Scott Robinson was born April 27, 1959, in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, the son of a piano teacher and a National Geographic book editor, and grew up partly in an eighteenth-century Virginia farmhouse. In high school he won the National Association of Jazz Educators' Louis Armstrong Award and Best Soloist Award, and in 1981 he graduated from Berklee College of Music; the following year, at twenty-two, he joined its faculty as its youngest member.

Robinson moved to New York in 1984 and built one of the most versatile instrumental careers in modern jazz, credited on more than 275 recordings across nearly every style the music has produced, from Dixieland to free improvisation. He has been heard on tenor saxophone with Buck Clayton's band, on trumpet with Lionel Hampton's quintet, on alto clarinet in Paquito D'Rivera's clarinet quartet, and on bass saxophone with the New York City Opera, in addition to stints with the Mingus Big Band, the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band and the Joe Lovano Nonet. He owns and performs on a vintage contrabass saxophone so rare that fewer than twenty playable examples are known to survive, and has recorded on the C-melody saxophone, the ophicleide and other instruments largely abandoned by working musicians. His 1984 debut as a leader, Multiple Instruments, is a solo tour de force built almost entirely from overdubbed self-accompaniment on dozens of horns, with liner notes contributed by Ernie Wilkins and Slide Hampton.

Since 1992 Robinson has held the baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, alto clarinet and clarinet chair in the Grammy-winning Maria Schneider Orchestra, an association that has run continuously across nearly three decades of the ensemble's recordings, from Evanescence (1994) through Concert in the Garden (2004, winner of the Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album), The Thompson Fields (2015) and Data Lords (2020). That chair also carried him onto David Bowie's final studio work: Schneider's orchestra, with Robinson in the reed section, backed Bowie on the 2014 single "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)," later folded into the compilation Nothing Has Changed and the sessions that led to Blackstar. In 2007 he played baritone saxophone and bass clarinet in the reed section, alongside Ted Nash and Billy Drewes, of the nineteen-piece band Anat Cohen and Oded Lev-Ari assembled for Noir, the debut recording of The Anzic Orchestra.

Robinson built a substantial leader catalog of his own alongside this sideman career, much of it for Arbors Records: Thinking Big (1997), built around his contrabass saxophone and covered by CNN; Melody from the Sky (2000), a showcase for the seldom-heard C-melody saxophone that drew a Wall Street Journal feature by Nat Hentoff; Jazz Ambassador (2004), drawn from an eight-week, eleven-country US State Department tour of West Africa performing his own arrangements of early Louis Armstrong compositions; a tribute to Thad Jones, Plays the Compositions of Thad Jones: Forever Lasting (2003), with Hank Jones a guest on piano; and Tenormore (2019), a tenor-focused quartet date with Martin Wind and Helen Sung. Since 2009 he has run his own label, ScienSonic Laboratories, releasing more exploratory work including a saxophone duo record with AACM co-founder Roscoe Mitchell, Tone Ventures (2014), and Mission in Space (2014), credited to his Scott Robinson Spacetette with Sun Ra Arkestra veteran Marshall Allen and bassist Henry Grimes.

Robinson has received four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a DownBeat Critics Poll win in the "miscellaneous instrument" category, and has appeared on four Grammy Award-winning recordings and numerous further Grammy-nominated ones, largely through his work with Maria Schneider and as a first-call sideman across the New York scene.

Robinson's defining trait is range rather than a single voice: he moves convincingly between traditional and swing-era idioms, modern big-band writing and free improvisation, often within the same year of recordings, and he has made a career-long project of keeping obscure and abandoned instruments (the C-melody and contrabass saxophones, the ophicleide, the sarrusophone, the theremin) in active jazz use rather than treating them as novelties. That range has made him equally valuable to repertory-minded bandleaders working the trad and swing circuit and to composers like Maria Schneider who need a woodwind doubler capable of covering an entire family of reeds inside a single chart. Leonard Feather and DownBeat gave his early leader dates five-star reviews, and DownBeat's international critics singled him out in its "miscellaneous instrument" category for talent deserving wider recognition.