Lester Lately Robertson (Born: around 1925 - Died: 1992) was an American jazz trombonist and arranger who was primarily active in the Los Angeles music scene.
Robertson played in music educator Alma Hightower's big band in the 1940s. In the following two decades he worked as a musician and arranger, among other things, in the big bands and ensembles of Clarence Daniels (Do the Deal), Maxwell Davis, Jimmy Giuffre, Teddy Edwards, Lionel Hampton, Gerald Wilson, Clark Terry and Gil Fuller. Together with Eric Dolphy, he led a big band interested in expanding bebop harmonies. He also played with Dolphy and Billy Higgins in the Oasis Club's house band. With the pianist Linda Hill and the bandleader Horace Tapscott, he founded the musicians' cooperative Underground Musicians Association (UGMA) in 1961, which was later renamed the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA). In the 1970s and 1980s, Robertson was a member of Roy Porter's big band Sound Machine and with Horace Tapscott in the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, for which he also composed. In the field of jazz, he was involved in 43 recording sessions between 1950 and 1984, also in recordings by Johnny Hartman, Al Hibbler, Joe Pass, Nancy Wilson and the pop band The Monkees.