Jason Robinson is a composer, saxophonist, flutist, and scholar whose music thrives in the fertile overlaps between improvisation and composition, acoustic music and electronics, tradition and experimentalism. Robinson has performed throughout the Americas, Asia, and Europe, published 20 albums as a leader or co-leader, and appeared on over 50 albums. As a scholar, Robinson’s work investigates the relationship between improvised and popular music, experimentalism, and cultural identity.
Recent large-scale composition projects include “For Yusef Lateef,” an ongoing series of pieces inspired by the work of Dr. Yusef Lateef; and “Ancestral Numbers,” an expansive sound meditation on genealogy and family history.
His latest albums include Ancestral Numbers I (Playscape, 2024), Ancestral Numbers II (Playscape, 2024), The Urgency of Now (Creative Nation, 2020), Harmonic Constituent (Playscape, 2020), and Two Hours Early, Ten Minutes Late: Duo Music of Ken Aldcroft (Accretions, 2020). 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.
At MacDowell, Robinson composed seven new works for his composition series titled “For Yusef Lateef.” Along with previous pieces in the series, Robinson is scheduled to record an album of the same name featuring a 17-piece ensemble in the spring of 2025.
Portrait by Julian Parker Burns
