Michael Brockman
Affiliation: University of Washington - Professor of Saxophone
Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra - Artistic Director
Artist's Biography
Michael Brockman moved from the East Coast to Seattle in 1987 to join the UW School of Music faculty. He instructs concert and jazz saxophone performance, and jazz arranging and composition. Brockman earned a master of music degree with distinction from the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he studied arranging with Jaki Byard, composition with George Russell, and woodwind performance with Joe Allard. He earned a bachelor of music degree from Lewis and Clark College, and also attended both the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Germany.
An authority on the music of Duke Ellington, Brockman is co-director of the award-winning Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, which presents the annual Duke Ellington Sacred Concert in Seattle (now in its 14th year), plus an annual subscription concert series of rare and classic big band works. Brockman has performed with Clark Terry, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Jimmy Heath, Quincy Jones, Ernestine Anderson, Arturo Sandoval, Ella Fitzgerald, Jon Hendricks and Joe Williams. As both a jazz soloist and a classical recitalist, Brockman has toured throughout Europe and the eastern United States.
Brockman is an active professional performer in numerous Seattle ensembles, including the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Auburn Symphony, and the Clarence Acox Sextet, whose 1991 CD Joanna's Dance and 1992 CD Indigenous Groove were consecutively selected as Album of the Year by Seattle's Earshot magazine.
He has premiered many new works for saxophone, including the West Coast premiere of Sonata for Saxophone by Gunther Schuller, and has appeared as a soloist in the Riems Music Festival, the Dubrovnik Music Festival, the World Saxophone Congress, the Stanford Computer Music Festival, the New Music Across America Festival, the Seattle New Music for Saxophone Festival, the Northwest Saxophone Symposium, and many others. Brockman is a clinician for the Selmer Company.
