Kimm Brockett Stammen

I grew up in Tacoma, Washington with two main desires: to play the saxophone and to travel the world. It took me a while to figure out I could do both at once.

By "a while" I mean years of study in classical, jazz, and world music: BMus, Northwestern University; Jazz Studies, McGill University; shakuhachi and Japanese traditional music, Tokyo; Middle Eastern music studies; additional classical studies, Banff Centre for the Arts. Also, years of teaching in all sorts of places including northern Manitoba, an inner city clarinet program, refugee centers, universities, saxophone clinics, and middle school choir. And years of solo performances: at two Olympic Arts Festivals, for Seattle Public Schools MIS series, with the Federal Way, Port Angeles, Winnipeg and other symphonies, and in hundreds of concerts across Canada with the Quarks! Trio.
And of course, years of traveling, or thinking about traveling: to France, Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Holland, Japan, Mexico, Canada and a lot (but not enough!) of the USA.

In all that "while" I collected music, sounds and impressions from the places I visited, studied performance techniques and music theory from around the world, searched out composers whose music sounded like the world I'd heard, and if I couldn't find any, wrote my own.

I also tried to learn from my variety of audiences over the years--what interests and moves them, what they really want to know, and what pacing, staging and juxtapositions work to best communicate what's really important, no matter where you are: the music.

My concerts are a variety of