Biography

Dr. Michael Brockman moved from the East Coast to Seattle in 1987 to join the UW School of Music faculty. He is an active performer in numerous Seattle ensembles, with more than 300 performances in the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. He is the artisitic director, co-founder, chief arranger and lead alto saxophonist of the award-winning Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, and appears on nationally acclaimed recordings with the SSO, Jimmy Heath, and the SRJO. He has premiered many concert/classical works for saxophone in Europe and the USA, and performed beside jazz greats Wynton Marsalis, Quincy Jones, Clark Terry, Branford Marsalis, Christian McBride, Joshua Redman, Tia Fuller, Anat Cohen, Wycliffe Gordon, Maria Schneider, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter and many other luminaries of the jazz world. He earned a Master of Music degree with distinction from the New England Conservatory in Boston, a Doctor of Musical Arts from the UW, and also attended both the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Germany.

 

As a jazz soloist and a classical recitalist, he has toured and taught throughout Europe, and in recent years has begun doing so in Asia.  He has premiered many new solo works for saxophone, including works by Gunther Schuller, Richard Karpen, John Muehleisen, David Arends, James Beale, and Gil Seeley, plus his own compositions for saxophone with choir or with organ. A perpetual student of woodwind acoustics, Brockman is the inventor of a patented device called the "Broctave Key" (U.S. Patent No. 8,314,318) that provides an additional octave/register vent to any wind instrument.

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He has spent many years studying and transcribing the work of many early jazz masters, and his doctoral dissertation (available through the University of Washington) is titled "Orchestration Techniques of Duke Ellington." He is often invited to speak at libraries and schools on the early history of jazz and improvisation.