Michael Brockman 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 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.

An authority on the music of Duke Ellington, Brockman 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 20th year), plus an annual subscription concert series of rare and classic 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in the SRJO, Brockman has prepared scores for much of the band's repertoire, based on rare vintage recordings of unpublished works by great composers.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 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.

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 Riems 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.