Ode to a Tenor Titan: The Life and Times Music of Michael Brecker

After John Coltrane, there was arguably no more revered and profoundly influential jazz saxophonist on the planet than Michael Brecker. Ode to a Tenor Titan follows Brecker's story from growing up in Philadelphia to a four-decade career as a commanding voice in jazz. Brecker possessed peerless technique (a byproduct of his remarkable work ethic and relentless woodshedding) and an uncanny ability to fit into every musical situation he encountered, whether it was as a ubiquitous studio musician (more than nine hundred sessions) for pop stars like Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen, playing with seminal fusion bands like Dreams and the Brecker Brothers, or collaborating with the likes of Frank Zappa, Charles Mingus, and Herbie Hancock. But his biggest triumphs came as a bandleader during the last twenty years of his career, when he produced some of the most challenging, inspired, and visionary modern jazz recordings of his time. At the peak of his powers, Brecker was struck down by a rare preleukemic blood disease that sidelined him for two and a half years. He got off a sick bed to make a heroic comeback with his swan song, Pilgrimage, which Pat Metheny called "one of the great codas in modern music history" and which earned him a posthumous Grammy Award in 2007. Michael Brecker was a player of tremendous heart and conviction as well a person of rare humility and kindness, and his story is one for the ages.