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Nicole McCabe is an alto saxophonist, composer and educator from Marin County, California, who works and lives in Los Angeles. A rising star in the city’s interdisciplinary scenes, her new album A Song to Sing marks her full-length debut on local creative hotbed Colorfield Records. The LP follows the Jeff Parker-produced Mosaic, McCabe’s fourth album as a bandleader, on Ghost Note Records. Her electro-jazz duo Dolphin Hyperspace released its latest album What Is My Porpoise? on Dox Records last fall.
A Song to Sing showcases McCabe in a more improvisational mode, composing and recording the album’s music on the spot in sessions with producer Pete Min, who encouraged McCabe to explore her palette as a multi-instrumentalist. Alto saxophone still emerges as the music’s leading voice, but most tracks started with exploration on piano, synthesizers, drum machines, or McCabe’s singing voice, to which the title alludes. This process that prized discomfort and spontaneity produced a vulnerable simplicity in melodic form, tender but no less assured. Frequent collaborators Justin Brown, Paul Cornish, and partner Logan Kane feature.
McCabe has otherwise performed or recorded with George Cooligan, Ari Hoenig, Dee Dee Bridgewater, David Binney, Salami Rose Joe Louis, Luke Titus, Kiefer, Dan Weiss, Darryn Dean, Louis Cole, Sasha Berliner, Genevieve Artadi, to name a few. She performs with Dave Harrington and Spencer Zahn as the trio Mr. Tape and featured on Zahn’s recent album Statues Live. In the last year she made her debut at North Sea Jazz Festival and SFJazz.
A teacher since high school, McCabe is currently an educator and jazz ensemble director at
Loyola Marymount University. She was a 2024 Next Jazz Legacy awardee, apprenticing under
Gerald Clayton, and the 2022 recipient of the Los Angeles Jazz Society’s Jeff Clayton Memorial
New Note Award. She studied with Jason Moran in Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead residency at the Kennedy Center. She earned a Master’s from University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies at Portland State University.