Mike Heffley is a musician and scholar of the highest caliber. His work as my teaching assistant in both my performance ensemble and music history class was consistently effective in getting across the most challenging intellectual material to the brightest students (as well as those far removed from the subject), and in drawing out the best performances and understanding of difficult music. As a scholar, he has established an extended body of writings that give real insight into creative music and creative music science. He is also the author of the first serious theoretical treatise on my music, published in 1996. His second book, on trans-Germanic music, will contribute invaluably to knowledge about the impact of trans-African musics in Eurasia.

Mike Heffley was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. His father, a Hollywood film actor and author, and his mother, grandmother, aunt, and uncle all contributed to a childhood steeped in the arts and letters, cultivating his interests and talents from the beginning. He began playing guitar and singing at age 10, and started on piano and trombone at 13. Always an avid reader, he began writing fiction and nonfiction in adolescence. He has been busy at music and writing in one way or another ever since.

At age 17, he won a summer scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston from Down Beat magazine for his performance of arrangements of his own compositions with a band of older professionals. When he returned, he began playing with Bay Area musicians including drummer Oliver Johnson (longtime Steve Lacy drummer) and reeds player Rafael Garrett (John Coltrane bandmate, AACM cofounder). He later moved to Eugene, Oregon, where he married and had a daughter, Geneva, whom he raised as a single father.

By 1988, he had gained wide exposure in the Northwest as both musician and music journalist, and began a professional relationship with composer-reedsplayer Anthony Braxton. After recording with him the internationally acclaimed Black Saint CD Eugene (1989), Braxton served, with Northwestern University Music Department Dean Dr. Bernard Dobroski, on Heffley's Master's degree committee, through Antioch University. Heffley then was brought into Wesleyan University's World Music Program, where Braxton then chaired the music department. Braxton was awarded the 1994 MacArthur "Genius" award in 1994; shortly thereafter, Heffley's first book, The Music of Anthony Braxton (Greenwood Press, 1996) was published.

During his years as a graduate student, Heffley continued to compose, perform, and record his own music, as well as collaborate with Braxton and other major artists in New York and Connecticut venues, writing grants and receiving a total of over $100,000 for musical events. Finally, he developed from journalist into scholar, receiving the coveted DAAD grant from the German government to produce a study of new and improvised music in Europe, which led to a contract with Yale University Press to produce his second major monograph on music (Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz, 2005). He has presented his papers at music conferences (College Music Society, International Society of Music Educators, Society for Ethnomusicology, Darmstadt Jazzforum, Leeds College of Music, others) throughout America, Europe, and Africa.

In 2006, Heffley was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of his music scholarship. He is currently working to fulfill the terms of his proposed project to the Guggenheim Foundation, and teaching online courses for various colleges and universities.