SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2022
VOLUME TWELVE NUMBER TWO
TERENCE BLANCHARD
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2022
VOLUME TWELVE NUMBER TWO
TERENCE BLANCHARD
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
ISAIAH COLLIER
(November 26-December 2)
SAVANNAH HARRIS
(December 3-9)
JOSH EVANS
(December 10-16)
ORRIN EVANS
(December 17-23)
NASHEET WAITS
December 24-30)
GEORGIA ANNE MULDROW
(December 31-January 6)
MARCUS SHELBY
(January 7-13)
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/marcus-shelby
Marcus Shelby
Marcus Shelby is a composer, arranger, band leader, bassist, and educator who currently lives in San Francisco, California. His work focuses on the history, present, and future of African American lives, social movements, and music education. In 1990, Marcus Shelby received the Charles Mingus Scholarship to attend Cal Arts and study composition with James Newton and bass with Charlie Haden. Currently, Shelby is an artist in residence with the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival and a new resident artist director for the San Francisco Jazz Festival 2019-2020. Shelby is also an artist in residence at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival where he is the music director of the 100 member Freedom Jazz Choir, youth choir, and youth music ensemble. Shelby has composed several oratorios and suites including “Harriet Tubman”, “Beyond the Blues: A Prison Oratorio”, “Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”, “Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues”, “Green and Blues”, and a children’s opera “Harriet’s Spirit” produced by Opera Parallel 2018. Shelby also composed the score and performed in Anna Deveare’s off Broadway Play and HBO feature film “Notes from the Field” and has also worked on a range of productions, such as Joanna Haigood’s “Dying While Black and Brown” (2014), Margo Hall’s “Bebop Baby” (2013) and “Sonny’s Blues” (2008), the Oakland Ballet’s “Ella” The SF Girls Choir (2013), The Oakland Youth Chorus (2014), and many other productions over the past 21 years. Shelby has served on the San Francisco Arts Commission since 2013.
In 1999, Marcus Shelby's interest in composing for big band orchestra and his work in collaboration with the Bay Area multidisciplinary arts organization Intersection for the Arts led him to form the Marcus Shelby Orchestra. The Marcus Shelby Orchestra is comprised of some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most respected musicians including vocalists Faye Carol and Kenny Washington, and several well-known instrumentalists over the years such as Howard Wiley (tenor/soprano), Rob Barics (tenor/clarinet), Patrick Wolff (tenor/clarinet), Dayna Stephens (tenor), Sheldon Brown (tenor/clarinet), Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Mike Olmos (trumpet), Adam Shulman (piano), Matt Clark (piano), Mitch Butler (trombone), Doug Beavers (trombone), and Joel Behrman (trombone). In the last 15 years, Shelby has written an extensive series of original compositions and suites as well as orchestrated a broad survey of arrangements from the great composers Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Shelby has been awarded two residencies with Intersection for the Arts through Theater Communications Group and Meet the Composer and in 2000 was awarded the Creative Work Fund grant to compose for the Marcus Shelby Orchestra. The project resulted in the a theater production of Howard Korder’s play called “The Lights” and featured the Marcus Shelby Orchestra performing the original music live. In 2002, Shelby was commissioned by the Equal Justice Society to composer a suite for jazz orchestra in honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Port Chicago Mutiny. In 2005, Marcus received the Creative Work Fund grant to compose an oratorio for big band orchestra, which honored the life and history of Harriet Tubman. In 2009, Shelby received the Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship in Chicago to conduct research at the University of Chicago and the Columbia Black Music Research Center for his project investigating the music in the civil rights movement. This research was in preparation for the Marcus Shelby Orchestra’s 4th CD release on January 15, 2011 titled “Soul of the Movement”. This CD received critical acclaim and reached #2 on National Jazz Radio Charts (February 2011). In 2011, Marcus Shelby received a Gerbode Award and was commissioned to compose an original musical with Bay Area director, writer, and actress Margo Hall called “Bebob Baby” which premiered in November 2013. This production featured the Marcus Shelby Orchestra, which performed the score live at The Z Space in San Francisco. In 2013 the Marcus Shelby Orchestra also performed the live score to “Gwah Guy: Crossing the Street” by artist and writer Flo Oy Wong and Marcus Shelby at the ODC Theater in San Francisco. In addition to developing commissioned works, the orchestra currently performs at Bay Area clubs, universities, high schools, elementary schools, churches, festivals, and concert venues.
CONVERSATION
Coronavirus Blues: A Q&A With San Francisco Jazz Leader Marcus Shelby
Shelby’s work often dives deeply into American history, but the pandemic isn’t a source of inspiration yet.
For 25 years, the multi-talented Marcus Shelby — bass player, bandleader, teacher, composer, and arranger — has forged art from jazz and history, often in multilayered suites that invoke the compositions of his hero, Duke Ellington, and take inspiration from African-American people and stories: Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Negro Leagues baseball and the Port Chicago naval disaster and protest during World War II. He recently began a project based on San Francisco’s homeless.
Like all San Franciscans, the 54-year-old Shelby has been forced to drastically change his life during the coronavirus pandemic, and like all artists who depend on performances, his livelihood is in limbo.
I caught up with him and asked about the impact of the pandemic on his life, career, and the San Francisco arts scene.
This Q&A has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
Lily O’Brien: How has your life changed as a result of the pandemic?
Marcus Shelby: When it first happened I thought, “Three weeks, and we’ll be back.” Then about a week ago, I thought, “Okay, this is going to be probably three or four months of shutdown.”
I’ve been doing music professionally for 30 years nonstop, and I don’t think I’ve ever shut down. The only vacation I take every year is to see the Giants’ spring training. So I’m really appreciative, in a way. I’m going to take advantage and relax and read. I’ve been reorganizing and catching up on old baseball games. Because at some point, everyone’s going to have to jump back on the treadmill.
Sounds like you are not too worried personally.
I’m worried, but I’m also practical. I have some things in place and a very strong family network. I have two kids, so a large part of my activities are occupied by home-schooling — monitoring homework like a full-time tutor, and just passing the time with them. They are 10 and 17 and they live nearby.
How are you going to get through this financially?
I’ll be creative like everybody else. Right now, I have a lot of financial needs, including children, so I’ve had to diversify my income stream, and live performances may only be one-third. I also teach, and a lot of that can go online, and I am very lucky and thankful that I have a number of commissions.
Is one of those commissions the homeless project?
I have begun the research stage of the work, which I’m doing with Joanna Haigood, the great choreographer. We find out if we get a big grant in June. I like to spend a year to a year-and-a-half reading and meeting people who can address an issue from scholarship or from real-life experience. The next phase will be conferences and meetings, then trying to create music that pushes a lot of these issues to the surface through songs, and with Joanna through movement.
What about emergency grants? Do you know about the SF Arts & Artists Relief Fund?
I can’t apply for it because I’m a city arts commissioner. I am not eligible for any money that comes from the city, and it should be that way, even in this unprecedented time. I’ll be creative like everybody else.
‘A lot of people need to write about this. When you’re a creator, you need inspiration, and this is life and death — this is unprecedented. But I need time for reflection.’
I think everyone’s pretty much in the same boat, whether you’re an independent artist or you work for a company. The only difference is, independent artist incomes have been completely cut off. You see this outburst online — live performances and people tipping through apps. I don’t know how well musicians are doing, but they’re being creative, they’re promoting, they’re finding the best ways to record, and they’re doing what they would do if it was a live performance.
We are all kind of holding hands and being hopeful that once this is over, organizations, institutions, local governments, and funders will help us put our lives and our employment back together, however that may look in the new world.
What other positive things have you seen?
I think everybody is using this moment in a different way. When everybody feels collective uncertainty about life and death, it brings out a humanitarian spirit. I see more people in my neighborhood working out, jogging, and walking dogs, and there’s a nod, and a smile, and it’s genuine. And there’s that instant of, “I don’t care who you are or who you voted for — in this moment, you’re my friend.”
Are you planning to do any projects virtually?
I’ve been teaching at Stanford, and we moved our live classes online. They just asked me to do ensemble classes [where everyone plays music together], but I don’t know if this technology allows for it to be synced, so it might have to be just lectures.
At the Community Music Center I have a teenage big band program with 20 kids, and I’ve been giving them weekly work online. Initially, I gave them videos to watch and to respond to, more of an intellectual journey with the music we’re playing, giving them a little bit more knowledge about Duke Ellington, or any of the masters that we might be studying. I know every kid in the class and where they are, so I’ve been able to tailor these individual curriculums.
Do you think performance venues will survive?
SFJAZZ just cancelled their spring season, but they have money from other sources, so they’re going to be fine. But I don’t know how a lot of the smaller live clubs are going to start back up without government support.
You have written many pieces about history. Do you think you’ll eventually compose a piece about this?
I don’t see myself needing to write about it. But I think a lot of people are — I have a friend who has already recorded an album about it — and I don’t blame them. When you’re a creator, you need inspiration, and this is life and death — this is unprecedented. But for me, I need time for reflection.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Lily O’Brien is a Bay Area writer, editor, singer, Buddhist, and bicyclist with a passion for the performing arts and world travel. Her articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including the San Francisco Classical Voice, Downbeat, JazzTimes, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Marin Independent Journal.
https://eastbayexpress.com/the-marcus-shelby-duke-ellington-connection-1/
The Marcus Shelby-Duke Ellington Connection
Marcus Shelby pays tribute to the man who inspired him.
Duke Ellington’s music defied easy categorization. His compositions were concerned with rhythm, melody, timbre, and harmony, and he refused to describe his music as simply “jazz” — a word he considered limiting — instead referring to it as “American music.” David Schiff, a music professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, wrote in his book The Ellington Century that “no single oeuvre represents the full cross-categorical range of mid-20th century music more than the vast repertory … of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.”
