The Don Robinson Trio

The Don Robinson Trio brings decades of fearless musical exploration to the Makers Stage at Filbert & Grant, led by Oakland-based jazz musician Donald Robinson — an intrepid and longstanding figure of the San Francisco Bay Area avant-garde jazz scene whose concept was forged in 1970s Paris studying bebop with pioneer Kenny Clarke and sharpened through collaboration with Cecil Taylor, Glenn Spearman, and the Rova Sax Quartet. A long-time student of Chuck Brown and a ground-breaker since the 1970s in Cleveland and Berkeley, Robinson has spent his career melding funk and improvisational jazz into something utterly his own. His roll call of collaborators — from saxophonists John Tchicai, Marco Eneidi, and Larry Ochs to koto player Miya Masaoka and pianist Matthew Goodheart — speaks to a musician who has spent a lifetime pushing at the edges of what jazz can be.