the improvisor festival

Gino Robair

as stated in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, Gino Robair is "an enormously talented percussionist, with a thorough-going musicality and an instinct for the unexpected."  Based out of San Francisco, Gino's work as an improviser, composer, and promoter stands as a testament to his dedication to new sonorities yet to be discovered. The head of Rastascan Records- which Billboard Magazine has described as, "a label devoted to the kind of improvised music that makes even the term 'cutting edge' seem dull"- Robair has been at the forefront of sonic exploration since the mid 1980's.  A composer, improvisor, and drummer, he plays prepared/modified percussion, analog synthesizer, ebow and prepared piano, theremin, and bowed objects (polystyrene, customized/broken cymbals, faux daxophone, metal). Although Gino is often referred to as a jazz musician, he grew up playing both rock and concert music.

His large-scale work, "I, Norton," is an opera based on the life of Emperor Norton, which combines improvisation, graphic scores, game pieces, and fully notated scores. The piece was featured in the documentary Noisy People, by Tim Perkis. usic.

Gino Robair  "...holds the listener captive as he oscillates between the accidental and the intentional; between the tiniest, most delicate noise and a torrential outpouring of sound." -San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Robair has taken the notion of open-ended improv to its logical endgame; milking maximum-impact rhythms from the most unlikely sources."- Jazziz

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