Nicole Glover was born July 18, 1991, in Portland, Oregon, and came up inside the city's unusually well-organized jazz education network rather than through a conservatory pipeline. Her father's record collection was her introduction to the music. As a teenager she went through the American Music Program, the Portland youth-jazz organization run by drummer Alan Jones, graduating with its class of 2009, and played in the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra. In 2009 she moved east to the jazz program at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, where the faculty included pianists Harold Mabern and Mulgrew Miller, who directed the program until his death in 2013, and tenor saxophonist Rich Perry.

She returned to Portland in 2011 and spent the next four years working in a scene small enough that a young tenor player could be in several bands at once. She was part of the American Music Program horn section that Esperanza Spalding, another Portland musician, brought onto her Grammy-winning 2012 album Radio Music Society. She held the horn chair in the Barra Brown Quintet for two PJCE Records albums, Songs For A Young Heart (recorded live to two-track at Tango Berretin on June 10, 2013) and Dreaming Awake (2015); she played tenor and soprano in pianist George Colligan's band Theoretical Planets on Risky Notion (Origin, 2015), cut at Dead Aunt Thelma's in Portland; and she was in the horn section of the Portland soul band Ural Thomas and the Pain for their 2016 Mississippi Records album. Her first record as a leader, First Record, appeared in December 2015 on her own imprint, a quartet date with Colligan on piano, Jon Lakey on bass and Alan Jones producing and playing drums, four of its eight pieces her own compositions.

Glover made New York permanent in 2015 and by the end of the decade had become a fixture of the Brooklyn straight-ahead studio scene, much of it through the Posi-Tone label. She recorded New Sounds with the label's New Faces band in September 2019 and Play On with the sextet Out To Dinner in June 2019, and she guested on vibraphonist Behn Gillece's Still Doing Our Thing and pianist Art Hirahara's Open Sky, both cut over the same August 2020 sessions. In May 2020 she released Literature, a fourteen-piece saxophone-and-drums duo suite with Nic Cacioppo. That October she recorded three tunes at Big Orange Sheep Studios in Brooklyn in duo with bassist Alexander Claffy, issued in 2021 both as their own Orange Hours single on LP345 Records and as one side of the eight-artist double album The Complete Orange Hours, on which four separate duos each occupy one LP side. Two months after that date she cut her Savant debut, Strange Lands, at Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in Astoria on December 15, 2020, with a working trio of Daniel Duke and Cacioppo and George Cables guesting on four of the nine tracks, including a saxophone-and-piano duet reading of Billy Strayhorn's "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing." Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt produced it.

In 2021 Glover took the tenor chair in ARTEMIS, the collective band assembled around pianist Renee Rosnes, succeeding Melissa Aldana. She is on both of the band's Blue Note albums since, In Real Time (2023) and Arboresque (2025), alongside Rosnes, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, bassist Noriko Ueda and drummer Allison Miller; the group made its Village Vanguard debut in February 2025 around the second record. From 2022 she has also played in Ursa Major, the quintet led by bassist Christian McBride with Michael King on piano, Ely Perlman on guitar and Savannah Harris on drums, documented on the 2025 Mack Avenue vinyl release More Is. Her sideman work through the same stretch runs across two Ben Wolfe albums, Unjust (recorded December 2021, sharing the front line with Immanuel Wilkins and Nicholas Payton) and The Understated (recorded December 2023, where she is the only horn and also wrote the liner notes); pianist Micah Thomas's live sextet album Mountains, cut at the Jazz Gallery in June 2023; the David Weiss Sextet's Auteur, recorded at Big Orange Sheep in January 2023 with Myron Walden on alto; and a guest appearance on one movement of Aaron Diehl's recording of Mary Lou Williams's Zodiac Suite with The Knights (Mack Avenue, 2023).

Since 2024 her own working group has been a trio with bassist Tyrone Allen II and drummer Kayvon Gordon. It made Plays (Savant, 2024), an eight-tune programme with vibraphonist Steve Nelson added on four tracks, and Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded at Van Gelder Recording Studio in Englewood Cliffs on December 17, 2024 and released June 27, 2025, an eleven-track set that the three of them produced together and that Or Bareket annotated. In 2026 the Jazz Journalists Association named her Up and Coming Musician of the Year, and ARTEMIS took the association's Mid-Sized Ensemble of the Year award the same season; DownBeat's 2026 Critics Poll placed her first among Rising Star tenor saxophonists and first among Rising Star soprano saxophonists. She teaches jazz saxophone on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, and has taught at Princeton University, The New School and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Glover is a big-toned, straight-ahead tenor player whose sound sits closer to the Dexter Gordon and Joe Henderson end of the instrument than to the smooth, small-vibrato modern school, and who is unusually willing to work without a net: the sparest tracks in her catalogue are a saxophone-and-drums duo album, Literature, and a saxophone-and-bass duo side, and her one duet with a pianist on Strange Lands drops the rhythm section entirely. She doubles on soprano more often than her leader records suggest, taking it on George Colligan's More Powerful and on Art Hirahara's Open Sky, and the 2026 DownBeat Critics Poll ranked her first among Rising Star players on both horns. As a writer she names her pieces after the people and ideas behind them: "II (For Richard Davis + Henry Grimes)" salutes two bassists, and Henry Grimes had died in April 2020, four years before she recorded it. Her programmes mix originals with standards nobody plays much ("Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," Tadd Dameron's "Good Bait," Strayhorn's "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing"). Reception has been strong since Strange Lands, which The Times of London gave four stars and called "otherworldly," and which sat near the top of the JazzWeek radio chart for eleven weeks; DownBeat gave Plays four and a half stars.