Has Scott Robinson’s tenor saxophone ever forgiven him for the time when, exhausted after a late gig, he absentmindedly left it on a New Jersey Transit bus?
“I sometimes feel my horn is rebuking me,” Robinson, 60, told me recently by phone, referring to the silver 1924 Conn that has been his partner since he bought it from an antiques dealer in 1975 when he was 16. In the liner notes for his new album, Tenormore (Arbors), Robinson writes, “This old tenor has been around the world with me many times, and we’ve been through a lot of scrapes and jams together.” He does all his own repairs, “soldering this, reinforcing that, replacing pads, patching the metal where it’s nearly worn through, even making my own parts when needed.” (Significant work of this kind was required after that unfortunate NJ Transit incident.)
