For those unaware, the music of American saxophonist and scholar Jason Robinson (rugged and scintillating, New York Times) thrives in the fertile overlaps between improvisation and composition, acoustic music and electronics, tradition and experimentalism.

Across time and space our ancestry unfolds, mysteries abound, unanswerable questions proliferate, the imagination wanders in all directions. Jason has long been a fan of the work of Octavia Butler, whose 1979 novel Kindred features a time traveling protagonist named Dana. What if we all could traverse our ancestral timelines past and future? How would that inform who we want to be today?

Ancestral Numbers is a sound meditation on genealogy and family history comprising an ongoing series of compositions for varying instrumentation. The present album, Ancestral Numbers II, along with its antecedent partner Ancestral Numbers I, are the first published documents of the project.

Numbers: the numerical relationships revealed in one’s ancestry, perhaps a guide or motivating energy, a companion, a guardian.

Number: a song, a tale, an imaginative fragment or universe, momentarily drawn out of one’s ancestry and generational histories, but also as a broader investigation of who we are and from where we come.

Jason began composing the Ancestral Numbers series shortly after the passing of his grandmother on his mother’s side. Ruby Annette Kilbury (nee Thomason) was the oldest of four siblings and was raised on farms in Arkansas and Texas, before settling in California as an adolescent. Ancestral Numbers I and Ancestral Numbers II are inspired by the loving warmth of her influence in his family.

1. Sweet Tooth
2. The Return
3. Ruby
4. Enos
5. Deployment
6. Arrival
7. Grayscale
8. Ancestral Numbers

This wonderfully cultured, heartfelt, impassioned and genuinely creative recording opens on the flourishing Sweet Tooth and then we get brought forth the vibrant The Return, the languishing beauty of the dulcet Ruby, and then comes the spirited Enos.

Recorded on August 23rd-25th, 2023 at Firehouse 12, New Haven, CT, along next is the more earnestly sculpted fare of Deployment which is itself backed seamlessly by the late night, low lung ambiance, latterly veritably impudent Arrival, before things round out on the rousing Grayscale, closing out on the glossy gossamer threaded throughout Ancestral Numbers.

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