Todd Brunel is a critically acclaimed clarinetist and sax player and the former director of music at Saint Thomas Aquinas High School in Dover, Hew Hampshire. He performs extensively as a classical and jazz musician, working with The Irish Tenors, folk icon Judy Collins, GBH Television, The Huntington Theater, The Greater Boston Stage Company, The Front Porch Arts Collective, The Reagle Music Theater of Greater Boston and The Wheelock Family Theater. He was a member of the band for the Front Porch Arts Collective productions of Aint Misbehavin' that received the 2023 Elliot Norton Award for ‘Best Musical’.
Besides solo performances as a band leader, his current original music projects include: Know Orchestra, The ChagallPac Performing Arts Collaborative, Peter Cassino and Friends, The David Haas Group: Coalition of the Willing, Tom Casale's No Bad Parts, Occasional Brass, The Roaring Foxes and Jerome Deupree's Listen to This.
He was a founding member of Musaner (Music of Armenia re-imagined), The Lilli Lewis Project and The Eric Hofbauer Quintet and has recorded with Andy Pratt, the Dylan Jack Quartet, the Last Taxi with Pat Battstone, the Sonic Explorers and the avante-funk band, The Circadian Rhythm Kings. Additional performance credits include: Music At Eden's Edge, The Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, The Mahoosuc Arts Council in Bethel, ME, Laurence ‘Butch’ Morris, Jonathan Stout and his Campus 5, Garrison Fewell, Louis Bellson, John McLellan, Dave Maxwell, Daniel Carter, Bobby Watson, John Tchicai and Guo Yhazhi.
Brunel has premiered new works by composers P. Andrew Willis, John Macdonald, John Kusiak, Pamela Watson, Vache Sharafyan, Ara Sarkissian, Vuk Kulenovic, David Owens, Brian Buch, Alla Cohen and many others. He has performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Dartmouth College, Boston College, Spazio Teatro NO'HMA in Milan, Academy of Music Dance and Art in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and CBGB's Gallery in NYC. Brunel is the director of the Vortex Series for New and Improvised Music and has been awarded grants by the Somerville, Cambridge and Massachusetts Cultural Councils.
The Boston Globe has hailed: "Clarinetist Todd Brunel and pianist Cynthia Sture played with tremendous virtuosity and heart." He can be heard on several critically acclaimed albums including the Eric Hofbauer Quintet Prehistoric Jazz Volumes One, Two, Three and Four (CNM), MusAner Once Upon a Time (Lucent Music) and Alla Elana Cohen: Red Lillies of Bells (Ravello Records), The Dylan Jack Quartet: Diagrams (CNM) and the soundtrack to several independent films including: One Cut One Life, and PBS documentaries, American Oz, the Battle of Chosin and Paul Robeson, 'Here I Stand'. Brunel is a recording artist with CNM, PARMA Records, Ravello Records and is currently the bass clarinetist and saxophonist with the Claflin Hill Symphony and former principal clarinet of the Waltham Symphony Orchestra.
Mr Brunel is an adjunct faculty member of clarinet and saxophone at Middlesex Community College in Bedford, MA and a former music specialist with the Arlington Public Schools and the Boston Public Schools. His new music studio is located in the Foodlink Building at 108 Summer Street in Arlington, MA and is open to aspiring woodwind students and those who are interested in studying improvisation and musical creativity.
He is a member of Arlington the Cultural Council and a 2020 grant recipient. He is a NEST artist with the New England Foundation for the Arts and a 'Centerstage' endorsing artist and clinician with Conn-Selmer. He was the saxophone/clarinet professor and interim jazz band director at Wheaton College and is affiliated with the Powers Music School where he teaches every summer in the Music On the Hill Summer Music Camp.
He has attended the Aspen Music Festival and has studied composition at Boston University and attended the Modern Americans Music Department at the Longy School of Music as a student of Peter Cassino and Jonathan Cohler as a scholarship recipient. In 2007, he earned a Master of Music from the Brooklyn College Conservatory and a Bachelor of Music in 1990 from the Boston Conservatory where he was a clarinet student of Atilio Poto and Pasquale Cardillo.
Link to Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Brunel
Link to Conn Selmer: https://centerstage.conn-selmer.com/artists/todd-brunel