George Andrew Cables was born November 14, 1944, in New York City and studied classical piano as a child before entering the High School of Performing Arts, where jazz first caught him by surprise. He went on to Mannes College of Music from 1963 to 1965, but his real education came on the bandstand: by 1964 he was playing in the Jazz Samaritans, a young co-op group whose ranks included drummer Billy Cobham, drummer/pianist Lenny White, and bassist Clint Houston. Gigs at the Top of the Gate and Slugg's built his reputation quickly, and before the decade was out he had recorded with tenor saxophonist Paul Jeffrey, appeared on Max Roach's Lift Every Voice and Sing, and held down a brief 1969 tenure in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.

A 1969 tour with Sonny Rollins carried Cables to the West Coast, and by 1971 he had become a fixture of the Los Angeles and San Francisco jazz scenes. His early-1970s dance card filled with major names: he recorded Sonny Rollins's Next Album, appeared with Joe Henderson, and, on trumpeter Woody Shaw's Contemporary debut Blackstone Legacy (recorded December 8 and 9, 1970, released 1971), played piano and electric piano across the entire record and co-wrote two of its tracks with Shaw. The Cables/Shaw partnership continued across Song of Songs (1973), Woody Three (1979), and Jazz Patterns (1982). Cables also became a favored partner of vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, appearing on Hutcherson-adjacent dates including drummer Eddie Marshall's Dance of the Sun (1978), and worked frequently on electric piano through this period, a texture he would largely set aside once the second half of the decade pulled him back toward the acoustic instrument.

That pivot came from tenor giant Dexter Gordon, who invited Cables into his working quartet in 1977 after Gordon's celebrated return to the United States. The two years Cables spent with Gordon, documented on Sophisticated Giant (1977), Manhattan Symphonie (1978), Great Encounters (1979), and the extensive live tapes issued later as the multi-volume Nights at the Keystone (recorded 1978 at San Francisco's Keystone Korner), reimmersed him in bebop vocabulary and rekindled his commitment to acoustic piano after years of doubling on electric keyboards.

The longest-running relationship of Cables's career, though, was with alto saxophonist Art Pepper, who nicknamed him "Mr. Beautiful" and made him his favored pianist for the last five years of his life. Cables appears on a long run of Pepper's Contemporary and Galaxy quartet dates, including extensive live engagements at the Village Vanguard, and the two also recorded as a duo: Goin' Home, cut May 11 and 12, 1982, at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, and Tête-à-Tête, drawn mostly from sessions in April 1982 with one additional title recorded that same May 11. Pepper died June 15, 1982, roughly a month after the Goin' Home sessions, making that duo record the more widely cited candidate for his final studio recording; either way, the two duo albums stand together as the closing chapter of one of Pepper's most sustained late-career partnerships.

Cables built an extensive leader catalog of his own alongside all of this sideman work, beginning with the trio date Why Not (1975, recorded in Los Angeles for the Japanese Trio label) and running, by way of Cables' Vision (1980, Contemporary, with Freddie Hubbard and Bobby Hutcherson), Circle and Phantom of the City (both Contemporary, mid-1980s), and the tribute album By George: George Cables Plays the Music of George Gershwin (1987), into a prolific run for the Danish label SteepleChase through the 1990s (Quiet Fire, Person to Person, Skylark, among others) and a solo outing, George Cables at Maybeck (1994, Concord), in that label's long-running solo-piano recital series. In the 2000s he became a fixture of alto saxophonist Frank Morgan's working quartet, documented on two volumes recorded live at New York's Jazz Standard, and paid tribute to his former employer on the trio album A Letter to Dexter (2006, with Rufus Reid and Victor Lewis). Cables underwent a simultaneous liver and kidney transplant in 2007, several months after recording You Don't Know Me, following roughly five years on hemodialysis; he returned to touring and recording afterward. His longtime partner Helen Wray died of pancreatic cancer in 2009, and Cables dedicated the 2012 trio album My Muse to her memory. Around the same period he became a founding member of the all-star band the Cookers, whose 2010 debut Warriors grew out of a working group he had crystallized in the late 2000s alongside Billy Harper, Eddie Henderson, Cecil McBee, Billy Hart, and David Weiss. His recent HighNote output, largely in a working trio with bassist Essiet Essiet, includes The George Cables Songbook (2016), I'm All Smiles (2019), Too Close for Comfort (2021), and I Hear Echoes (2024). In February 2025, the Mellon Foundation and Jazz Foundation of America named him one of twenty inaugural Jazz Legacies Fellows. Most recently, Cables played piano throughout Roni Ben-Hur's Stories (Dot Time Records, recorded September 11 and 12, 2020, released 2021), a sideman role he shares with trumpeter Ingrid Jensen and, in the bass/mixing chair, Harvie S; he also composed the album's closing track, "Melodious Funk."

Cables is a lyrical, harmonically sophisticated pianist whose touch and voicings made him one of the most in-demand accompanists of his generation, comfortable inside hard bop's fast tempos and equally persuasive on ballads. He has said he was shaped less by any single pianist than by the collective sound of bands like Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's, and his own catalog bears that out: he moves fluently between the bebop language he absorbed from Dexter Gordon, the intimate duo rapport he built with Art Pepper, and his own body of original compositions, several of which ("Helen's Song," "Quiet Fire," and the record-titling "My Muse" among them) have since been recorded by other musicians. Critics have consistently singled out his gift for economical, melodic solo construction over flashy technique, and his decades as a first-call sideman across so many different leaders' bands are themselves a form of critical recognition rarely afforded a musician who was, for much of his career, "everyone's favorite sideman" before belatedly getting his due as a bandleader.