Herb Robertson was a musician who nurtured the trumpet’s primordial violence. I first encountered Herb’s playing on a used copy of Tim Berne’s Sanctified Dreams (Columbia, 1988). Berne’s tunes were high tech warfare; long, angular edifices that seemed, to my prejudiced ears, solely constructed to hold up under the oncoming apocalypse of Herb’s solos. In the end, they almost always crumbled under the screaming fervor of his trumpet, bursting into a chaos that was endlessly exciting.