The Wicked Bees

Connor McCormick is the kind of musical architect every horn band secretly hopes to find—a strategist from Burnsville, Minnesota who can stare at a blank sheet of staff paper and somehow turn it into a wall of brass that rattles the windows. A music composition major by trade and a trombone player by necessity, McCormick lives in that mysterious zone where theory, instinct, and a bit of late-night madness collide. While the rest of the band is arguing about tempos and tacos, Connor is the one sketching horn lines that weave together like clockwork, turning chaos into something that actually swings.

In The Wicked Bees, McCormick handles trombone duties with the steady confidence of a man who understands both the weight of the low brass and the delicate machinery of a horn section. But his real superpower is arranging. Give him a melody and a few hours and he’ll return with a full horn chart—tight punches, swaggering counterlines, and those glorious brass stabs that make a ska groove jump out of its shoes. He hears the band like a whole organism, stacking trumpets, saxes, and trombone into something bigger than the sum of its parts.

Raised in Burnsville and forged in the peculiar pressure cooker of music school composition classes, Connor McCormick brings a sharp musical brain to the buzzing circus that is The Wicked Bees. On stage he’s the trombone player holding down the brass trenches; behind the scenes he’s the mastermind helping shape the band’s sonic punch. In a group powered by groove, horns, and controlled musical mayhem, McCormick is the guy making sure all the explosions happen in exactly the right place.