By Adam Renn Olenn
June 17, 2014
Brockton, Massachusetts native Mike Flanagan ’08 started playing saxophone when he was ten 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 #1 in the iTunes jazz category and was flagged as a heat-seeker by Billboard magazine.
