Born in Los Angeles, California in 1985, Nicholas Urie was a recipient of the first annual ASCAP Young Jazz Composer’s Award at the age of 17. He left Los Angeles to study composition with Bob Brookmeyer in Boston, receiving both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music. Urie’s music has been heard internationally at festivals and concerts throughout the world.

As an active arranger, Urie has been commissioned to write music for concerts, recordings, and television broadcasts in a wide range of styles. His credits include jazz artists such as Kurt Elling, John Scofield, Donny McCaslin, Cory Wong, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Oscar Jerome; rock bands including Steve Vai, The Goo Goo Dolls, and The Black Keys; R&B and hip-hop groups including Queen Latifah, The Spinners, and Bell Biv DeVoe; classical artists such as Lucienne Renaudin Vary and James Oesi; as well as country acts including Orville Peck, Dan + Shay, LOCASH, and The Mavericks.

Urie has written for major orchestras around the world, including the Metropole Orkest, the Boston Pops, the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, the Klüvers Big Band, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, A Far Cry Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra chamber concert series, the Clazz Ensemble, Ensemble Apex, the Azerbaijan State Symphony Orchestra, and the Rochester Philharmonic, among many others.

Urie is an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, where he teaches arranging in the Contemporary Writing and Production Department. He is the author of Harmony for Composers and Arrangers, published by Oxford University Press. He also contributed a piece to DownBeat’s “Woodshed” series titled “A Clearer Understanding of II–V’s,” and wrote the foreword to Warren Schwartz’s architecture folio The Shape of Music, published by Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers.

Urie’s recordings of original music—Excerpts from an Online Dating Service (2009), My Garden (2012), Quintet (2019), and Two Songs (2023)—have earned wide critical acclaim. All About Jazz praised Urie’s sui generis approach, saying, “Urie does not simply blow off the dust of the large jazz ensemble, he sandblasts it off with uranium.” At the same time, Urie’s unique ability to transform unlikely source material through subtle musical treatment has been widely noted. DownBeat magazine observed that “Urie succeeds wonderfully in transferring the grime of skid row to the sheen of the concert hall without sacrificing any of the bite and desperate humanity.”