Michael Brecker was born March 29, 1949, in Philadelphia, into a musically inclined family; his father took his sons to see jazz legends including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington perform live. Brecker first studied clarinet and alto saxophone before switching to tenor in high school, inspired by John Coltrane. He followed his trumpeter brother Randy to Indiana University but left after a year for New York, where in 1970 he helped found the jazz-rock group Dreams, later joining Randy in Horace Silver's quintet.

Michael and Randy went on to found the successful jazz-rock fusion group the Brecker Brothers. Michael's solo career began in 1987, when his self-titled debut was voted Jazz Album of the Year by both Down Beat and Jazziz magazines. A versatile and highly influential tenor saxophonist, he won 11 Grammy Awards across a career spanning more than three decades, appearing as sideman, studio musician, and leader on thousands of recordings for artists ranging from Frank Sinatra, James Brown, and Simon & Garfunkel to Frank Zappa, Laura Nyro, and Funkadelic.

Brecker was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood cancer, in 2005, and died of leukemia January 13, 2007, in New York, at age 57.

Brecker's tenor sound, technically formidable and equally at home in straight-ahead jazz, fusion, and pop-session work, made him one of the most recorded and most widely imitated saxophonists of his generation, a musician whose vocabulary shaped an entire generation of players who came after him.