Jason Robinson - Harmonic Constituent (2020)

Playscape Recordings is proud to release Harmonic Constituent, saxophonist/composer Jason Robinson s first recording on the Playscape Recordings label as a leader, also featuring Joshua White on piano, Drew Gress on bass and Ches Smith on drum set and glockenspiel. Writes Robinson in his liner notes, In April 2018 I spent a solitary week along the rugged coastline of Mendocino County in Northern California. A self-designed artist retreat of sorts, my aim was simple: to compose an album s worth of new material, adding a new chapter to Resonant Geographies (pfMENTUM), an album I released just one month prior. While this earlier project was a meditation on the ephemeral connections between places, memories and communities, this new project assumed a focus more specific to this stretch of the north coast as some people refer to it. Walking through the rugged beaches and cliffs of that magnificent coastline, smelling the salty and kelp-imbued air, looking out at the magnificent omnipresent Pacific, and turning around to see the deciduous tree-covered ridges of the Mendocino National Forest was not a new experience to me. I ve been visiting that magical meeting place of sea and mountains since I was a young child. Each piece on this album is inspired by a technical and sometimes impressionistic aspect of the oceanography, tidal dynamics, and geography specific to the coastline from Mendocino, California and Westport, California. Harmonic constituent is an oceanographic term that refers to the complex influences of the cyclical motion of the earth, sun, and moon on tides at specific locations. Rather than reveal the details of the various translations of data, sight, smell and geography and other elements that I used to generate musical structure that in turn were brought to life in collaboration with my wonderful friends and bandmates I d prefer to let the music and performances stand on their own without too much guidance, to hopefully spark a memory or imaginative coastal scape of your own.¬¬ Robinson divides his time between performance and recording, teaching, and ethno/musicological research and is presently an Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College and holds a Ph.D. in Music from the University of California, San Diego.