In many ways, San Francisco-based composer, arranger, bandleader, and bassist Marcus Shelby could be considered Ellington’s 21st-century counterpart. Shelby started his own orchestra in 1999, in part, to perform Ellington’s music, as well as his own compositions. And like Ellington, Shelby doesn’t subscribe to the label “jazz” — even though his sixteen-piece ensemble is called the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra. “I play blues and swing,” he said. “I grew up playing open string bass, all in the key of G. But I’m open to all styles: I find the power and potential of musical inflection, of call-and-response. I lose the labels.”
In honor of Ellington’s birthday and the fifteenth anniversary of Shelby’s orchestra, Shelby will present “The Legacy of Duke Ellington: 50 Years of Swing!” at Zellerbach Hall on May 2. The first half of the show will pay tribute to Ellington’s fifty-year career with selections such as “Creole Love Call” and “Black Beauty.” The second set will consist of Such Sweet Thunder, a twelve-part musical suite written by Ellington and his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn and inspired by the work of William Shakespeare. The performance will also incorporate actors from the California Shakespeare Theater, and while Shelby wouldn’t reveal specifics, he said “you might find yourself sitting next to Hamlet.” Throughout the evening, the orchestra will be accompanied by top-notch talent, including singer Faye Carol, violinist Mathew Szemela, saxophonist Jules Broussard, and trumpeter Joel Behrman.
Cal Performances Associate Director Rob Bailis likened Shelby to Ellington, describing him as a formidable composer, arranger, and performer with a creative process similar to Ellington’s. “We’ve come to respect that Marcus is truly an Ellington scholar,” he said. “He brings rigorously researched interpretive nuance to these classics.”
But despite being well versed in the Duke’s music, Shelby still had to do lots of research on Such Sweet Thunder. “I wasn’t sure why the plays and the music connected,” Shelby said. “I had to understand the motives. I learned Ellington put his impressions into sound.” The music is meant to evoke the essence of Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and other Shakespeare plays, rather than to depict a particular character or scene. Throughout his fifty-year career, Ellington wasn’t limited by “cultural constructs,” said Shelby.
In his own work, Shelby has been informed by his religious upbringing. As the grandson of a Baptist minister, he learned music wasn’t just entertainment; it was a fight for civil rights. “Slavery was on this land and the blues were the tool oppressed people used to try to free themselves,” he said.
Over the years, Shelby has been commissioned to produce pieces based on the lives and work of several of his heroes, and he conducts thorough research on his subjects. For example, a project relating to Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy had him traveling through the South for years before he wrote a single note. “I think of composition as more than sitting around and imagining,” Shelby said. “I learn about characters, stories, action — these things turn into melody, harmony and rhythm.”
Shelby is also inspired by musicians such as Louis Armstrong, who he calls “the father of his language, improvisation”; Nina Simone, who used her music to make positive change during the era of segregation; and Stevie Wonder, for incorporating “the full breadth of black music.”
He said he admires Ellington’s ability to listen astutely and learn from everything around him — “and he could talk a good game,” Shelby said. But it was Ellington’s ability to write for the talent he had on hand that most inspires him. “He knew how to use their gifts and wrote tailor-made parts for them to play,” he said. “It was critical to Ellington’s development.”
Shelby said his job is much like Ellington’s: “showing racial pride, tearing down perceptions of African Americans in this country, and trying to learn through history how music can carry ideas and make change.” In Shelby’s capable hands, such a task looks easy.
Marcus Anthony Shelby 2021
Marcus Anthony Shelby is a composer, bassist, bandleader, and educator who currently lives in San Francisco, California. His work focuses on the history, present, and future of African American lives social movements and music education.
In 1990, Marcus Shelby received the Charles Mingus Scholarship to attend Cal Arts and study composition with James Newton and bass with Charlie Haden. Currently, Shelby is the Artistic Director of Healdsburg Jazz, an artist in residence with the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, and a past resident artist with the San Francisco Jazz Festival and the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. Shelby has composed several oratorios and suites including “Harriet Tubman”, “Beyond the Blues: A Prison Oratorio”, “Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”, “Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues”, “Green and Blues”, and a children’s opera “Harriet’s Spirit” produced by Opera Parallel 2018. Shelby also composed the score and performed in Anna Deavere Smith’s Off-Broadway Play and HBO feature film “Notes from the Field” (2019). Shelby is also the voice of Ray Gardener in the 2020 Oscar-Winning Disney Pixar film “SOUL”. Shelby has also worked with a range of artists including Angela Y. Davis’ “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism” (2019), Joanna Haigood’s “Dying While Black and Brown” (2014), Margo Hall’s “Bebop Baby” (2013), and “Sonny’s Blues” (2008), the Oakland Ballet’s “Ella” The SF Girl Choir (2013), The Oakland Youth Chorus (2014), and many other productions over the past 23 years. Shelby has served on the San Francisco Arts Commission since 2013 and has worked with the Equal Justice Society for over 20 years. The Marcus Shelby Orchestra has released 5 CDs--“The Lights Suite”, “Port Chicago”, “Harriet Tubman”, “Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”, and “Transitions”.
Marcus Shelby Orchestra bio
In 1999, Marcus Shelby's interest in composing for big band orchestra and his work in collaboration with the Bay Area multidisciplinary arts organization Intersection for the Arts led him to form the Marcus Shelby Orchestra. The Marcus Shelby Orchestra is comprised of some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most respected musicians including vocalists Tiffany Austin, Faye Carol and Kenny Washington, and several well-known instrumentalists over the years such as Howard Wiley (tenor/soprano), Rob Barics (tenor/clarinet), Patrick Wolff (tenor/clarinet), Dayna Stephens (tenor), Sheldon Brown (tenor/clarinet), Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Mike Olmos (trumpet), Adam Shulman (piano), Matt Clark (piano), Mitch Butler (trombone), Doug Beavers (trombone), and Joel Behrman (trombone). In the last 15 years, Shelby has written an extensive series of original compositions and suites as well as orchestrated a broad survey of arrangements from the great composers Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Shelby has been awarded two residencies with Intersection for the Arts through Theater Communications Group and Meet the Composer and in 2000 was awarded the Creative Work Fund grant to compose for the Marcus Shelby Orchestra. The project resulted in the a theater production of Howard Korder’s play called “The Lights” and featured the Marcus Shelby Orchestra performing the original music live. In 2002, Shelby was commissioned by the Equal Justice Society to composer a suite for jazz orchestra in honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Port Chicago Mutiny. In 2005, Marcus received the Creative Work Fund grant to compose an oratorio for big band orchestra, which honored the life and history of Harriet Tubman. In 2009, Shelby received the Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship in Chicago to conduct research at the University of Chicago and the Columbia Black Music Research Center for his project investigating the music in the civil rights movement. This research was in preparation for the Marcus Shelby Orchestra’s 4th CD release on January 15, 2011 titled “Soul of the Movement”. This CD received critical acclaim and reached #2 on National Jazz Radio Charts (February 2011). In 2011, Marcus Shelby received a Gerbode Award and was commissioned to compose an original musical with Bay Area director, writer, and actress Margo Hall called “Bebob Baby” which premiered in November 2013. This production featured the Marcus Shelby Orchestra, which performed the score live at The Z Space in San Francisco. In 2013 the Marcus Shelby Orchestra also performed the live score to “Gwah Guy: Crossing the Street” by artist and writer Flo Oy Wong and Marcus Shelby at the ODC Theater in San Francisco. In addition to developing commissioned works, the orchestra currently performs at Bay Area clubs, universities, high schools, elementary schools, churches, festivals, and concert venues.
The Marcus Shelby Orchestra released their 5th CD titled “Transitions” June 2019.
https://marcusshelby.com/press
PRESS LINKS
-DOWNBEAT MAGAZINE (2019) Shelby Enriches the Bay Area with Music, Education, Activism
-JAZZTIMES (2019) Marcus Shelby: Jazz and Baseball Interview with Lee Mergner
https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/marcus-shelby-jazz-baseball/
-BLU NOTES (2019) Larry Blumenfeld on jazz and other things-Interview with Marcus Shelby
http://larryblumenfeld.com/index.php/2019/07/19/now-batting-marcus-shelby
-ALL ABOUT JAZZ (2019) Marcus Shelby Orchestra "Transitions" CD Review!
-THE JAZZ PAGE (2019) Marcus Shelby Orchestra "Transitions" CD Review!
https://thejazzpage.com/album/marcus-shelby-orchestra-transitions/
-TOM HULL ON THE WEB (2019) Marcus Shelby Orchestra "Transitions" CD Review!
http://tomhull.com/ocston/blog/archives/2744-Music-Week.html
-BLACK GROOVES. (2019) Marcus Shelby Orchestra "Transitions" CD Review!
http://blackgrooves.org/marcus-shelby-orchestra-transitions/
-SAN FRANSCISCO CHRONICLE (2019) Marcus Shelby's deep dive into Blues Royalty with Angela Davis and More by Thurman Watts
-ALL ABOUT JAZZ (2011) Marcus Shelby Orchestra "Soul Of The Movement: Meditations On Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." CD Review!
-SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE (2019) Marcus Shelby goes Popovich with community jazz chorus
-SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE (2019) Marcus Shelby Composes Moving Evocation of Port Chicago Disaster
-A NEON JAZZ INTERVIEW (2019) San Francisco-based Jazz Bassist, Composer, Arranger, Bandleader & Educator Marcus Shelby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GujueU478wU&feature=youtu.be
-SF GATE CD REVIEW (2008) Marcus Shelby Orchestra: "Harriet Tubman: Bound for the Promised Land" CD Review!
San Francisco-based Jazz Bassist, Composer, Arranger, Bandleader & Educator Marcus Shelby
Bassist Marcus Shelby Finds Freedom's Message in the Music KQED
https://www.sfgate.com/music/article/CD-review-Marcus-Shelby-3283840.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Shelby
Marcus Shelby
Marcus Shelby (born February 2, 1966, in Anchorage, Alaska)[1] is an American bass player, composer and educator best known for his major works for jazz orchestra, Port Chicago, Harriet Tubman,[2] Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Beyond the Blues: A Prison Oratorio.[3] He has led the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra since 2001 and has recorded with artists as diverse as Ledisi and Tom Waits.
