Blue Salience: For Yusef Lateef, is Jason Robinson’s epic tribute to the late Dr. Yusef Lateef, featuring an astonishing range of compositional, improvisatory, and sound approaches for his 17-piece Janus Orchestra. The concert features leading figures in the jazz and creative music scenes of New York, Boston, and Lateef’s long-time home of western Massachusetts.

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. Raw stones polished into shimmering jewels through months of tumbling, Robinson’s music cuts to the deepest human emotions, bringing joy, longing, hope, and love into sound.

Thus was born Blue Salience: For Yusef Lateef, Robinson’s epic tribute to the late Dr. Yusef Lateef. 135 minutes, 13 pieces, an astonishing range of compositional, improvisatory, and sound approaches. Virtuosic performances by unique and leading figures in the jazz and creative music scenes of New York, Boston, and Lateef’s long-time home of western Massachusetts. 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. This is captivating, expansive music drawn from the vicissitudes of our modern moment.