PODCAST: Mike Flanagan '08

Brockton native Mike Flanagan ’08 finds success as a saxophonist, arranger, and songwriting producer.

June 17, 2014

Brockton, Massachusetts native Mike Flanagan ’08 started playing saxophone when he was 10 years old and never looked back.  A high-school regular on Boston’s South Shore jazz scene, Flanagan won a scholarship to Berklee and almost immediately began touring internationally.

Flanagan has grown his career in multiple directions at once—as an in-demand saxophonist, as a composer and arranger, including an arrangement of the Varsity Girls’ pop hit “Be You” for the Boston Pops, and as a songwriter and producer creating his own albums.

Under the name MRF, Flanagan released Elevator Music, a hybrid of straight-ahead jazz, hip-hop, and R&B, and followed that success with Mob Music, another genre-bending album that has rocketed to No. 1 in the iTunes jazz category and was flagged as a heat-seeker by Billboard magazine.

 

Mike Flanagan, Mob Music