Mike Westbrook

Mike Westbrook (born Michael John David Westbrook in High Wycombe on 21 March 1936; died 11 April 2026) was an English jazz pianist, composer, and writer of orchestrated jazz pieces remembered as a key figure in the development of British Jazz in the late 1960s. He recorded as the Mike Westbrook Brass Band, the Mike Westbrook Orchestra, and as the Mike Westbrook Band. Westbrook spent his childhood in Torquay and went to art school in Plymouth where he began his first bands with such musicians as John Surman, Lou Gare and Keith Rowe.