Michael Eaton

Brooklyn-based saxophonist Michael Eaton approaches a personal view of jazz and jazz tradition with progressive experimentation and avant-garde inspiration. He attended the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music before moving to Brooklyn in 2008, where he quickly established himself as a performer in a variety of settings. He released his first album as a leader, Individuation, in 2014, followed by another record with the same group, Dialogical, in 2019. Eaton then pursued various other projects, including the groups Symbiotique (a duo with guitarist/electronics musician Seth Andrew Davis), Second Nature (a quartet, also featuring Davis), Paraphrase (a duo with pianist Nicki Adams), and Tenor Triage (a free jazz-meets-groove group featuring saxophonists James Brandon Lewis and Sean Sonderegger). He also collaborated extensively with Adam Minkoff, recording a Stravinsky album and organizing Coltrane tribute shows with him. In 2024, Eaton presented his third Individuation album, The Phenomenal. Michael Eaton was born in the Kansas City metropolitan area in Missouri in 1981 and attended the Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, where he received a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies in 2004. His teachers included David Liebman, Eugene Rousseau, and Tim Timmons. He began to work as a teacher himself and played in the showband of a cruise ship for a few months before moving to Brooklyn in 2008. Apart from establishing himself as a musician, he continued to teach, working as a woodwind instructor at the PS 126 Manhattan Academy of Technology (starting in 2012) and Church Street School of Music and Art (starting in 2018), among others. Eaton released his debut album, Individuation, in 2014, introducing his core quartet with bassist Daniel Ori, drummer Shareef Taher, and pianist Brad Whiteley, but also featuring guests like David Liebman. In addition, he kept himself busy with numerous other projects: he played in flutist Cheryl Pyle's Beyond group, which released several live recordings; he was a member of trumpeter Kyle Quass' free improv band Beneath the Paving Stones, appearing on their EP Rise Against and their album Darkness Made Light (both 2016); and he appeared on a variety of other records including Doyle Bramhall II's Rich Man (2016). Eaton also started a collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Adam Minkoff, working on a rock octet edition of Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," which they performed in 2013, then recorded it for an album that was eventually released in 2018 as Til the End My Dear: Arrangements of Stravinsky. With Minkoff, he also curated a number of jazz concerts, producing Coltrane tribute shows in 2015 and 2017. In 2019, Eaton released a new album with his Individuation group, Dialogical, this time featuring guitarist Lionel Loueke among the guests. The same year, he also presented the self-titled debut album of a new project called Tenor Triage, a free jazz/groove group featuring fellow saxophonists James Brandon Lewis and Sean Sonderegger. The next few years, Eaton experimented with numerous other settings, especially in collaboration with guitarist and electronics musician Seth Andrew Davis. The two started a duo called Symbiotique, which released their self-titled album in 2020 and a follow-up called The Maximal Effect in 2021; they recorded a quartet album with Quass and Damon Smith called Ghost Tantras (2022), and started another group called Second Nature Ensemble, which released their debut album, Second Nature, in 2022. These albums were released through their own Kansas City-based label Mother Brain, which also put out several of Davis' other projects. Additionally, Eaton teamed up with his Individuation pianist Brad Whiteley for the duo album The Work of This Moment (2020), was heard on a free improv album with a group called Lunch Purse (Don't Mess with Lunch Purse, 2023), and recorded two duet albums with pianist Nicki Adams, Paraphrase (2022) and The Transcendental (2024). 2024 also saw the release of the third album of his Individuation ensemble, The Phenomenal, recorded with trumpeters Dave Scott and Tim Hagans. ~ Christian Genzel, Rovi