MSA Alum Nicole McCabe (Jazz & Classical, ’15) has received the Los Angeles Jazz Society’s Jeff Clayton Memorial New Note Award, given annually to a stellar young jazz composer to compose a new work to be performed in the fall at the Angel City Jazz Festival.
Nicole is a quartet leader, a music educator, a regular collaborator in George Colligan’s Theoretical Planets, currently working toward her Masters in Music at USC Thornton School of Music, following her studies at Portland State University’s Jazz Studies program.
“In creating my own voice as a player, I’ve had to accept that I like all kinds of music. You have to listen to the tradition and bend to the contemporaries. I think it adds a lot to my own sound and my own approach to writing,” Nicole says.