Mike Mower (from England) originally studied classical flute at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but soon realised that he was too restless to sit quietly in an orchestra obeying instructions. Mike had just discovered Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and realised he was playing the wrong instrument! So he got a saxophone and taught himself, whilst transcribing jazz solos from records in the RAM library and tried to work out jazz was…
A few years later he was playing sax and flute with Tina Turner and Björk whilst leading his own jazz bands from quartet to big band around the world. By listening to lots of genres of music and playing in salsa bands, jazz, rock and classical ensembles (Mike’s award winning sax quartet Itchy Fingers toured 48 countries over 12 years), Mike gradually started writing his own music.
He worked a lot in session studios both playing, writing and arranging for the pop industry, TV and radio and for classical recital stages. At the same time, he kept playing flute and started publishing his own music on Itchy Fingers Publications.
Commissions came from BBC Radio Orchestra, BBC TV, NDR, WDR and Stockholm big bands, USAF and US army bands, the Eurovision Song Contest as well as from classical artists such as James Galway (Mike wrote and produced 2 albums for Jimmy), wind quintets, sax quartets and from many individual artists. Mike has also written a lot of educational music for exam boards such as ABRSM, Trinity, AMEB (Australia), RCM (Canada) as well as his professional standard concert works.
Mike is still playing flutes, clarinets, saxophones and bass guitar and writing commissions from his home town in Bath, England, and he frequently guests at conventions such as NFA, BFS, Croatia festival, DGfF and of course for the International Piccolo Festival (Mike has been practising the piccolo recently and amazingly he’s still friends with his neighbours!).