Tom Kelley

Tom Kelley is a saxophonist, woodwind player, and arranger. Tom currently plays the Reed Chair on the National Broadway Tour of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Tom is also the lead alto player on both the 2020 and 2019 winners of the GRAMMY “Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album” category: The Omni-American Book Club by Brian Lynch, and American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom by John Daversa. Tom was a highly sought-after freelance musician in Miami while attending the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, recording on 12 professional albums and several more within a scholastic context.

Notable performances and programs from the last few years include Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra (2021/2022), the final Brubeck Festival (2019), Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead (2018), Brian Lynch’s Spheres of Influence at Pinecrest Gardens (2017), Alicia Hall-Moran and Shelly Berg at Festival Miami (2017), the Banff Jazz Workshop (2016), and the world premiere of Michael Tilson Thomas’s Playthings of the Wind (2016) with the New World Symphony.

Tom graduated in 2018 from Frost’s Studio Jazz Writing master’s program, where he studied chiefly with Gary Lindsay. Tom graduated from Frost’s Studio Music and Jazz program in 2016, in which he studied mainly with Gary Keller. Tom was a Brubeck Fellow (Brubeck Institute, University of the Pacific) from 2012-2013, studying predominantly with Joe Gilman and Jeff Clayton. Other teachers include Martin Bejerano, Dale Underwood, Dan Goble, and Adam Kolker.