He has contributed numerous musical compositions to works created in collaboration with dance ensembles and theater artists ranging from California Shakespeare Theater to Intersection for the Arts.
Background
When Shelby was five, his family moved from Memphis, Tennessee, to Sacramento, California. Shelby played double bass briefly as a teen, but abandoned music until 1988, when he attended a Wynton Marsalis concert with his father, which inspired him to rededicate himself to music.[4]
Shelby moved to Los Angeles and began working with drummer Billy Higgins. After winning the Charles Mingus Scholarship in 1991 he studied music at California Institute of the Arts with Higgins,[5] composer James Newton, and Charlie Haden.[6]
From 1991 to 1996 he recorded and toured with Black/Note (credited as Mark Shelby), a hard bop group based in Los Angeles.
When Black/Note broke up in 1996, he moved to San Francisco because he "had seen groups like Broun Fellinis" whose tenor saxophonist of the time, David Boyce, "was playing a totally different style", and he felt a need to grow.[7] There he founded the Marcus Shelby Trio and the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra. He has served as Artist in Residence at Yerba Buena Gardens Festival[8] and Composer in Residence at Intersection for the Arts.
In 2013, Shelby was appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Marcus has two daughters.
Major works
- 2002: Port Chicago, 14-movement suite for jazz orchestra
- 2007: Harriet Tubman, oratorio for voice and jazz orchestra
- 2011: Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
- 2015: Beyond the Blues: A Prison Oratorio
Discography
With Black/Note
- 1991: 43rd & Degnan (World Stage)
- 1994: Jungle Music (Columbia / Sony Music Distribution)
- 1994: L.A. Underground (RED Distribution)
- 1996: Nothin' But the Swing (Impulse! / GRP)
As leader
- 1997: Un Faux Pas!, Marcus Shelby Trio (Noir)
- 1998: Midtown Sunset, Marcus Shelby and the Jazzantiqua Music Ensemble (Noir)
- 1998: Sophisticate, Marcus Shelby Trio (Noir)
- 2001: The Lights Suite, Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra (Noir)
- 2006: Port Chicago, Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra (Noir)
- 2008: Harriet Tubman, Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra (Noir)
- 2011: Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra (Porto Franco)
As sideman/contributor
- 1994: Judgement, Robert Stewart
- 1996: Flow, Faye Carol
- 1998: Mortyfied, New Morty Show
- 1998: Intimate Strangers, Marcus Poston
- 2004: Too Good to Be True, Buford Powers
- 2005: First Pitch Swinging, Danny Grewen
- 2006: It's a Good Thing, Jamie Davis
- 2006: Blue Divine, Tammy Hall
- 2007: The Shotgun Wedding Quintet, The Shotgun Wedding Quintet
- 2007: The Code, John Calloway
- 2007: 12 Gates to the City, Howard Wiley
- 2008: Extraordinary Rendition, Rupa & the April Fishes
- 2010: On a Day Like This..., Meklit Hadero
- 2011: Bad as Me, Tom Waits
Select collaborations
- 1993–2006 Musical Director, Jazz Antiqua Music and Dance Ensemble
- 1998–2004: Savage Jazz Dance Company, Musical Director
- 2014: The Legacy of Duke Ellington: 50 Years of Swing! with California Shakespeare Theater
- 2015: Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, The California Chapter with Anna Deavere Smith[9]
Awards, honors, and commissions
- 1991: Charles Mingus Scholarship
- 2000: Meet the Composer residency
- 2000: Creative Work Fund commission
- 2003: Equal Justice Society commission[10]
- 2005: Oakland Ballet commission
- 2006: Fellow, Resident Dialogues Program of the Committee for Black Performing Arts, Stanford University[11]
- 2008: Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award, Best Original Music Score, Sonny's Blues
- 2009: Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship
External links
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Marcus-Shelby-mixes-music-politics-history-3261035.php
Marcus Shelby mixes music, politics, history
WHAT I DO: Marcus Shelby, Jazz Musician/Educator
Marcus Shelby plays the bass. He fronts the Marcus Shelby Trio and Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra, but says some of his most gratifying moments occur in classrooms. At Rooftop Alternative School in San Francisco, he teaches a workshop each year on the intersection of music, politics and history.
The workshops grew out of Shelby's research on Underground Railroad founder Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr. and jazz legend Louis Armstrong. In February, Shelby took his family on a tour of the South to visit historical sites important to the civil rights movement - Memphis; Little Rock, Ark.; Jackson, Miss.; and Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala.
He lives in the Mission District with his partner, Vanessa Silva, their 7-month-old daughter, Billie, and Shelby's 7-year-old daughter, Kennedy, from a previous relationship.
I was born in Anchorage, Alaska. My dad was stationed there. Then we moved to Sacramento when he got transferred to McClellan Air Force Base.
My parents weren't professional musicians. They sang in church. So that was the sort of my musical DNA. My mom plays piano; she knows how to play all the spirituals. That for me was very grounding.
I went to Cal Arts in Los Angeles and studied bass with Charlie Haden and composition with James Newton. The bass is the foundation. Listen to reggae: That bass line tells you it's a reggae song. Listen to swing or blues, the same thing. The bass is like the heart beating involuntarily.
Everything else kind of centers around that pulse. So there's a lot of responsibility in the bass. It's the timekeeper.
Twenty years ago, I decided I wanted to only play acoustic bass. No amp. I wanted to develop a style that was almost the way a person would sing in a mike. And have all the components of that: the overtones, the attack, the subtleties and nuances.
I was losing those qualities with an amp. What you gain in amplification, I was losing in something very guttural, very natural and human that you can only get if you don't use an amp. The overtones aren't resonating naturally. They're going through some sort of box, some sort of equalizer.
Three years ago, a friend came over and he's like, "Man, you need a new bass" and sold me his German flat back. Over 100 years old. It makes a big difference: The wood, the way the neck is carved, the size of the bass, the strings. The tailpiece, the endpin. All the things you might think are just ornamentation are part of the entire sound emanating from that instrument.
My girlfriend plays guitar. My 7-year-old's been studying piano and violin. I play bass and a little piano, and we have sessions here, my family. Me and my daughter play together all the time.
Music has always been for me an extension of a lot of other things, like politics and history and teaching and social justice.
The first year (of my workshop), I did a program called Harriet Tubman and Jazz. I talked about the music that came out of slavery - field cries, work songs, blues hollers, spirituals - and how that music was a form of communication to give messages to slaves, to help along the Underground Railroad. I wanted to expose that to young people, to show how these early strains of music evolved into all of American music - from the early blues to hip-hop.
The second year was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the third year Louis Armstrong. I told them about Armstrong: "Look, he was born to a prostitute, didn't know his father and yet he was able to overcome that. Let's listen to his music, but let's talk about his character."
Some of these kids have very challenging homes or in some cases no home at all. Those are the kids for whom a story like Louis Armstrong's resonates the most.
https://www.sfcv.org/articles/review/marcus-shelby-composes-moving-evocation-port-chicago-disaster#
Marcus Shelby Composes Moving Evocation of Port Chicago Disaster
Hearing live performances a couple of days apart had me musing on the parallels between Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, premiered in 1944 and presented last week by the San Francisco Symphony, and Marcus Shelby’s Port Chicago: Suite for Jazz Orchestra, premiered at Yoshi’s in 2006 and performed last Saturday night at the Presidio Officers’ Club, by the 15-piece, all-star Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra, under the auspices of the Presidio Trust.
Both the Prokofiev and the Shelby are long-form pieces which advance the deployment of large ensembles, with music sourced in tradition but blossoming in polychromatic variety that at the same time forms a cohesive whole.
The Presidio venue, with its hefty exposed beams and elegant curtains, seemed a comfortable and appropriate place for Shelby to showcase a piece commemorating two disastrous explosions, 75 years ago, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, a munitions depot in the East Bay. Of the 320 persons killed in the widespread blasts, the vast majority, due to the Navy’s assignment policies, were African-Americans, who’d been inadequately prepared. The reassignment of surviving personnel to a nearby munitions depot, under similarly dangerous conditions, resulted in a work stoppage, deemed a mutiny and criminally prosecuted. An appeal, launched by Thurgood Marshall (then executive director for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund), had a significant influence on Harry S. Truman’s presidential declaration on the desegregation of the armed forces, in 1948.
The sharply attired Shelby introduced his first-ever long-form composition and interpolated commentary on the piece’s sections, referencing the historical and socio-psychological circumstances of the story. The "Introduction" to the 12-part suite set an affecting, dolorous mood, evocative of the similar musical social commentary of Kurt Weill. By contrast, in the “Opening Dance: Port Chicago Blues,” Shelby effectively evoked the era in lively, Ellingtonian fashion, walking the bass (skillfully played here by Tomoko Funaki), with shuffling accompaniment on drums (Sly Randolph), and separating the melody choruses into ’40s big band sections for the seven brass, then the five reeds. Pianist Gaea Schell comped smartly behind the virile, burnished tenor sax solo of Patrick Wolff. Shelby conducted from the front, animatedly pacing, sometimes clapping and shouting, summoning up a spirited tutti shout chorus, with a clarion solo by Santana trumpet master Bill Ortiz.
The “Call to War” slowed down to a second line dirge, with Schell working twelve-tone anguish and Wolff doubling soulfully on clarinet. “Training Day” seemed to evolve the big band sound into a less dancey, more artful Woody Herman rollick. But Shelby also proved here that, whatever mode he moves in, his melodic lines are distinct, tuneful, and attractive. “Mechanized Women” shifted alluringly between 3/4 and 4/4, the alto sax solo delivered with delightful bounce by Kristen Strom, one of four women in the Orchestra.
Taking a verbal break, Shelby allowed that his 90-minute nonstop spell as conductor was “a workout, in which I’m trying to be like Steph Curry,” The “Work Routine I” challenged the ensemble with 7/8 time, with canny polyrhythms and polytonalities. Charles Hamilton, former director of the award-winning Berkeley High School Jazz Program, blew a skillful and sassy trombone solo, and this section demonstrated another of Shelby’s theatrically effective buildups of critical musical mass, in which the Orchestra’s virtuosity showed brightly and consistently.
