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NANCY WOODELL McCRACKEN  
413 WOODLAWN AVENUE
GREENSBORO, NC 27401
TE: 336-273-4135

RESUME AND EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

Introduction:  I am a self-employed musician and music instructor with 32 years of professional experience.. My duties include maintaining a teaching studio, now in my home, providing private instruction and group instruction for all levels beginner to advanced for all woodwind and brass instruments, piano/keyboards, theory, music arranging and composition.  As a performing artist, recording artist, musical theatre conductor, arranger and composer, I am self-contracted.  My personal performance history is vast and varied, and is outlined in my personal musician‘s biography.  


Nancy Woodell McCracken Resume 
Performance/ Professional Biography

Born in 1958 in High Point, North Carolina, Nancy McCracken began her first musical training at age five, in piano study. With this foundation, her interest in music grew steadily. She studied viola, flute, percussion, trumpet, French horn, clarinet and bass clarinet, euphonium and trombone throughout middle and high school. Nancy entered Elon University’s School of Music in 1976 serving as co-lead trombonist with the prestigious Emanons led by Dr. Jack White. She majored in piano and applied trombone performance under the tutelage of Joseph Belk, with special emphasis in theory, arranging and composition. She was steadily employed throughout college as a performing musician, and upon graduating in 1982, continued to perform and teach in the Piedmont Triad and Triangle areas. In 1984 Nancy received invitation to travel throughout Western Europe with the International Trombone Association’s all-pro trombone ensemble, touring and performing in Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France, and Belgium. Upon return, Nancy enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s School of Music, where she completed her Masters of Music Degree in Applied Trombone Performance, and went on to Doctoral study in the same field. 

From 1983 through 1990, Nancy was organist and choir director for Saint Andrews Church, a small mission church in Alamance County. In addition to music ministerial duties at Saint Andrews, she also assisted as music programmer and performer for numerous liturgical and private events in the Triad and Triangle areas. These performances and programmed events included wedding celebrations, memorial services, and other sacred and secular occasions. Along with the duties of programming and performance Nancy was frequently called upon to provide versatile custom musical arrangements and specific instrumentation for conventional to extraordinary venues.  A most popular venue of note is the annual Jazz Nativity performance “Bending Towards The Light”, produced annually for 15 years and counting at West Market Street Methodist Church in Greensboro under the direction of Alice Anne Johnson. Nancy is among many featured wonderful jazz soloists at this favorite event. She has used music as physical and spiritual therapy for young and old, in private and multi-student settings.

After graduating from UNCG, Nancy continued to travel, performing and working in Australia, Great Britain, and most recently, Budapest, Hungary for Dr. Gustav Gabor Hoena’s Centennial Celebration of Trombone Teaching at the Franz Listz Academy of Music. Both locally and nationally, she has performed with with Greensboro’s own  SWAMP CATS, The LikeWise Jazz Trio, The Rob Massengale Band, The Southern Serenaders,  the North Carolina Symphony, the Raleigh and Durham Symphonies, the Greensboro Symphony, as well as performing in supporting ensembles for artists including Lou Rawls, Ray Charles, Rosemary Clooney, The Four Tops, The Platters, Dione Warwick, and The Temptations. While in Budapest and also during her teaching term at Elon University, she performed in concert in duo with world-renown jazz trombonist Carl Fontana. Nancy was also a member of New York City’s all-women big jazz band DIVA, and toured extensively throughout the United States with this award-winning ensemble. 

