Daron Bradford is a part-time faculty member of the School of Music at BYU. He currently teaches saxophone and clarinet, and has directed the Jazz Ensemble. He has performed with the Utah Chamber Artists, Ballet West, Utah Opera, and the Utah Symphony as an extra or substitute since their 1977 tour to Europe and has played clarinet, bass clarinet, saxophones, oboe, oboe d’amore, flute, penny whistles and other world instruments with the orchestra, and as soloist in their Celtic concerts with Keith Lockhart. He first performed with them in 1975 as a clarinet soloist on that year’s Salute to Youth program.
Daron is principal clarinetist with the Orchestra at Temple Square, and in 2007 performed solos on clarinet and alto saxophone with the orchestra in the SL Tabernacle. A particularly unusual experience was playing clarinet and singing with Elmo in the Christmas concert with the Sesame Street characters. He performs regularly with Kurt Bestor, and is active in the recording studios for local and national projects, often playing various ethnic instruments. In several of the Bestor Christmas concerts, he has played Kurt’s Christmas Concerto, the most recent time playing 36 instruments in a 6 ½ minute piece. The latest instrument count in the household is 148. He is a member of the group Enoch Train, whose first 3 CDs in 1999, 2001, and 2004 received critical acclaim. Other performing groups include the Utah Saxophone Quartet, the Lyra Recorder Quartet and the Utah Baroque Ensemble (as a singer and instrumentalist). He has performed for many touring Broadway productions and has been a backup musician for the Moody Blues, Barry Manilow, Mel Torme, Kings Singers, Johnny Mathis, Chuck Mangione, Ray Charles, Michael Martin Murphy, Elaine Page, Maureen McGovern (in a duet), and many more.
He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1980 with degrees in Clarinet Performance and Music Education. Other study included prominent teachers in SLC, Manhattan, and Chicago. In 1979 he was a musician on the Donny and Marie TV show, and in 1980 and 1981 he was principal clarinetist in the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra, which toured in the Orient, Europe, the United States and Mexico. Upon leaving Mexico, he returned to BYU where he did graduate work in computer science, taught band, orchestra and jazz band at Orem High School.