Exceptionally gifted, Herb Robertson followed a non-established and thwart-wise course. Robertson is undoubtedly an emblematic figure, from a small coterie of musicians originating in New Jersey and Brooklyn who has contributed his share to the crucible of the NY downtown jazz scene. To love Herb Robertson’s utterances means nothing. One doesn’t...
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Exceptionally gifted, Herb Robertson followed a non-established and thwart-wise course. Robertson is undoubtedly an emblematic figure, from a small coterie of musicians originating in New Jersey and Brooklyn who has contributed his share to the crucible of the NY downtown jazz scene. To love Herb Robertson’s utterances means nothing. One doesn’t love Herb. Robertson should be initially understood as the man he is and why he is this man. Do you know why? Because his gift’s duty over this earth is improvising, exploring the space of only one moment; to venture with the conquest of the present: that scary continent.
About 25 years ago Robertson started carrying (as his only luggage) his trumpets and mutes. On each bandstand he extracts with a timbre of scalpels all of his glands, his affairs, his beauty tumours and his joys that he deploys onto his audiences.
When Robertson speaks with his trumpet he talks not only about the music. To play as Herb Robertson plays it’s necessary to live in unconventionality and it is necessary to be preposterous and bedazzled by his notes spouted out aggressively or tenderly from his horns.
So, what’s in the core of Herb Robertson’s music and compositions? A bruised child babbling, that’s for sure. Torrents of thorny red flowers, blind acrobats balancing on the top of electric trapezoids, the echo of Iguaçu’s falls invading your living room, or mountain tremors over Mars. A solo of Herb is a black hole illuminated by Bengal lights, it is a storm of tears, a duel of scorpions on the snow and tiger kisses on your crucified body!
Clarence Robertson could well have been able to be other things besides an artist: a writer, a physicist, a doctor, a hired killer, a healer, a torturer. It sounds terrible but some people simply don’t understand that the music is to be understood before being listened to; the eye on the ceiling, blissfully, abstractedly, with what Herb calls “that crazy taste”.
At 56 years young, this incisive trumpet player has acquired a spiritual dimension which particularly makes him radiate today at the lead of an ideal quintet, and other formations which he does not cease to create. He turns himself now right on, while developing his own label. Herb Robertson has not lost any of his eccentric timidity and frank speech. Dr. Jekyll thrills the autarchic Herb...
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