Nancy and her jazz-drummer husband Jay McCracken lead a jazz combo called “SWING-O-RAMA”, as well as a group “INTERVENTION RIFF” performing vintage jazz standards, Dixie-land style, and other favorites from the vast and often overlooked library of jazz music. Other ensembles she leads as a performer include McNEAL BRASS” a mixed brass ensemble that can accommodate a variety of musical needs from wedding ceremonies and celebrations, public and private concerts, to seasonal holiday performance, and “THE VOX GABRIEL TROMBONE QUARTET”, a unique ensemble that performs vast and time-honored literature spanning six centuries of composition and arrangement for trombone quartet. Additionally, she is a first call instrumentalist and vocalist for area studio work and recently assisted with several works for Kindermusik and Kindermusik International.  Of January 2009, Nancy and husband Jay completed and released a full length jazz recording “WHY DON’T I DO RIGHT?”  under artist name GIRL TROMBONE PLAYER & SHE SINGS TOO.  This recording embraces with joy and respect the popular music of early jazz idiom, and is rapidly achieving popularity with jazz vocal and trombone fans as well as jazz lovers alike. In November 2009, Nancy was appointed Musical Director of the newly launched NOT IN STOCK THEATRE COMPANY, an ambitious venture specializing in productions ranging from extraordinarily entertaining under-performed musicals to premier concert settings of familiar and unknown works of composers throughout the world.

Nancy has taught in public and private schools across the state of North Carolina, as well as at Elon University. She was the private instrumental instructor for Moore Music from 1994 through 2005. After eleven years at Moore Music, she now teaches private and group lessons for purposes of education, therapy and general appreciation.   She utilizes music as physical and spiritual therapy for young and old, in private and multi-student settings in and out of home. In the Greensboro area, Nancy McCracken has taught scores of public, private, and home-schooled students, and she welcomes the opportunity to pursue music education in all practical venues. She also welcomes any and ALL opportunities to perform!
REMARKS:
Jeanne Williams Holder  Professional Trombonist and Music Educator
West Orange, New Jersey and the New York City Area
“I met Nancy McCracken in 1984 during a tour of Europe by an American trombone ensemble. We have remained friends and colleagues since that time. I know that Nancy is a fine trombonist and pianist who is at home in all styles of music. She was a founding member of the AMERICAN CLASSIC TROMBONE QUARTET that won the Grand Prize of the International Brass Ensemble Competition at Keystone, Colorado in 1989. She has also performed and toured throughout the United States in a New Orleans Classic Jazz band known as the SWAMP CATS from1989 TO 1995, appearing as trombonist and featured vocalist. From 1997 through 2000, Nancy also performed nationally with the famed New York City big band DIVA, an all women pro ensemble . Whenever she had to fly into NYC for local concerts and departure for tours, she made my home her place to stay. I often went to the more “local concerts” with her. Her job was to play any necessary trombone chair, from specialized bass trombone that requires a more involved, low-range instrument, to second chair and lead chair parts. This requires versatility and much practice, and Nancy was this world-renown band’s first call trombonist substitute player. You get my point. Nancy is a generous, caring, resourceful, and creative teacher. Her versatility and ability to play all wind instruments and piano is most remarkable, as well as her good nature and talent to assess any music student’s tutorial needs. For the past decade I have been responsible for teacher recruitment at a large music school in New Jersey. Ms. McCracken would be the quality of educator that we would want to employ.” 

Robert Nesbit Professional Guitarist, Recording Artist, and Music Educator
“Nancy McCracken is one of those rare artists with the ability to combine a wide array of influences into a unique voice all her own. Her command of varied musical idioms is always impressive. Whether singing or playing one of any number of instruments, her sound and versatility of repertoire should be experienced by any lover of great music.”






Nancy Woodell McCracken Resume Page Three


Allison King-Jordan  Professional Singer, Guitarist, Recording Artist, Leader of the Allison King Band
“Traveling from my home in California for a visit with my then-boyfriend Brad who was on a tenure-track position at UNCG,  Greensboro was like visiting Mars and I was truly worried about the provincial mindset in such a small southern town. One night Brad dragged me to Crocodiles on Tate Street (have no idea what that place is now) and a band called the Swamp Cats was playing. I was really impressed with the band's sound, but there was this petite woman playing trombone with the band who simply blew my socks off. Her horn playing (not to mention holding her own and then some with the "big boys") knocked me out. And then she started to sing and I almost fell off of my chair! Man she was amazing. I thought she was channeling some chanteuse from a long-gone-by era. I was floored (and being from L.A., that was not easy to do). I've been floored by Nancy's talents many times since then!”


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