Michael Mason

Michael Mason, a Chicago-based flutist, composer, author, recording artist, and arranger, commands fluency across jazz lineages stretching from swing and hard bop through the vanguard, alongside prog-rock, world music, and additional idioms. His technically advanced approach nonetheless delivers unfiltered directness in timbre and articulation, holding emotional directness in equilibrium with conceptual rigor. Across decades he has collaborated widely with figures spanning the Windy City circuit, encompassing AACM affiliates, Ernest Dawkins, and Kahil El'Zabar.

Mason’s 1995 debut, Deluge, was realized by an octet. Nine months afterward, Visionary paid homage to John Coltrane’s Atlantic period. Exploration, released in 1997, traversed jazz and Caribbean idioms, while Angels of Fire from 2001 presented a gripping, resonant reflection on the 1958 Our Lady of Angels school fire in Chicago that claimed 92 children and three nuns. Mason himself attended the school as a first grader, and the event imprinted a permanent influence on his life; he later became a fireman, serving more than thirty years as a lieutenant in Downers Grove. In that capacity he also acted as a teaching consultant for the NBC series Chicago Fire and for the Batman v Superman production filmed locally.

After Signal appeared in 2004, Mason stepped away from recording for sixteen years, during which he led workshops, performed live, and continued his firefighting duties. He resumed in 2021 upon signing with Audio & Video Labs Inc., issuing Human Revolution, which demonstrated an effortless, authoritative fusion of bracing modern jazz, Eastern modalism, and world fusion. Transcendence followed the same path in 2022, and in 2023 Mason released Impermanence, a probing yet fully realized planetary outlook on contemporary jazz.