Nicholas Urie is a composer, arranger, and author born in Los Angeles, California, in 1985. At 17, he received the inaugural ASCAP Young Jazz Composer’s Award. He later moved to Boston to study composition with Bob Brookmeyer and Frank Carlberg, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music. His music has been performed internationally at festivals and concerts around the world.

Urie has been commissioned to write music for concerts, recordings, and television broadcasts in a wide range of styles. His credits include work with American music icon James Taylor; jazz artists Jon Batiste, Kurt Elling, John Scofield, Donny McCaslin, Cory Wong, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Trombone Shorty; rock artists including Steve Vai, The Goo Goo Dolls, and The Black Keys; Broadway’s Alex Newell; R&B and hip-hop groups including Queen Latifah, The Spinners, and Bell Biv DeVoe; classical artists such as Yo-Yo Ma, Lucienne Renaudin Vary, and James Oesi; as well as country and traditional music acts including Orville Peck, Aoife O'Donovan, Dan + Shay, LOCASH, Lainey Wilson, Solas, and the Mavericks.

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

Urie is an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music, 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 has also contributed “A Clearer Understanding of II–V’s” to DownBeat’s “Woodshed” series and written 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 (2018), 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.”