“Barracks Life” revealed the troops’ troubled dreams, while “Black in Blue” moved the big band sound forward again, into the more experimental regions explored by the likes of bandleaders Gerald Wilson and Don Ellis. “Big Liberty Blues” envisioned time spent away from base, perhaps in the lively clubs of nearby Oakland. Baritone saxophonist Fil Lorenz seemed an audience favorite, suave and seductive, with intricate, biting runs. Rob Ewing displayed a trombone impressive in its soft sweetness, quite different from Hamilton but equally meeting the composer’s needs. This was a Shelby tune fully fit for a standard place in the jazz repertoire, as was the following “Letters Home (Sweet Brownness),” a sweet ballad rather evocative of Kern and Hammerstein’s “All the Things You Are.”
It was next, in affecting theatrical fashion, that Shelby chose to position the “Explosion,” heard fortissimo on all parts of Randolph’s drum set and then in a sustained anguished brass chord. What came “After” was set as a limpid, palliative theme passed from instrument to instrument, with Wolff’s clarinet sounding a particularly appealing call to the heart and auguring the final standing ovation from an appreciative full house. Composer, the individual and collective players, and the commemorated event all deserved it.
https://americanrepertorytheater.org/media/a-note/
A Note from Notes in the Field Composer and Performer Marcus Shelby
August 15, 2016
American Repertory Theater
I have had the greatest honor of my life working with Anna Deavere Smith on her School-to-Prison Pipeline Project. I have learned a great deal from her about communication and empathy. Both are central to the blues form given to us by our ancestors, who found a creative way to express hope, determination, and identity in the face of overwhelming oppression. The musical score for my work is born out of this blues tradition, which includes call and response, improvisation, inflection, and tension and release. I have found the power of the blues in all of Anna’s past work, so this is a natural form for us to work with. Each of the individuals whom Anna interviewed has a personal and succinct musicality that embodies the very essence of the blues—triumph over tragedy. The music aims to provide a soulful addition to Anna’s words. The subject material for the School-to-Prison Pipeline Project has personally inspired me to fight for reform using my creative tools. I am eternally grateful to Anna for this opportunity.
Marcus Anthony Shelby is a composer, arranger, bassist,
and educator who currently lives in San Francisco. His work and music
have focused on the history, present, and future of African American
lives, social movements, and early childhood music education. In 1990,
Shelby received the Charles Mingus Scholarship to attend CalArts and
study composition with James Newton and bass with Charlie Haden. From
1990-1996, Shelby was bandleader of Columbia Records Recording Artists
Black/Note. Currently, Shelby is artist in residence with the Yerba
Buena Gardens Festival. In 2013 Shelby received a MAP Fund Award to
compose Beyond the Blues: A Prison Oratorio, an original composition for
big band orchestra about the prison industrial complex. In 2015, Shelby
was commissioned by Anna Deveare Smith to compose the score for her new
play Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education.
Shelby also has arranged for Ledisi and the Count Basie Orchestra,
recorded with Tom Waits, and received the City Flight Magazine 2005
award as one of the “Top Ten Most Influential African Americans in the
Bay Area.” Shelby teaches at the Stanford Jazz Workshop and in March
2013, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee appointed Shelby to the San Francisco
Arts Commission.
Image Credits
Marcus Shelby: Peter Varshavsky
https://www.ronniesawesomelist.com/ybgf/marcus-shelby-new-orchestra-blues-in-the-city-world-premiere
Source:: https://ybgfestival.org/event/marcus-shelby-blues-in-the-city/
Marcus Shelby’s musical suite on prison industry
Marcus Shelby, the jazz bassist and composer whose swinging music is often fueled by his passion for history and social justice, just finished a monthlong run at Berkeley Rep accompanying Anna Deavere Smith in her new multi-voiced solo work, “Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education.” It deals with the so-called school-to-prison pipeline that funnels mostly poor young people of color into the unforgiving criminal justice system, a subject even more relevant now, in this post-Ferguson moment, than when Smith wrote the piece.
Shelby, who wrote the music and plays off the actress in call-and-response-like phrases that suggest blues shouts and field hollers, got so absorbed in the subject while developing the piece with Smith over the last few years that he wrote a musical suite about mass incarceration and the so-called prison industrial complex, “Beyond the Blues: A Prison Oratorio.” Commissioned by the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, where it premieres Sept. 27, the piece was written for Shelby’s big band and a vocal quartet featuring Tiffany Austin, Joe Bagale, Mujahid Abdul-Rashid and Kennedy Shelby, the composer’s 12-year-old daughter (Kennedy was Duke Ellington’s middle name).
“The people I’ve always admired — Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington — used their music to make social change. For me, that’s been a personal calling, to try to understand the world around me, particularly as it relates to social justice,” says Shelby, whose previous works include “Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman,” and “Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
Shelby, as always, did copious research for this two-year project, reading about mass incarceration and the history of U.S. prisons, visiting California jails and doing monthly programs at San Francisco’s Juvenile Justice Center, where he brings in musicians to play, encourages and helps the kids to make their own music and exposes them to “art, culture and critical thinking.”
He’s also been attending conferences and restorative-justice workshops, and putting on monthly meetings on incarceration-related issues at the Red Poppy Art House, where he performs prison songs by everyone from Ma Rainey (“Chain Gang Blues”) and Bessie Smith to Johnny Cash and B.B. King.
In addition to composing new songs, he has rearranged some of those classic numbers orchestrally for “Beyond the Blues: A Prison Oratorio.” He’ll play some of them with his quartet next Thursday, Sept. 10, at the Museum of the African Diaspora on a program called “Beyond the Blues: Ending the Prison Industrial Complex.”
Kennedy Shelby — who plays piano in the San Francisco Community Music Center’s Teen Jazz Orchestra, led by her father for the last three years — will also perform at MoAD, along with a few other ringers from the CMC band.
“I’ve been able to work with these young people at CMC consistently, and it’s a great project for me,” says Shelby, whose 5-year-old daughter, Billie, named for Holiday, plays percussion in the band.
For more information, go to www.moadsf.org or www.ybgfestival.org.
What’s in a genre? Bassist Marcus Shelby questions what makes jazz, jazz
In 1944, Tchaikovsky’s famous “The Nutcracker” landed in North America at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. 78 years later — and just down the street — Marcus Shelby and his jazz orchestra hit the bandstand with Duke Ellington’s arrangement, “The Nutcracker Suite,” a true jazz masterwork. But was it really jazz?
“There’s no such thing as jazz,” Shelby said before the Marcus Shelby New Orchestra’s performance on Friday at SFJAZZ as part of their holiday concert series.
On Thursday, Shelby gave a lecture for students in the ITALIC program, who attended Friday’s show. The thesis of the lecture was “Why Jazz?”
Shelby argued that much of what we call jazz is actually the blues. “Not the blues as in the sense of the style of music, but blues as in communication,” he said, referencing the music that goes back to the blues “shouts” and “complaint calls” of slavery. He also referenced ideas of call and response of voices which later became instruments, a technique used heavily in the Ellington arrangement.
Shelby talked about how important it was to capture the sound of Duke Ellington’s band with his ensemble. “It’s not something that you change,” he explained, saying that altering the original arrangements would be akin to changing a Beethoven symphony.
Instead, he focuses on bringing out the work of improvised solos. One of the true standouts was the 16-year-old third trumpet, Skylar Tang. Her solos were dynamic and unpredictable, yet melodic and honest. Another standout soloist was first alto saxophone, Kristen Strong. Her lines were excellent examples of storytelling in jazz; it was obvious she wasn’t just playing for playing’s sake.
The second half of the show
featured vocalist Tiffany Austin in a series of holiday songs, ranging
from “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to “Oh Hanukkah” and an
original Kwanzaa song written by Shelby and Austin. The night culminated
with an audience sing-along of “Jingle Bells.”
In the ITALIC lecture, Shelby taught the class listening techniques to enjoy the concert. He played a clip from Ellington’s 1960 TV promo for “The Nutcracker Suite,” and then played the overture from Tchaikovsky’s version. He asked the class to take a Ratatouille-esque approach to listening, ingesting all the “flavors” of the piece, experiencing each of the instruments separately and then all at once.
He instructed the ITALIC students to point out moments of call and response, as well as moments when leading instruments took over. Singing along as the jazz overture played, Shelby displayed a love for the music that was both moving and electric.
“I’ve heard [The Nutcracker Suite] thousands of times,” said Shelby in his lecture to ITALIC students, “and I hear something new every time.”
Besides authenticity, Shelby has but one other simple goal: “Keep the energy alive. Jazz musicians are always beating their own time … but it’s about bringing people in, bringing in the energy, bringing the dynamics down,” he said.
Shelby also told ITALIC students why the term “orchestra” was important. At a time when large jazz groups headed by Black musicians were referred to as “big bands,” Ellington wanted to bring the gravity of the “Tchaikovsky aesthetic” and “apply it to his own visage,” as Shelby put it.
His grace and professionalism in the classroom was duly matched onstage as well. The performance was strong yet intimate. Those sitting behind the stage were able to see his conducting up close; his quiet remarks to the band made the whole experience feel very personal.
Shelby is a bassist, composer and director of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. He is best known for his compositions for jazz orchestra, including “Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” He also voiced the character Ray Gardner in the Oscar-winning Pixar movie “Soul.”
Shelby had a strong command of the band, and the group’s synchronicity was astounding. The Marcus Shelby Orchestra lived up to its name — the 15 musicians sounded like a symphony.
Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sebastian Hochman is a staff writer at The Stanford Daily for Arts &
Life and University desks. He is a music major. Maybe. You can contact
him at shochman 'at' stanford 'dot' edu.
