Westbrook, Mike

Mike Westbrook has led and composed for a succession of big bands and small groups since the 1960s. His compositions range from large-scale works for jazz and classical ensembles such at The Cortege and London Bridge Is Broken Down, to stage musicals, opera and experimental theatre, as well as pieces for radio,TV and cinema. His tribute to Rossini, Big Band Rossini was the first jazz work to be featured in the BBC Proms, in 1992. Many subsequent performances include the 2018 Rossini Festival in Pesaro, the composer’s birthplace. Compositions for classical orchestras include a saxophone concerto. Bean Rows and Blues Shots for Bournemouth Sinfonietta, and a piano concerto, Classical Blues, for the BBC Concert Orchestra.
He has made a hundred albums, among them Citadel/Room 315 featuring John Surman, Glad Day, settings of William Blake with vocalists Phil Minton and Kate Westbrook, and On Duke’s Birthday, dedicated to Duke Ellington. His theatre work includes Adrian Mitchell’s Tyger, a celebration of William Blake staged by the National Theatre in 1971. Mike television credits include the award-winning BBC drama Caught on a Train by Stephen Poliakoff. His Opera Coming
Through Slaughter, based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje about the New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, was premiered in1994.
He has toured world-wide and directed performances of his work in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland and Australia.
Mike’s song writing collaboration with vocalist/librettist Kate Westbrook began in the 1970s with the jazz cabaret Mama Chicago, which won the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Award in 1978. They have written and participated in many music-theatre shows involving different combinations of actors, singers, dancers, jazz, rock and classical musicians.They often include settings of European lyrics and poetry, as in Chanson Irresponsable, inspired by the song of the Sedge Warbler, and the epic Turner in Uri, a Swiss commission about J.M.W.Turner’s travels in the Alps.This involved classical and jazz soloists, a jazz rock group, a choir and a brass band.
Other examples include The Ass, based on a poem by D.H Lawrence,The Serpent Hit, a political fable, Art Wolf, dedicated the 18thC Alpine painter, Caspar Wolf, Paintbox Jane, about the painter Raoul Dufy, and English Soup - The Battle of the Classic Trifle.
With Kate’s Granite Band, they created Granite, about the quarries of Dartmoor,
Earth Felt the Wound, songs in a time of climate change, and for their West Country based big band the Uncommon Orchestra, a jazz rock oratorio, A Bigger Show.
Their widely traveled Trio, with saxophonist Chris Biscoe, combining song, composition and improvisation, has been at the heart of the Westbrooks’ music for more than four decades. It is the nucleus of the current Band of Bands, an 8-piece
assembly of some of their closest musical associates.
Mike Westbrook was awarded an OBE in 1988 and, in 2004, an Honorary Doctorate of Music by the University of Plymouth. He received an Honorary Fellowship of Plymouth College of Art in 2018.
Scores of his works are in the archives of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and Leeds Conservatoire. General information in the National Jazz Archive.