We were lucky to catch up with Nicole McCabe recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Nicole, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I am very excited to share my latest recording entitled “Mosaic” that will be released March 8, 2024 on Ghost Note Records. The album is entirely original compositions that I composed for opportunities that helped push me as a writer and player. Two of the songs I wrote for the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program in Washington, DC at the Kennedy Center. This was a two week intensive headed by pianist Jason Moran who helped guide 14 musicians to unlock their greatest potential as artists. I was lucky to be mentored alongside incredible peers that brought my compositions to life. Three other compositions on this album I wrote for the Jeff Clayton Memorial New Note Award given to me by the Los Angeles Jazz Society. I wrote these pieces for influential women in my life such as my grandmother and female music mentors I have had along my path. These opportunities gave me support to really dig into composing more through composed music and experimenting with new harmony.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Nicole McCabe is a saxophonist and composer from Marin County, California. She works and lives in Los Angeles, where she earned a Master’s from University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, studying with Vince Mendoza, Patrice Rushen, and Russell Ferrante. She previously earned a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies at Portland State University, where she received the William Bradford and Janet Hughes Mersereau Jazz Scholarship.

McCabe recently released her sophomore album as a bandleader, Landscapes, on the Spanish label Fresh Sound. Inspired by picturesque drives up the West Coast, the record features her first Los Angeles quartet, including Paul Cornish, Myles Martin, and her partner Logan Kane, as well as Knower’s Genevieve Artadi. It stretches McCabe’s hard bop roots into soothing and stylish new territory, informed by an expansive melodic sensibility. Her upcoming release “Mosaic” is set for March 8th, 2024.

Moving to Los Angeles has shaped McCabe’s approach as a composer and player, as she’s embedded in the city’s interdisciplinary scenes brewing outside the academy and around jazz boundary-stretching labels like Brainfeeder, Leaving, and her home base Minaret Records. She’s a mainstay at local hotspots Sam First, Altamira Sound, and ETA, where she’s performed with Rachel Eckroth, Tina Raymond, Dave Harrington, and more.

McCabe’s 2020 debut, Introducing Nicole McCabe, featured her Portland teachers Alan Jones and George Colligan, in whose band Theoretical Planets she performed. The album helped launch the underground label Minaret, which later released Mini Giraffe, the 2021 album from McCabe and Kane’s electro-jazz project Dolphin Hyperspace. More recently, McCabe released the EP Orbit with beatmakers 10.4 Rog and Vooo, and featured on Jacob Mann Big Band’s Greatest Hits Volume 3.

A prolific collaborator, McCabe has also played with David Binney, John Escreet, Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Erskine, Sasha Berliner, Louis Cole, Thumpasaurus, and more. She recently completed Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead residency at the Kennedy Center, where she studied under Jason Moran. While at USC, she received the Los Angeles Jazz Society’s Jeff Clayton Memorial New Note Award and the Keep an Eye International Jazz Award.

McCabe has taught music since she was in high school. She currently teaches undergraduate students at California State University, Northridge, as well as Los Angeles public school students through the Musicians at Play Foundation and the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz program Jazz in the Classroom. She owns a one-eyed dog named Buster.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Honesty, authenticity, communication, connection, and humanity.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Asking for help from your community is something at one time I felt too proud to do, but the truth is none of us would be where we are without the help of friends, mentors, teachers, and supporters. I try my best now to help others that need support and to be an active part of the Los Angeles music community (going to shows, checking in on friends, creating an open environment at my shows).

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nicolemccabejazz.com/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nicolemccabe4007

Image Credits
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