Shelby Enriches the Bay Area with Music, Education, Activism
Bassist and composer Marcus Shelby says his career has been shaped by performers and institutions in the Bay Area. (Photo: Ronald Davis)
On the final evening of a four-night run as resident artistic director at San Francisco’s SFJAZZ at the end of May, Marcus Shelby was visibly exuberant.
Stylishly dressed and elegantly poised, the charismatic 53-year-old bass player, composer and educator presented “Ellington: Blues and Swing,” a show featuring the 16-piece Marcus Shelby Orchestra, which the bandleader founded 20 years ago.
The evening included Shelby’s original compositions and arrangements of standards, some of which are on his latest album, Transitions. Using his entire body to conduct the big band, San Francisco-based Shelby jumped, danced and waved his arms to inspire the band during a long first set, which was dominated by Ellington tunes. Violinist Mads Tolling displayed considerable chops, and offered smooth, lyrical phrases on tunes like “Mood Indigo” and “On A Turquoise Cloud.” The second set featured a trio format with pianist Adam Shulman, drummer Genius Wesley and Shelby on bass, backing up guest vocalist Kenny Washington on classic Ellington tunes like “Take The A Train” and “In A Sentimental Mood.” They were followed by guest vocalist Faye Carol (with pianist Joe Warner), a longtime collaborator and mentor, who opened with “The Maestro,” by Shelby, and closed out the set with flamboyance on “It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.”
A well-known figure in the Bay Area arts community, Shelby is involved in a wide variety of activities and organizations, and works as an educator at the San Francisco Community Music Center and the Stanford Jazz Workshop, as well as serving as a teaching artist at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival and the San Francisco Jazz Festival.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Was there a theme for your four-day artist residency at SFJAZZ?
The whole idea of the residency was to celebrate the Bay Area, and that’s why I used primarily Bay Area artists. With this residency you can get top artists from all over the world to perform with you, but my career has been defined by the artists and the institutions I have worked with here that have supported me.
I got to work with Angela Davis, who is a local entity, and who wrote the most articulate treatise on the history of the blues and black feminism. It was an excellent opportunity to celebrate not only her, but to work with three of our great local vocalists—Paula West, Tiffany Austin and Kim Nalley. And I was also able to get Terri Lyne Carrington and Tia Fuller. These musicians are not only fierce in their music, but in their activism, and that’s what this whole thing was about.
What was your inspiration for Transitions?
For this record, I wanted to document what the band had been doing for the last six years. It is a representation of what it might be like to come and hear the Marcus Shelby Orchestra. The whole record is structured like a live concert, where we might come out and the band plays two numbers, and then we bring out our featured vocalist and we do five standards. And then we do an original suite—four pieces from my “Black Ball Suite,” which is all about baseball and the blues and how things changed over time—there are all these relationships that deal with migration and transition, and the birth of the blues and Negro League Baseball.
Duke Ellington has been a big inspiration for you. Why do you think he’s still so important?
Duke Ellington wrote about people, places, events—he was just one of the most inspirational figures I know. Wynton Marsalis kind of did the same thing throughout his career, creating these large-scale works. They were inspirational in their ambition of how you can use history and use music and use this language called the blues and swing to create music that informs, inspires, entertains, educates. And in our music, the big band format is the large canvas. I needed to have a band to learn to play Duke Ellington’s music, so that’s all we did in the beginning. I collected over 200 Duke Ellington scores and over 100 Duke Ellington charts.
How do you see your role as the conductor?
I’m appreciative of the opportunity to have this band. I used to play bass in my band, but now I primarily just conduct, and that’s been a big thrill. It’s a whole other skill and has allowed me to be the coach that I want to be, and inspire and try to get the most out of these compositions. There’s nothing more enjoyable than being in front of my big band and yelling and screaming, and laughing and telling jokes.
You want good players, and you want to build a good culture and environment, just like a team. And that starts with the leader. So, I have to walk the walk and talk the talk, and treat every member of that band with the ultimate respect. DB
Jazz Icon Marcus Shelby on his Work and Duke Ellington's Legacy
Jazz bassist and composer Marcus Shelby grew up in Sacramento. Despite the lure of a promising New York jazz career and a Columbia Records deal, he made his home in San Francisco and has been a leading figure in the Bay Area's blues and jazz scene. He's especially known for his trio of big band suites, "Port Chicago", "Harriet Tubman" and "Soul of the Movement," which are steeped in his deep research of African-American history. On Friday, his 16-piece band the Marcus Shelby Orchestra will celebrate the legacy of Duke Ellington, born 115 years ago this week, with a tribute concert presented by Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall. We talk with Shelby about his music, his career and the enormous influence and talent of jazz legend Duke Ellington.
Guests:
Marcus Shelby, jazz bassist, composer, teacher and member of the San Francisco Arts Commission
https://reflectionsinrhythm.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/reflections-with-marcus-shelby/
Reflections with Marcus Shelby
Marcus Shelby first gained major public attention with the hard swinging unit BLACKNOTE and their debut recording from the indie label of rhythm master Billy Higgins (World Stage Records) in 1991. After four recordings from Blacknote the bassist/composer began seeking different avenues for his musical expressions. From writing and recording with poet D Knowledge, Savage Dance, to film (love jones) and stage (Murder In B Flat), Marcus Shelby has continued to grow and develop as an artist while running his own label, Noir records. Today Marcus is an acclaimed band leader (Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra, Marcus Shelby Septet, Marcus Shelby Trio) and award-winning composer whose recent works have touched on important moments of history (Port Chicago, Harriet Tubman). Also a dedicated educator, Marcus has helped instruct and influence many of Jazz’s upcoming artists and entrepreneurs. The following interview is from a conversation that Marcus and I had in 1999…
G1: Marcus, you first came to my attention, and I think
national attention, with the group BLACKNOTE… What’s happening with
BLACKNOTE now?
Marcus Shelby: It’s interesting that you ask that, because I’ve recently been in conversation with Willie Jones, the drummer, and we’re in the creative stages of putting together a new recording project that we’re going to do on Noir Records, our label here. We’re real excited about that because we haven’t actually played together for some time. He was in town about six months ago, and we hung out for about a week and did some playing, but the group BLACKNOTE hasn’t actually done any work together for the last two years… at least two years. We’re excited about the new project because we’re going to have some guest artists: Anthony Wonsey, perhaps Roy Hargrove on some of the tracks, along with James Mahone. We’re going to record that in July. You know, BLACKNOTE, I don’t think we’ll ever break up. We took some time off; Willie went to New York, James went to New York, and I stayed here in San Francisco.
G1: BLACKNOTE’s first recording, 43rd & Degnan, was done on World Stage Records, an independent label run by legendary musician Billy Higgins.
Marcus: Yeah, Billy Higgins is the owner. Kamau Daaood (noted poet), he was also part of the whole World Stage movement and he provided the space. Billy was the one who financed the label and threw us in the studio when we could barely hold our instruments right. We went in there with a lot of heart and a lot of fire and we did 43rd & Degnan, and every now and then I’ve gotta pull it out and dust it off and remember where I came from.
G1: How did all of that come about?… the hookup with Billy and the recording??
Marcus: I moved to L.A. (Los Angeles) in 1990. I went there, I knew Billy was there, but I didn’t really know anybody else. I didn’t know any other musicians, so I started asking anybody who I saw was involved in music where Billy was and they told me to go down to Leimert Park. I went down there and hung out for about a month straight, then I heard that he was out on the road. I kept going back every day, and then one day he was there practicing. I told him that I had been looking for him. He didn’t know who I was, but he took me in. I guess he saw something in me, because he took me in, gave me a key to the World Stage and over the course of the next four months was when I met the different members of BLACKNOTE, Willie, Richard Grant (trumpet), and James.
We decided to put together a project after four months, but we didn’t want to play anywhere. We wanted to shed for about six months. We didn’t do any playing, no gigs or nothing. We just practiced for six months at the World Stage. Billy would bring in different cats, like he brought Elvin Jones in, Cedar Walton came, like, every Wednesday and worked with us. Barry Harris, Ron Carter, anyone who was in town he’d bring down to the World Stage and have them work with us. We’d talk about concept, technique… After, I would say, six months we got our first gig at a health food restaurant, this place called The Good Life. We played there every Tuesday.
G1: Having the chance to shed like that, I could only imagine the value in that. It seems like a lot of musicians, once they learn a few phrases on their instrument they want to get out and gig right away. For you, what was the benefit of just taking that time to actually just shed and connect with the group?
Marcus: The big benefit was that I got an opportunity to work out different concepts about playing and learn different concepts. You can do a lot on your own, but when you have a collective of musicians who want certain music aesthetics as you do… I mean we thought the same way, we breathed the same way, and we all wanted… we all had a clear vision, which was the same. Four guys, and that’s really incredible, when four people see the same goal and are willing to work hard to reach it. That was really what BLACKNOTE was all about. We all had this clear vision, musically. We had the same influences: Miles’ bands in the 60’s, Coltrane’s rhythm section, Clifford Brown’s rhythm section with Max Roach and George Morrow, Wynton Marsalis’ first band… We all worshiped the same Jazz gods, and that influence you can only get when you have four people like that. You can’t really individually get it yourself. We worked out the kinks, we worked on concepts, we worked on skills, we all wrote music, we brought music in, we shed… it was like a workshop. Those were the type of things that made us jump from just four guys who knew how to play, to being a real strong unit that was headed in the same direction. We got on each others case, you know, in love and only within the rehearsal situation, once we were outside the rehearsal situation it was all laughs and jokes. But when we were together, playing on the bandstand it was very, very serious.
G1: …And now, down the line, four albums later, and you’re the owner and head of a record label, NOIR records. Was that in your vision back at that time?
