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Maggie Nicols or Nichols, as she originally spelt her name as a performer, was born Margaret Nicholson on February 24, 1948 in Edinburgh, Scotland. At the age of fifteen she left school and started to work as a dancer at the Windmill Theatre. Her first singing engagement was in a strip club in Manchester a year later. At about that time she became obsessed with jazz, and sang with bebop pianist Dennis Rose. From then on she sang in pubs, clubs, hotels, and in dance bands with some of the finest jazz musicians around.

In 1968, Maggie went to London and joined an early improvisational group, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and performed at Berlin’s new avant-garde festival. In the early 1970s she began running voice workshops at the Oval House Theatre, acted in some of the productions and rehearsed regularly with a local rock band. Shortly afterwards she became part of Keith Tippett’s fifty-piece British jazz/progressive rock big band Centipede. She joined Brian Eley and formed the vocal group Voice, and around the same time began collaborating with the Scottish percussionist Ken Hyder and his band Talisker.

By the late 1970s, Nicols had become an active feminist, co-founded the Feminist Improvising Group, organized Contradictions, a women’s workshop performance group in 1980 and dealt with improvisation. Over the years, Nicols has collaborated with other women’s groups, such as the Changing Women Theatre Group, and even wrote music for a prime-time television series, Women in Sport.

Nicols has also collaborated regularly over the years with Swiss pianist Irene Schweizer and French bassist Joelle Leandre, touring and recording. She continues her duo collaboration with Ken Hyder, pianists Pete Nu and Steve Lodder, with her own daughter, Aura Marina, with avant-gardists Caroline Kraabe, Charlotte Hug and lighting designer Sue Neal. She performs throughout Europe and internationally at a variety of creative and improvised music festivals.

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