Michael Brecker was born March 29, 1949, in Philadelphia, into a musical family; his father, an attorney and amateur pianist, took his sons to see Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington perform live. Brecker started on clarinet, moved to alto saxophone, and switched to tenor in high school after hearing John Coltrane, the player who would remain his lifelong touchstone. In fall 1967 he enrolled at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he fell in with a jazz-rock group called Mrs. Seamon's Sound Band alongside trumpeter Randy Sandke. He left after a year, moving to New York in 1969 to join his older brother Randy, a trumpeter already working the city's studio and club scenes.

In New York the brothers fell in with drummer Billy Cobham and founded Dreams, an unruly, short-lived jazz-rock band that cut two albums for Columbia — the self-titled Dreams (1970) and Imagine My Surprise (1971) — before folding around 1972. Both Breckers then moved into pianist Horace Silver's band in the early 1970s, a harder-swinging hard-bop apprenticeship that gave the 23-year-old Michael a rigorous grounding to set against the fusion instincts he'd been chasing in Dreams. The two threads — hard-bop harmonic depth and rock/funk-inflected rhythm — never really separated again in his playing.

By the mid-1970s, Michael had become one of New York's most in-demand session tenors, and in 1975 he and Randy formalized their partnership as the Brecker Brothers, releasing The Brecker Bros. (1975, Arista) with David Sanborn on alto, Don Grolnick on keyboards, and Harvey Mason on drums. Over the next six years the band cut Back to Back (1976), Don't Stop the Music (1977), the live Heavy Metal Be-Bop (1978), Détente (1980), and Straphangin' (1981) — a run that helped define the sound of jazz-funk fusion horn writing for a generation of players, built on Michael's harmonically dense, R&B-inflected tenor lines layered over Randy's brass. The brothers also co-owned the West Village club Seventh Avenue South, which became a hangout and workshop space for the era's top session players; it was there, in 1979, that vibraphonist Mike Mainieri assembled an informal house band billed simply as Steps, with Michael on tenor. That group evolved into Steps Ahead once it signed to Elektra, cutting three studio albums with Michael in the lineup — the self-titled Steps Ahead (1983), Modern Times (1984), and Magnetic (1986) — alongside bandmates including drummer Peter Erskine, bassist Eddie Gomez, and pianist Eliane Elias; Mainieri and Erskine are both profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com.

Alongside the Brecker Brothers and Steps Ahead, Michael's session career reached a scale few instrumentalists in any genre have matched: he is credited on well over 700 recordings, ranging across jazz, rock, R&B, funk, and pop. He can be heard on Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run (1975), Parliament's Mothership Connection (1975), Todd Rundgren's Todd (1974), Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years (1975), Elton John's Blue Moves (1976), Frank Zappa's Zappa in New York (1977), Chaka Khan's Chaka (1978), Steely Dan's Gaucho (1980), Joni Mitchell's live album Shadows and Light (1980), Chick Corea's Three Quartets (1981), Herbie Hancock's Magic Windows (1981), Yoko Ono's Season of Glass (1981), Frank Sinatra's L.A. Is My Lady (1984), and Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms (1985), among hundreds of others — a scope so large that this profile, like the Brecker Brothers catalog above, itemizes only his own leader recordings plus the most historically significant of these sideman dates rather than attempting a complete accounting (see discography-full.md).

Brecker didn't release a record under his own name until 1987, at age 38, well after he had already shaped the sound of a generation of saxophonists through session work and the Brecker Brothers. His self-titled Impulse!/MCA debut, Michael Brecker (1987), featuring Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, and Kenny Kirkland, was voted Jazz Album of the Year by both Down Beat and Jazziz. He followed it with Don't Try This at Home (1988) and Now You See It... (Now You Don't) (1990), then, after a mid-decade lull, entered his most acclaimed stretch as a leader: Tales from the Hudson (1996), Two Blocks from the Edge (1998), Time Is of the Essence (1999, with organist Larry Goldings and drummers Elvin Jones, Bill Stewart, and Jeff "Tain" Watts rotating through the trio format), Nearness of You: The Ballad Book (2001), and the fifteen-piece Wide Angles (2003), billed to the Michael Brecker Quindectet. In 2001 he also joined pianist Herbie Hancock and trumpeter Roy Hargrove for Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall (2002), a live tribute to Miles Davis and John Coltrane that won two Grammy Awards. Across his solo career and sideman work combined, Brecker won 15 Grammy Awards — more than any other jazz saxophonist in the award's history — including two for Tales from the Hudson, two for the Brecker Brothers' reunion album Out of the Loop (1994), two for Directions in Music, and two posthumous wins in 2008 for both his own final album and his brother Randy's Some Skunk Funk, on which he played.

Brecker began adopting the EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), a wind-controlled synthesizer, in 1986–87, starting with an early Nyle Steiner "Steinerphone" model and later moving to Akai's production EWI and custom-built versions; it became a signature second voice alongside his tenor from the mid-1980s on, audible on Steps Ahead's later records and much of his own solo catalog. In 2004 he received an honorary doctorate in music from Berklee College of Music.

In 2004, while performing at Japan's Mount Fuji Jazz Festival, Brecker felt a sharp pain in his back; he was diagnosed the following year with myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood cancer that frequently progresses to leukemia. His wife, Susan, organized a worldwide bone-marrow and stem-cell donor search that became one of the most publicized in the music industry's history, with donor drives held at the Red Sea, Monterey, and Newport jazz festivals; it raised significant funds and registered thousands of new donors, but never found Brecker himself a match. He underwent an experimental partial-match stem-cell transplant in late 2005 and, during a period of remission in 2006, recorded his final album, Pilgrimage (2007), with Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau, John Patitucci, and Jack DeJohnette. He made his last public performance on June 23, 2006, sitting in with Herbie Hancock at Carnegie Hall. Michael Brecker died of leukemia complications on January 13, 2007, in New York City, at age 57. Pilgrimage was released posthumously that May and won two more Grammy Awards; he was inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame later that year.

Brecker's tenor style fused Coltrane's harmonic reach and rhythmic intensity with the vocabulary of funk, R&B, and rock — a combination he'd been developing since his teenage discovery of Coltrane and his young-adult apprenticeships in Dreams and Horace Silver's hard-bop quintet. He was harmonically exhaustive in a way that became a model (and, by his own admission, sometimes a trap) for younger saxophonists: dense, rapid-fire lines built on extended and altered chords, executed with a technical control that made near-impossible ideas sound like second nature. That combination made him simultaneously one of the most imitated saxophonists of his generation and one of the most widely used session players in popular music, equally credible behind Aretha Franklin, Steely Dan, and Parliament as in front of his own working groups. His adoption of the EWI in the mid-1980s extended that vocabulary into synthesizer territory without abandoning a horn player's phrasing, giving Steps Ahead and his own fusion-era records a second, electronically processed voice alongside the tenor.