Marcus: You know, I thought about it. I entertained the idea of a record label, but I was always kind of intimidated because there are so many components to a record label that you can’t even imagine. A lot of people think it’s just making a record and then putting it out and hoping the world likes it. That’s far from the truth, I mean, it’s a business so there are business issues that you have to deal with… from the lights, to having computers, to having phones, and then when you think you have all of that together you have to think about what kind of business it is. We’re going to make records, so we have to promote them, we have to market them, we have to make GOOD records, we have to have people to produce records, we have to have distribution, we have to have some sort of promotion. Ok, where do you get all of this money to do it? So I was always intimidated. I always thought owning your own record label could be pretty cool. Even though we did an indie for Billy Higgins there really wasn’t a machine behind pushing those records; it was like “Let’s make the record, send it out, and see where it lands.” When I came out here I really wanted to do something that was going to have a, I don’t want to call it a machine, but something that would be able to sustain itself and something that would allow multi talented artists working in Jazz, working in Spoken Word and classical music to have a place where they could be promoted, be marketed, produce their own works, have control of their own compositions, and have the distribution that could compete with the major labels.
I was with Columbia records for three years, Impulse for two years, Chrysalis music I was with for three years. I saw what the majors were doing, and I knew that if we could take some of the ideas and concepts, it’s almost impossible to have the resources because they’ve got billions of dollars, but if you could do things where you can compete with them, like innovative recording techniques, internet stuff, which is free pretty much, creative art work, and those areas where we can compete with the majors, and have some sort of message that the world can hear…
It was intimidating four or five years ago, but two and a half years ago when we started the label I felt that this is something that could happen. If I can get a collective of people who were interested in music, an artists’ base, that’s why I chose the Bay Area. The Bay Area has the artist base and the support of the public on the live situations. So, I ended up here. I love this city and this is where I felt something like this could happen.
G1: How long did it take from the actual thought of starting a label, to putting everything together, to putting out that first disc?
Marcus: It took about nine months. I did some research. I thought about how I was going to do it. We didn’t start with investors. We didn’t start with a bank loan. None of us has a rich uncle. So it was like, the thing to do was to put together a project that could get the ball rollin’ so we did the first trio cd Un Faux Pas! (with Jaz Sawyer and Matt Clark) that helped us get our distribution, that was kind of our calling card. Then we figured we’d keep knocking on the doors and learn the distribution game… because it is a game and if you can learn all of the options and opportunities that you can get out of distribution, and know how to speak the language, you can start to make things happen. It took us about two years to do that. We did another project, a Langston Hughes/Romare Bearden project (Midtown Sunset vol.1), then we did a spoken word project with Jazz, and then we did The Sophisticate and by the time we got there, we’d figured out how to promote and we’d raised enough capitol and resources to promote. It does cost a lot of money, even if you know the game you still got to have some money to play it. We were able to pull that together and at the same time make sure that the creative aspect, which is the most important thing, was still progressing and getting to a level where we could feel proud about what we were creating and being able to promote that with pride.
G1: Noir Records is more than just a Jazz label, you record and distribute different types of music. One of the things that you’ve done is the disc Spoken City, which features some of the talent from the Bay Area’s ever-growing poetry and spoken word scene.
Marcus: That’s something that came from a project that we pitched to Levi’s, or Dockers Khakis more specifically, to record shows they had already set up to produce live. We had a very nice contact and friend at Dockers who saw the value and how it could work and still be a part of their overall marketing strategy. Their whole idea and concept was to work with companies that are involved in grass roots type projects, and that’s what this was about. All of the proceeds go to this organization called YOUTH SPEAKS, which is a youth organization that’s committed to poetry from kids; a community based non-profit organization. We’re very active in spoken word, so this project and the live concerts were right up our alley. Recording them is something that we would do whether Levi’s sponsored it or not.
G1: Marcus Poston is another spoken word artist on the label, did you know him before signing him to Noir?
Marcus: Yes. I met him at different art gatherings in the city and we became friends. He told me he was a writer, and showed me some of his work, and I thought it was interesting. It was like an extension of Kerouac into the 90’s. I felt like there was something that could happen that would celebrate the beat poetry of Jazz without being too stuck into it. So, we spent about nine months plotting and planning his album. It was the first time he’d ever been in a studio, and he went in like a true professional to knock out his work and consequently put out a great album. That was a very rewarding project because here’s a guy who was, like, 21 at the time who, from one year didn’t know that anyone would ever read his work to the next year having it recorded on a cd. It completely changed his life. Now he’s totally active on the arts’ scene and he’s doing workshops for kids, he’s launching a magazine under the Noir label, that deals specifically with art and culture in the Bay Area. That’s what this label is trying to do, inspire people to try to reach their full potential.
G1: How did the concept of the label come about? Noir Records. I mean, when I look at the cd covers and just hearing the name Noir, it reminds me of film. Film noir… black and white, sharp images. What did you have in mind?
Marcus: The name has a lot to do with my personal influences in art. Film noir is an art form that I’m very fond of. Old films, old French films, old American classic films that were shot in film noir fashion have influenced me as a composer, as an artist, and I just think the word Noir has a very strong significant meaning to it, just being Black and being strong. I wanted something to represent what we were doing, having something that was strong and spoke about who we were, you know, without being too much in the face. But, I think there’s a message there about being Black and strong, and Noir was the best way that I could do that without being pretentious or catchy or self absorbing. I think all of my interests kind of came together in that word, Noir. BLACKNOTE was the same thing, something that was strong and positive, and had a musical connotation to it.
G1: On the BLACKNOTE cd, Jungle Music, you used a Malcolm X soundbite…
Marcus: Willie and myself, we came up with that idea. There were a lot of Malcolm X tapes floating around Leimert Park and we heard this one speech and we were like “Man, let’s use that at the beginning of our album”, it was like “It’s time to stop singing and start swinging”. Our whole concept was swing, from A to Z and that’s what BLACKNOTE was all about. This was our first major release and that’s the way we wanted to step to the public eye. We were heavily into Malcolm’s work at that time and we heard this speech that was like an eye opener. We thought, whoa that’s the beginning of the album. They made us pay for it too. That few seconds cost a couple of grand, man.
G1: Since BLACKNOTE, you’ve taken your music into different arenas; you’ve composed for dance companies, and film, and even had an acting role in a play about musicians. Is this something that you just see as a natural extension of what you do as a musician?
Marcus: I kind of wanted to be… My interest in art extends to dance, ballet, theatre, and film, and in performance. I’ve had the fortunate experience of being in every aspect of the record business, as an artist, involved with management, involved with publishing and production. Some of the other things that have happened have been by chance, I didn’t plan it. It was just by chance, as an artist and then on the other side. So, I was able to bring some experience to the table. The timing, being here in San Francisco at a time that’s ripe with art, and meeting certain people that wanted to do the type of project that was community and grass-roots based and having the artists to work with. There are probably a number of Jazz musicians who could do an operation like this. It takes a lot of patience, it takes a lot of perseverance, and it takes a lot of resources and a lot of heart. If you can think business wise, because you have to have some sort of business acumen… My background is, I was an engineer before I did all of this, an electrical engineer. I went to Cal Poly and studied double E. So I learned how to think in college, and how to problem solve, and was into technology based discipline. That may have a little bit to do with my business background.
G1: How do you see Noir records as time goes on?
Marcus: I would like to see us maintaining our independent spirit of helping artists do things that allow them to control their own work and still have their work have the same type of exposure that they’d get from the major labels. We’d also like to provide opportunities for people to work as artists and with artists without having to move to New York or Los Angeles. We’ve been lucky that we’ve been able to pull together what we have, and do what we have. We just want to continue to build on that. There are other people who want to work in promotions, marketing, and business affairs, they’re not necessarily artists but they want to work with artists. There’s got to be some sort of machine set up for them to do that.
Industry has to keep supporting the works or it will die. By supporting I mean recording and distributing the works so that other people could recognize that there’s something going on. Writers have to continue to write about it. That’s how things keep going, because if people turn their backs on it, no one records it and no one writes about it they’ll go by as if it never happened.
Marcus Shelby continues to flourish as one of today’s
true Jazz ambassadors. When he’s not leading his award winning orchestra
or one of his swinging smaller units he can be heard accompanying
masters such as John Handy or Faye Carol, collaborating with
contemporaries such as Howard Wiley, or providing soundscapes for a
dance company. More information about Marcus Shelby and Noir records can
be found at:
http://larryblumenfeld.com/index.php/2019/07/19/now-batting-marcus-shelby/
Now Batting, Marcus Shelby…
Twenty years ago, when bassist Marcus Shelby formed a 15-piece jazz orchestra, he began to think big and thematically.
“I have been on a mission for the past 20 years to compose and create music about African-American history,” he says. These pieces have included an oratorio on Harriet Tubman and a suite about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.
On “Transitions,” released on his own MSO Records, Shelby’s lush arrangements of classic tunes by Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, and Cole Porter frame the album’s centerpiece: “Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues,” his smart, slick and soulful four-part suite inspired by the history of Negro League Baseball. Here, Shelby merges his mission with his two driving passions—jazz and baseball.
While working on my next column for Jazziz magazine, I spoke with Shelby about these passions.
Have you always been a baseball guy? Did you play?
I have always loved baseball. I played little league up to high school, but later focused on basketball as I entered my junior and senior years. I actually played basketball, football, baseball, and ran track. I received a full ride basketball scholarship to attend Cal Poly (SLO) in 1984 and put my bats and gloves down. It was the Michael Jordan effect. Most black kids my age at that time were mesmerized by Jordan and basketball became more attractive. Perhaps it was the opportunities, like scholarships, that basketball provided. It was also less expensive for low-income communities. You just needed a bucket and ball. Baseball, you needed all the equipment and 18 guys, plus a well-groomed field. Nonetheless, I played outfield and also pitched. Now I play catcher because I’m mostly playing with young kids and that’s the one position you need someone who is not afraid to get hit.
