Jason Robinson’s Janus Orchestra presents Blue Salience: for Yusef Lateef

Blue Salience: for Yusef Lateef is a kaleidoscopic sound journey inspired by and dedicated to the late Dr. Yusef Lateef, a towering figure in American music. Featuring a special expanded17-piece version of Robinson’s Janus Orchestra, the project includes some of the brightest individualists in creative music today from New York, Boston, and western Massachusetts, where Dr. Lateef called home for much of his life.

Jason Robinson’s Janus Orchestra is a 17-piece ensemble that busts open the boundaries between jazz big band and modern classical music, funk and other groove-oriented musical traditions, and a musical experimentalism that invites listeners to imagine dreamy soundscapes of a better future.

It 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 his sound worlds help us understand our current world? Composer, saxophonist, flutist, and scholar, Jason Robinson, long inspired by Lateef, began exploring these questions by returning to a consistent companion in his musical studies: Lateef's 1981 book, Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns, an extensive study of musical theory and practice etudes. Like a humble thread called into service of an intricate weaving, Robinson discovered a series of inspiring miniature sounds and musical concepts drawn from Lateef’s book, transforming the ideas into rhizomorphic shapes, melodic passages, and harmonic and rhythmic ideas, ranging from small-scale motifs to large-scale forms.

Over 135 minutes and 13 pieces, the recording features leading figures in the jazz and creative music scenes of New York, Boston, and Lateef’s long-time home of western Massachusetts, and an astonishing range of compositional, improvisatory, and sound approaches. Composed between 2021 and 2025, including during residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo, the striking, expansive sound worlds of Robinson’s compositions defy simple categorization, instead illustrating a mobility across genre boundaries and historical performance practices, ranging from jazz and modern classical music to irresistibly danceable grooves and heady abstraction.

Jason Robinson: composer & conductor, saxophones, flutes, percussion, spoken word

Reeds

Allan Chase, alto saxophone, flute, baritone saxophone

Marty Ehrlich, alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet, Bb clarinet

Felipe Salles, tenor saxophone, piccolo, flute, alto flute, Bb clarinet

Ian Buss, tenor saxophone, flute, Bb clarinet

Brian Landrus, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, bass flute

Trumpets

Bijon Watson, trumpet, lead

Mike Piepman, trumpet, co-lead

Haneef Nelson, trumpet

Zoe Murphy, trumpet

Trombones

Randy Pingrey, trombone

Chris Gagne, trombone

Angel Subero, bass trombone

Bill Lowe, bass trombone, tuba, spoken word

Rhythm

Eric Hofbauer, guitar

Kevin Harris, piano

Avery Sharpe, bass

Richie Barshay, drumset, percussion

Personnel subject to change

Jason Robinson's Janus Orchestra

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