Michael Leonard Brecker was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. He is the recipient of 15 Grammy Awards as a performer and composer, received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music in 2004, and was inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 2007.

Brecker was born in Philadelphia and raised in the local suburb of Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania. He was raised in a Jewish—and artistic—family: his father, Bob (Bobby), was a lawyer who played jazz piano and his mother, Sylvia, was a portrait artist. Michael was exposed to jazz at an early age by his father. He began studying clarinet at age 6, then moved to the alto saxophone in the eighth grade, settling on the tenor saxophone as his primary instrument in his sophomore year of high school.

Early in his career, Brecker played a Selmer Super Balanced Action saxophone (serial number 39xxx), later moving to a lacquer-finished Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone (serial number 86351, manufactured in 1960) with silver-plated neck (serial number 92203), fitted with a Dave Guardala MB1 mouthpiece and LaVoz medium reeds. His earlier mouthpieces included a metal Otto Link 'New York' STM (during the mid-1970s) and a metal Dukoff in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

On February 11, 2007, Brecker was awarded two posthumous Grammy awards for his involvement on his brother Randy's 2005 album Some Skunk Funk.