After playing basketball for four years at Cal Poly, something strange happened that altered my course. I went to a Wynton Marsalis concert in Sacramento at the Radisson Inn, in 1988, and I lost my mind. The band included Marcus Roberts, Bob Hurst, and Jeff “Tain” Watts. You see, I also played bass in high school but had no dreams of becoming a professional musician. After seeing Marsalis and understanding that my sports career was coming to an end, I was inspired. I found an old bass and began playing again. I fell in love with music! Specifically blues and swing. I left San Luis Obispo after graduation in 1990 and went to LA where I met Billy Higgins and joined the World Stage Jazz Workshop. I got a job at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena which is why I went to LA. I didn’t really want a “real” job but that was my reality in 1990. Soon after landing in LA, I applied and received a scholarship to attend Cal Arts and study bass with Charlie Haden and composition with James Newton. Goodbye JPL and electrical engineering. Things moved fast. I started a group called Black/Note that featured drummer Willie Jones III and trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos. We all went to Cal Arts. We signed a record deal with Columbia Records, toured with Wynton Marsalis as his opening act, and my life became only music for the next 6 years. I did not follow baseball as closely. I think it was because I was surrounded by nothing but Dodger fans.
When did that change?
Fast forward to 1996, when I moved to San Francisco, I became interested in baseball all over again having settle into a career as a musician. It was the Giants and Barry Bonds that did it. San Francisco is a baseball town. Like St. Louis, Chicago, and Philly, baseball is part of the civic culture. It’s hard to live here and not be aware of what’s going on with the Giants. All of this brought me right back to my love of the game. Since I’ve been in San Francisco (23 years now), I have been active over the past 5 years working with kids on simple baseball skills, organizing pickup games at my daughter’s school, and just having fun getting to know people by inviting them to play catch. I carry gloves, balls, bats, bases, and other equipment in my car and will play catch with anyone willing to. I have 2 daughters (9 and 16). My 9-year old daughter plays baseball. We play every day. Before school and after school. Weekends too. It’s our common passion. We go to 50 Giants games a year as we live 10 minutes from Oracle Park (former AT&T park). I attend Spring Training in Arizona every Spring. I’m good friends with our flagship station (KNBR) and have been a guest on that radio program (Talking Baseball with Marty Lurie) twice, talking about the Negro Leagues and related subjects. So that’s it in a nutshell. I started off has a hard core athlete in four sports, became a full time musician, and have married my two interests together creating music about the history of baseball.
What gave you the idea for this suite?
I have been on a mission for the past 20 years to compose and create music about African American history. I’ve written an oratorio on Harriet Tubman, a suite about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, Port Chicago, the Prison Industrial Complex, and other collaborative projects about black history through plays, ballets, and films. The Negro Leagues have been on my mind for years. Back in 1993, I wrote a piece called “The Ballad of Josh Gibson,” but I was not at a point where I truly understood the history of the Negro Leagues, its impact on the Civil Rights Movement, and certainly not all of the colorful characters that make up the rich history—including Fleetwood Walker, Rube Foster, Effa Manly, Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, and of course Jackie Robinson.
I have had my big-band orchestra now for 20 years. I have great support from my artistic home the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival and also from SF JAZZ. This support has allowed me to create a piece about the Negro Leagues where I was able to spend three years researching the subject, attending conferences, interviewing surviving Negro League players, reading all the books, and sufficient time to compose and orchestrate.
Are there specific musical aspects that relate in some specific way to the sport of baseball?
I have a section that is called “At Bat” that is the re-creation of an at-bat, and features three clowns that I employ throughout the suite. In this case, the music follows the action which ends up being a strikeout; this starts an argument between the batter and the umpire (both played by clowns) and turns into an aria sung by the umpire.
I am very interested in the sound of baseball and have tried to create the essence of a crack of bat, or the blues holler of the ump, or the space between action which baseball and music use to create tension and release. Most of these reincarnations are found in the full outdoor presentation of our piece “Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues” which incorporated clowns and actors. Our recording is a mini-suite of four pieces that frame the important cities that birthed black baseball—Chicago, NY, Pittsburg, and Kansas City.
Can you tell me more about your research for this suite?
I spent three years researching “Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues”. This research included joining SABR (Society of Baseball Research), attending conferences, reading no less than 30 books, watching films, pretty much living on YouTube, making in-roads with the SF Giants organization, studying all music recorded that I could find about baseball, and being active on online forums to obtain information. I had generous support from the MAP fund, the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, and SFJAZZ.
What did you learn in doing that research?
I learned that the real hero of Negro League baseball was Rube Foster. He taught black people to be self-sufficient and to build their own infrastructure to support segregated baseball. This including owning your own fields, booking agencies, concessions, hotels, travel, and of course teams. I believe he died of a broken heart because of the collapse of this solidarity.
Do you see a parallel between Negro leagues and pre-integration music scenes?
Absolutely. That inspired the suite in a way—the parallel history of the birth of blues music and the birth of the Negro Leagues. The first black baseball players in MLB was Fleetwood Walker and his brother Welday Walker. Fleetwood played for the Toledo Blue Stockings but was banned in 1884 because of the most popular player at the time, Cap Anson, and his reluctance to play with black players. This ban of course lasted until 1947, when Jackie Robinson got signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Rube Foster started the first organized Negro League in 1920, right about the same time Gertrude Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Bessie Smith, Sara Smith, and others made the first blues recordings and toured the infamous wheel which ran through the south, Midwest, upper south, and parts of the south east. Barnstormin’ Negro League baseball teams employed the same traveling routes, stayed at the same hotels, ate at the same homes, and in many cases were booked by the same agents. This would be true all the way up to the 1960s. If you were Nat King Cole Jr., or Ella Fitzgerald, or Satchel Paige, or Toni Stone (second basewoman for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1962) you probably stayed at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis Tennessee as that was the only place a black artist or entertainer could stay during segregation. The impulses between Negro League players and early “jazz” musicians were the same. The style of baseball was loose, fast, and furious. Style was of the essence. Same as in music. The cultural connections that informed both the sport and the music are unmistakable such as their “lingua franca” and improvisational necessity.
The live presentation of this music went even further, in an attempt to re-created the environment of a Negro League baseball park. How did you do that?
When we performed “Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues” at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival September 2018, we performed the suite outside in a park and borrowed from the recorded history of what happened at Negro League parks or at least parks where Negro League teams played (such as Comisky Park in Chicago). This included using clowns that “shadow-balled” and recreated infield practice, We recreated a live radio show that interviewed black luminaries like Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Effa Manly, and Rube Foster, and my big band orchestra performed the suite with three vocalists and four actors to bring interesting aspects of the history to life though monologues and original and re-arranged songs.
In what way were the four cities—Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Kansas City—central to the Negro leagues, and do you see a parallel there with jazz in those towns?
I highlight these four cities in my suite because they were most central to the history of Negro League Baseball. The first Negro League team was the New York Cubans. New Yorkhad a big influence on Negro League baseball because of its market size and also its large black population that included Afro Latinos. I’d also include one of the most influential owners Effa Manly who ran the Newark Eagles and was central to Negro League baseball in New York. Chicago is where the Negro Leagues as an initial entity began through the efforts and leadership of Rube Foster, who migrated from Texas to Chicago (like so many other musicians who traveled up the Mississippi River like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong). Rube Foster first started the Chicago American Giants.Pittsburgh was home to the rebirth of Negro League baseball in 1931 because of the numbers runner Gus Greenlee, who owned the Crawford Grill (and managed several boxers). He put together a tenacious team called the Pittsburg Crawfords that sported a roster that included Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Judy Johnson, Sam Bankhead, and the great Satchel Paige. In 1933, Greenlee started the Negro League Allstar game that would ultimately save the Negro Leagues from financial ruin until World War 2 started, which actually in a strange way helped the Negro Leagues (and MLB) due to the fact people had jobs. Kansas Cityis where the most legendary team is from—the Kansas City Monarchs, which had Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Jackie Robinson at some point on their roster. The Kansas City Monarchs are also the first team black or white to use night lights to be able to perform at night.
In all four cities, we also see independent musical styles that were influenced by factors of migration early on. New York City was experiencing a population boom that defined life, surrounded by subways, cultural diversity, street cars, and city sounds. Chicago saw a migration from the South, such as New Orleans, Memphis, and Texas, and with that they brought with them a tinge of the blues that would define Chicago “jazz”. Same with Kansas City, which birthed the Count Basie Orchestra. I love the story of Pittsburgh, and how families like Josh Gibson’s family migrated there like many other black families that produced artists like Ahmad Jamal, Art Blakey, Billy Eckstein, Kenny Clarke, Paul Chambers, Ray Brown, Earl “Fatha” Hines, and Errol Garner. There is a consistency of refined musicmaking in all of these cases. Pittsburgh, a steel town full of sand lots, is a perfect example of the cultural simpatico between baseball and music.
Obviously, this concept has to do with many things, especially African American history. But do you also see a natural affinity between playing jazz and playing baseball, things that are inherent in the doing of both?
I see some connections. If you watch players like Mookie Betts, Dee Gordon, Billy Hamilton, Yasiel Puig, Jose Altuve, Javier Baez, Lorenzo Cain, or even Cody Bellinger, you will see the spirit of “jazz” being played out every time. These players play in the moment. They read the situation and respond. I wouldn’t say baseball has the same rhythm as “jazz”, but it does swing and it grooves. Watch the rhythm and motion between a pitcher and a catcher. It’s critical that it has rhythm or the pitcher will be rattled. Watch any infield practice. Same thing. There is a flow and rhythm to it: You have to be ready because it’s different every time a fast hop is coming at you, just like being fora bassist being in the middle of walking rhythm changes.
Also, baseball takes patience. I’m old school. No clocks, please. Jazz, of course, is a patient art form with little gratification that is quick and easy. A good composition is an experience that involves a group effort in which you have leads and you have role players.—just like in baseball. It unfolds over time and can not be reduced to a bite size understanding. You either like “jazz” or you don’t. You either like baseball or you don’t. There really isn’t any way to dumb down the two, to make them more accessible, and I’m OK with that.
Were your jazz orchestra a baseball team, what position would you play?
I think about this question every day, as I’m always trying to learn the values of baseball by watching games,” he says. “I would certainly be the catcher. As a bass player, I think the catcher has the equivalent role: steady and consistent; involved in every pitch; controlling the tempo by calling the game; rarely the front-person but in the center of the action and comfortable with that role.
