer, saxophonist, flutist, and scholar Jason Robinson (“rugged and scintillating,” The New York Times) thrives in the fertile overlaps between improvisation and composition, acoustic music and electronics, tradition and experimentalism. Initially a devotee of post-1960s jazz and creative music, Robinson is celebrated for bringing together various historical directions in jazz—bebop, post-bop, the avant-garde—with an improvisatory and compositional sensibility drawn from and extending the languages of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Lester Young. His musical interests, however, span far and wide. Born in 1975, he is a critically acclaimed, distinctive voice in a generation of creative musicians in equal dialogue with jazz, popular music, experimental music, and electronic music.
Robinson’s Janus Orchestra is the full 17-piece version of his longstanding and primary group, the New York-based Janus Ensemble, which prior to Blue Salience: For Yusef Lateef, ranged in size from quartet to an 11-piece ensemble featuring pianists Joshua White and Angelica Sanchez, guitarist Liberty Ellman, bassist Drew Gress, percussionists Ches Smith and George Schuller, trombonist Michael Dessen, trombonist and tubist Bill Lowe, tubist Marcus Rojas, and fellow reedists Marty Ehrlich, JD Parran, and Oscar Noriega. The group’s most recent releases before Blue Salience: For Yusef Lateef, Ancestral Numbers I (Playscape, 2024), and Ancestral Numbers II (Playscape, 2024), are the first two albums of an ongoing, far-reaching composition project that serves as a “sound meditation on genealogy and family history.” Robinson’s Janus Ensemble has four previous albums: Harmonic Constituent (Playscape), Resonant Geographies (pfMENTUM), Tiresian Symmetry (Cuneiform), and The Two Faces of Janus (Cuneiform).
With Blue Salience: For Yusef Lateef, Robinson has released 21 albums as leader or co-leader and appeared on nearly 50 albums in total. He performs regularly as a soloist (acoustically and with electronics), with his group Janus Ensemble, and in numerous collaborative contexts. He has performed at festivals and prominent venues through North, Central, and South America, Europe, and East Asia, and performed with Peter Kowald, George Lewis, Anthony Davis, Myra Melford, Nicole Mitchell, Amiri Baraka, Howard Johnson, Toots and the Maytals, Groundation, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Eugene Chadbourne, Earl Howard, Bertram Turetzky, Mark Dresser, John Russell, Roger Turner, Gerry Hemingway, Kei Akagi, Mel Graves, Babatunde Lea, Mel Martin, Marco Eneidi, Lisle Ellis, Raphe Malik, Mike Wofford, Dana Reason, San Francisco Mime Troupe, New Pickle Circus, Makanda Project, Ernie Small Big Band, among others.
As a scholar, Robinson’s work investigates the relationship between improvised and popular musics, experimentalism, and cultural identity. His writing is published in Ethnomusicology, Jazz Perspectives, Critical Studies in Improvisation/ Études critiques en improvisation, Jazz and Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Social Anthropology, and several edited volumes. Robinson is the Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Professor of Music at Amherst College and received a Ph.D. in music from the University of California, San Diego.
