Brad Phillips

For more than 15 years, Brad Phillips has served as a sideman for some of Michigan’s most prevalent singer/songwriter acts. He is most known for his appearances with Jeff Daniels, The Verve Pipe, and the Celtic-fusion super-group Millish. He has also appeared with May Erlewine, Joshua Davis and played violin for Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Pat Metheny, and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. A graduate of the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, Brad now serves as a resident artist in the Chamber Music department. Brad is also a resident artist at the Purple Rose Theatre Company, where he has worked as a composer, sound designer, and actor.

Brad’s solo show is an eclectic retrospective of his life in the arts as a sideman, while exploring his own creative voice with original instrumentals and songs which delve deeply into his rich and diverse history in the music scene at home in Michigan, across the country, and abroad. Brad can also appear as a trio with fiddle and bass, the Brad Phillips Band (5 piece with fiddle, guitar, banjo, bass and drums) or as the Roots Music Ensemble (7 piece with guitar/voice, violin, viola, cello, bass, drums and piano).

Brad is also available to perform his piece for Mandolin and Orchestra, UNFOLDING. UNFOLDING is in Brad's own words "a reflection on personal growth and its unending path toward wisdom by way of what we experience along the way throughout our lives. Sometimes growth is painful and takes a long time. It takes courage and commitment, and a whole lot of love for, and trust in one's self. When we're younger, there exists a false ideal that somehow, someday as we grow into our own lives that we will eventually know all there is to know and have all of the answers. As we grow, as we unfold into who we are more and more with each passing day, the more we tend to realize that there is no end to growth. Every day is new. Every day, we grow. We unfold -- hopefully -- further and further into our more authentic, more spiritual, more present state of being. UNFOLDING is indeed a reflection, and it is also a celebration of the opportunity to continuously expand ourselves within the human experience while also pausing recognizing how far we have come".