UW Music faculty colleagues Michael Partington, guitar, and Michael Brockman, saxophone, take a global road trip performing music by Assad, Bartok, Machado and Piazzolla.
Program includes the premiere of Motherlands, a brand-new work written for the duo by Welsh composer Stephen Goss, founder and director of the International Guitar Research Center and faculty member at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the University of Surrey in Guildford. Goss will be at the concert to introduce his music.
Artist Bios
Michael Brockman, DMA, 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 Doctor of Musical Arts from the UW, and 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.
Brockman's doctoral dissertation is titled "Orchestration Techniques of Duke Ellington," and he has transcribed numerous classic large ensemble scores by Ellington, Mingus, Mulligan, Lunceford, Kenton, Monk and others. He is the lead saxophonist and co-director of the award-winning Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, and has performed with Wynton Marsalis, Clark Terry, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Jimmy Heath, Quincy Jones, James Moody, Benny Carter, Ernestine Anderson, Arturo Sandoval, Ella Fitzgerald, Jon Hendricks, Joe Williams, and many other luminaries of jazz. The SRJO presents the annual Duke Ellington Sacred Concert in Seattle (now in its 23rd year), plus an annual subscription concert series of rare big band works. In addition to performing in the SRJO, Brockman has prepared scores for much of the band's repertoire, based on rare vintage recordings of unpublished works by great composers.
As both a jazz soloist and a classical recitalist, he has toured throughout Europe and the eastern United States. He is an active professional performer in numerous Seattle ensembles, including the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and appears on nationally acclaimed recordings with Jimmy Heath, the SSO, the SRJO, and Seattle drummer Clarence Acox, whose 1991 CD Joanna's Dance and 1992 CD Indigenous Groove were consecutively selected as Album of the Year by Seattle's Earshot magazine.
A perpetual student of woodwind acoustics, Brockman is the inventor of a patented device called the "Broctave Key" (U.S. Patent WO/2010/068909) that provides an additional octave/register vent to any wind instrument.
Brockman 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 Reims 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.
Brockman is Director of the UW Jazz in Paris program. For information, visit http://faculty.washington.edu/brockman/jazzinparis/jazzinparis.htm/
For more information about the UW Saxophone Studio visit http://faculty.washington.edu/brockman/
Michael Partington is one of the most engaging of the new generation of concert players. Praised by Classical Guitar Magazine for his “lyricism, intensity and clear technical command,” this award-winning British guitarist has performed internationally as a soloist and with ensemble to unanimous critical praise. Audiences are put at ease by his charming stage manner and captivated by his musical interpretations. His innate rhythmic understanding and sense for tonal colour combine to form some of the most memorable phrasing to be heard on the guitar.
He began playing guitar at age 6 while growing up in Wales, gave his first public performance at age 7 and won his first competition at age 9. He has trained with many of the world’s greatest guitarists, including Oscar Ghiglia, Eliot Fisk, Eduardo Fernandez, Manuel Barrueco and David Russell, who commented on his “exquisite good taste and fluid perfection.”
Mr. Partington has appeared throughout the USA, UK, Canada, Russia and Scandinavia in solo recital, with orchestra and in chamber ensembles. His North American appearances include the first solo guitar recital in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, as well as Town Hall and Meany Theater in Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, New Haven, Phoenix, Portland, Reno, San Francisco, Vancouver and many others. Concerts in England and Wales have included Blackheath Halls, the Royal College of Music, St. Martin-in-the-Fields and St. James’, Piccadilly in London; the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff; St. Mary in the Castle, Hastings; Bristol Music Club; Russell-Cotes Museum, Bournemouth; Brewery Arts Centre, Kendall; Trinity Arts Centre, Tunbridge Wells; Nottingham; Carlisle; Derby; and others. He has performed live on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune, BBC Radio Bristol, BBC Wales and Great Western Radio in the UK, as well as St. Paul Sunday on National Public Radio in the US, KUOW, KING FM, KZAZ, and KAOS in Washington, JPR in Oregon, KUT in Texas, and cable television in California, Montana and Washington.
An advocate of new music, he has commissioned and premiered works by Stephen Goss, Bryan Johanson, Toshio Hosokawa, Angelo Gilardino, Tom Baker, Kevin Callahan and others. He is a frequent performer and teacher at festivals, including the Guitar Foundation of America Festival, Llantilio Crossenny Festival, La Guitarra California, Columbus Guitar Symposium, Appalachian Guitar Festival, Portland Guitar Festival, Northwest Guitar Festival, Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, Cascadia Festival and Chelan Bach Fest. He has also performed with Seattle Opera, Seattle Chamber Players, Seattle Pro Musica, Orchestra Seattle, Philharmonia Northwest, Seattle Creative Orchestra, Wenatchee Valley Symphony, Rainier Symphony, Portland State University Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Chorale, Seattle Choral Company, and flutist Paul Taub in the duo Dinamici. Mr. Partington is frequently invited to adjudicate or sit on the jury for local, national and international competitions in the US and Canada, including the Guitar Foundation of America competition, the National finals for the Federation of Canadian Music Festivals, the Music Teachers of North America national finals and the Portland Guitar Competition. He has released 8 solo CDs for Rosewood Recordings, and is also featured on releases on the Cadenza Music and Present Sounds labels.