Trio aRT: Music at ScienSonic Speed

By Ted Panken I Sep. 3, 2025

Trio aRT with its avalanche of instrumentation: from left, Pheeroan akLaff, Scott Robinson and Julian Thayer.
(Photo: Courtesy Trio aRT)

Trio aRT, a working unit since 1988, shockingly released its very first studio recording this summer. Recorded in January 2024, aRT (ScienSonic Laboratories) — titled for the surnames of Pheeroan akLaff, Scott Robinson and Julian Thayer — contains 20 scratch-improvised vignettes on which the trio postulates and interacts with extreme fluency and compositional intention with a mountain of instruments. Robinson plays tenor, bass and electric contrabass saxophones, contrabass sarrusophone, alto clarinet, dizi, F tuba, jazzophone (a double-belled trumpet), sheng, theremin, bass marimba, tremoloa, soundsheets, bells and gongs. Thayer is on bass, and akLaff mans the drums, cymbals, gongs, yunluo and boo bams.

It’s the most recent entry in the 15-album catalog of Robinson’s ScienSonic label, named for the laboratory he created in 2010 in the garage of his Teaneck, New Jersey, home to access his vast array of “instruments of every description, some quite rare ... and make as much noise as I want at any time of day or night.”

Their backstory starts in 1977 at Berklee School of Music, where Robinson and Thayer, randomly assigned roommates at the start of freshman year, bonded upon finding numerous common interests in their respective record collections. Soon they formed a group called New York in 1984, in composer Tom Pierson’s Medium Jazz with Czech pianist Emil Viklicky (with whom they played in Prague last October), and coalesced “Baryon Octet,” an outcat quintet named by Thayer for a subatomic particle, foreshadowing his 40-year career as a widely published neuroscientist who studies the physiological effects of listening to music. Robinson, a skilled practitioner of multiple saxophones, clarinets and flutes since his high school years in Herndon, Virginia, played “a forest of instruments, including all kinds of crazy car parts, hanging racks of percussion and weird sculptures I made.”

“We’d play anywhere up to four hours without a break,” Robinson continued. “We free-improvised a lot, but we also wrote compositions. We occasionally brought in dancers and other musicians. It was an important step in my process. I recently reconvened and recorded Baryon at the lab, and I look forward to representing both versions on my label.”

During freshman year, Robinson and Thayer heard akLaff, then 22, play an “unforgettable” engagement with Oliver Lake and Michael Gregory Jackson at Lulu White’s in Cambridge. “We were amazed,” Thayer said. “I decided I had to play with Pheeroan.” Robinson played with akLaff first, soon after moving from Boston to New York in 1984, in composer Tom Pierson’s venturesome big band. Thayer was also in New York, earning his Ph.D. at New York University while occasionally subbing on gigs for bassist Art Davis, his classmate, but they didn’t perform again until Thayer arrived at Penn State (“my first job”), where he doubled as faculty advisor for the university’s jazz club and then-annual jazz festival.

Thayer booked the trio to play there in 1987, Soon thereafter, they collaborated on a multimedia performance with the Pennsylvania Dance Theater, for which Rob Fisher, an environmental sculptor described by Thayer as “a pioneer of using computers in the arts,” did the set design. Their next encounter was an interactive video project at New York’s Knitting Factory based on a sculpture Fisher made in Saudi Arabia. “We played improvised music, while he improvised the video images, which were interspliced, interwoven, sort of superimposed upon each other,” Thayer said. “In 1996 we did another interactive 3D project in Pittsburgh based on cell biology images called ‘Night of the Living Cell.’”

Four years Robinson’s and Thayer’s senior, akLaff — whose discography already included important albums by Lake, Anthony Davis, Wadada Leo Smith, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill’s Sextett and New Air, Geri Allen, Baikida Carroll and Craig Harris — recalled how impressed he was by their devotion to “creative impulses and digging deep into unknown territories more than the display of virtuosity, which didn’t always occur with some of the brilliant folks I was connected with. I’d never seen or been part of people interested in working with neuroscience and behavioral science and the body and music. Also, Scott’s prowess on all his instruments was super-impressive — the completeness most musicians really want, but are unable to or afraid to execute.”

He opined that Fisher’s death in 2006 changed the nature of the trio’s interaction. “The video and/or the sculpture and/or the video being combined with our images while playing had been our musical score,” akLaff said. “Our score became our deeper creative ideas reflecting upon our history, reflecting upon the moment and, of course, a certain amount of intuition as to the most sensitive way to react to each other.”

By 2006, Robinson had earned the deep respect of the upper echelons of both the outcat/ experimental and “straightahead” jazz communities, bringing equivalent panache and brio to rubato textural improvising with brother sound scientist Roscoe Mitchell, freewheeling with Sun Ra alumni Marshall Allen and Michael Ray in the Cosmic Crew, rendering the charts of Maria Schneider and Toshiko Akiyoshi, and functioning as a master practitioner of an Armstrong-to-Coltrane span of jazz vocabulary on most of his instrumentarium, as showcased on a series of ingeniously programmed swing-to-bop leader albums on Arbors and sideman dates with, among others, pre-boppers Ruby Braff and Marty Grosz.

“Playing music of a different era doesn’t mean sacrificing your personality or sounding like another earlier player,” Robinson said. “These areas are still unlimited and untapped. It’s possible to be appropriate to any musical situation while giving it some kind of growth. I love all this music. To me, it’s like a big river. I can’t separate one part of the river from another because it’s only a river if it’s all connected and flowing.

“When I created ScienSonic I had a lot of outlets for mainstream-type playing, but not these other adventurous things I wanted to do. I wanted to balance those worlds.”

In 2015, Robinson invited Milford Graves to the lab to record Flow States with Mitchell and Allen. Soon thereafter, Robinson introduced Thayer to Graves, whose long-standing autodidactic research into mapping the rhythms of the heart paralleled Thayer’s academic investigations into psychophysiological phenomena. They planned a project whereby Thayer helped Graves publish and present his research to the scientific community, followed by prospective events opening with a lecture on Graves’ research and concluding with an aRT-plus-Graves quartet concert. When it became apparent to Graves that his severe cardiac condition made it impossible to play, he provided the trio with recordings of his heart rate, breath and other physiological data transmuted into musical sound, which they incorporated into the flow in a filmed concert shown at an exhibit of his work at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art in November 2020, a few months before Graves transitioned.

Robinson’s own intimations of mortality after a diagnosis of prostate cancer on Christmas Eve 2023 spurred him finally to document the trio. “It seemed ridiculous that time was marching on, and we didn’t have an album,” Robinson said. “We have tapes representing our important projects of the past. But I wanted to start with a fresh, straightforward representation of the music we play.” Over the next few months, even the morning of and night after a successful six-hour operation, he worked on the album every day in his lab- oratory, “fiddling with the mixes and mastering, designing the package and booking a few gigs for us to launch the album.”

“This has given us what we need, given me what I need and given the music what she needs for all these years, so we’ve stuck with it,” Robinson said. “Every gig is important because we’re playing the music we love. I hope to keep it going as long as possible.” DB