Marcus Shelby’s deep dive into blues royalty with Angela Davis and more
Marcus Shelby wasn’t supposed to be a jazz musician.
For starters, he was born in Alaska, hardly an outpost of cultural import. Then, after his military family relocated to Memphis and later Sacramento, Shelby became enraptured with sports, skilled enough to be a four-sport high school athlete who earned a basketball scholarship to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo.
But it was during his time at Cal Poly, studying electrical engineering, that his life’s arc was redirected. While talking to his father about an upcoming date with a girl, his dad suggested taking her to a Wynton Marsalis concert. Seemed like a good idea. It was so much more.
“From the first note, I forgot about her. I got hooked on the music,” Shelby recalled. “It hit me upside the head.”
The music by Marsalis, a lion of the contemporary jazz scene, struck Shelby so hard, he was transformed. Shelby backtracked into music, got a bass, an instrument he played during his teen years, woodshedded in earnest and joined a church to start playing regularly.
After graduating, he ditched electrical engineering and migrated to Los Angeles where he studied under musicians Billy Higgins, Charlie Haden and James Newton.
What followed was as much determination and hard work as talent or serendipity. Shelby moved to the Bay Area, formed his own record label, Noir Records, and focused on creating music that embraced social awareness. On that path toward creative enlightenment, Shelby’s education included reading “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism,” a book by author and activist Angela Davis that examined the careers of singers Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Billie Holiday through a feminist prism.
“I read ‘Blues Legacies and Black Feminism’ 10 or so years ago as I was seeking all things that could tie up my understanding of the blues. I had read every scholarly work I could get my hands on,” Shelby said.
“When I came across the Angela Davis book, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the most articulate account of the blues I’ve ever read.’”
Like the Marsalis concert, it left an impression on Shelby. Now a decade later, Davis is slated to join Shelby, resident artistic director at SFJazz, and his quintet on Friday, May 24, for a performance inspired by her book as part of a four-day run at SFJazz Center’s Miner Auditorium. Davis, as spoken word artist, is expected to offer her feminist commentary on the lyrics and performances of Smith, Rainey and Holiday.
Guest artists Terri Lyne Carrington, Tia Fuller, Paula West, Tiffany Austin, Kim Nalley and Tammy Hall will also be on hand to lend their voices and musicianship.
“Sometimes I’m not sure of their effect on the culture, because we have to keep rediscovering them,” Hall said about Smith, Rainey and Holiday. “It’s a shame that people don’t know who they are.”
Shelby hopes to change that, and further educate Bay Area audiences during his string of concerts that blend history with music.
Kicking things off is “Green And Blues” on Thursday, May 23, a collaboration of the Marcus Shelby Orchestra with author Daniel Handler, most famous for his series of children’s fiction stories, “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” They have assembled a musical history of famous and infamous San Francisco neighborhoods from the indigenous Ohlone tribe, to the evolution of Hunters Point and the Gold Rush era’s inception of the Barbary Coast red-light district. They’ll also describe the flora and fauna peculiar to each neighborhood, juxtaposing them with a blues backdrop.
The third show brings Shelby’s intimate knowledge of athletics into union with his music. “Black Ball,” scheduled for Saturday, May 25, is a musical suite examining Negro League Baseball, which is where most African American players before 1947 — when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier — got their professional start.
“My research shows that black folks have been playing baseball pretty much as long as America at large,” Shelby said. “Ironically, the first African American to play professionally was a fellow named Fleetwood Walker in 1884, decades before the game became segregated.”
Shelby’s suite of concerts concludes Sunday, May 26, with a look at a legend as he explores the legacy of Duke Ellington, an artist whose music also had an impact on Shelby’s life.
“Ellington’s body of work hit me hard … I found that the deeper you swim in his water, you’ll likely find the essence of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith,” he said. “If you swim deep enough, you will find (proto-jazz musician) Buddy Bolden.”
It’s a week of concerts that dive deep into the black experience with a theme of social justice for all.
“There’s a sort of celebration and buoyancy of these aspects of black life,” Shelby said. “Admittedly, some of it is sad, yet out of it came songs that helped us in the struggle.”
Marcus Shelby residency: “Green and Blues”: Marcus Shelby Orchestra with Daniel Handler. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 23. $25-$26; “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism”: Marcus Shelby Quintet with Angela Davis. 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 24 (sold out); “Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues.” 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 25. $30-$70; “The Legacy of Duke Ellington” featuring the Marcus Shelby Orchestra, Faye Carol, Kenny Washington and Mads Tolling. 7 p.m. Sunday, May 26. $25-$65. SFJazz Center’s Miner Auditorium, 201 Franklin St., S.F. 866-920-5299. www.sfjazz.org
This is the story of a “local guy” who stuck to his guns and made it on his own terms. He’s a DIY musician. His name is Marcus Shelby.
Twenty years ago, Shelby — bassist, bandleader, composer, big musical thinker — was part of the “Young Lions” movement in jazz, recording for Columbia Records and seemingly destined for fame and fortune in New York City. Shelby, however, moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco and began gigging six and seven nights a week. He was forging a reputation, teaching in schools and collaborating with theater companies, choreographers, filmmakers and poets, while building a discography focused on grand historical themes in African-American history.
He’s never left the Bay Area. Lucky us.
“In New York, I’m not sure I could’ve built the vision,” he says, during a two-hour conversation at the Red Poppy Art House, a cozy community center near his Mission district apartment. “This is my city. This is where I am. My kids go to school here. I work in the schools. I believe in them.”
Dedicated to Duke
Now 48, he brings his latest project to fruition Friday at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, where the Marcus Shelby Orchestra will perform a Duke Ellington tribute under the auspices of Cal Performances. It will include early classics by Ellington, as well as his “Such Sweet Thunder” suite, inspired by Shakespeare — and here performed by Shelby’s 16-piece orchestra in a collaboration with Cal Shakes. Actors just may pop up around the concert hall to render Bardian bits: i.e., from the balcony scene of “Romeo and Juliet,” which inspired Ellington and Billy Strayhorn to compose the suite’s sublime ballad “The Star-Crossed Lovers.”
The collaboration was Shelby’s idea; he knows Jonathan Moscone, Cal Shakes artistic director. Well, Shelby knows everybody, it seems.
On stage, wrapped around his double bass, grounding bands with his fat tone and deep rhythm, he is all business, rarely cracking a smile. In conversation, he is a charismatic dynamo, expansive and prone to breaking into laughter — and, as on stage, wearing a fedora tipped at just the right angle, his signature.
He veers from one topic to the next: from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” (he scored a 2012 production for San Francisco’s African-American Shakespeare Company) to actor-playwright Anna Deavere Smith (he’s scoring her new play “Pipeline Project”), from San Francisco’s juvenile hall (where he teaches music) to the 100-voice choir he conducts in Sonoma (it performs in June at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival) and somehow on to the California Gold Rush, Ohlone Indian culture, Grizzly bears and naturalist John Muir (about whom he wrote a piece, “Muir’s Walk,” part of his “Green and Blues” suite for his orchestra).
“I’ve tried to combine different things that inspire me,” he says. “When I want to learn about a subject, then I find a way to write music about it.”
Shelby has composed a triptych of big band suites drawn from African-American history. His “Port Chicago” (2006) was inspired by the 1944 explosion at an East Bay naval yard, where more than 320 men were killed, mostly black American sailors. His “Harriet Tubman” suite (2007) evoked the Underground Railroad’s abolitionist hero. His “Soul of the Movement” (2011) drew on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., while exploring work songs, spirituals, blues, jazz and Curtis Mayfield’s “We’re a Winner.”
Doing his homework
It involved three years of research, including residencies at Stanford University, the University of Chicago and the Columbia College Center for Black Music Research, also in Chicago. He drove from Alabama to Tennessee, interviewing scores of men and women who lived through the civil rights years, including his aunts Katie Mae and Lucille Greer, retired nurses who had participated in the Memphis protests on behalf of the city’s black sanitation workers, led by King in 1968.
“It’s research and immersion, and that turns into melody,” Shelby says, explaining his process. “It’s action and movement, which turns into rhythm.” He adds, “Music has to be about something.”
Pianist and composer Rebeca Mauleón directs the education program at SFJazz, where Shelby’s family concerts (including two with author Lemony Snicket) have been sell-outs:
“Everything he does is with this spirit of curiosity and experimentation — one foot in tradition and one foot in the modern world,” she says.
Deborah Cullinan has known Shelby since the late ’90s, when she directed Intersection for the Arts. Now she directs the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and has helped guide funding toward his projects for 16 years. She says, “He’s special. He’s one of these constantly evolving, constantly questioning people.”
Asked to imagine what Shelby might be doing in 15 years, she says, “His curiosity is kind of insatiable, so the question would be like, ‘What kind of wild collaborations would he come up with?’ Astronauts and musicians and who knows what? But also the themes and questions that he feels required to explore: What will they be?”
Memphis boyhood
As a boy, Shelby lived in Memphis, where his grandfather was a preacher and family life revolved around church. “Oh yeah, every Sunday. Twice on Sunday,” he says.
When he was about 5, Shelby and his family moved to Sacramento. At 13 — inspired by the bass-playing older brother of his best friend — he took up the double bass, playing it alongside the choir at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church and in his high school orchestra. He never had a private lesson — and quit at age 16 to pursue sports.
He won a basketball scholarship to Cal Poly, where he majored in electrical engineering, thinking, he recalls, “I was going to be an electrical engineer or a professional athlete, if God let me be.”
In his senior year, though, his father suggested that he “check out this trumpet player.” It was Wynton Marsalis. Shelby took a date to see Marsalis’ band at the Radisson Hotel in Sacramento — and quickly forgot about his date. “Because it was like they were playing to me. This swing, this up-tempo swing, this multi-polyrhythmic — oh, man. And Wynton was so articulate. And I was, ‘Wow, that’s what I want to be, right there.'”
This was in 1988. Shelby was 21 or 22. He dusted off his bass and practically was laughed off the stage during a gig in Pismo Beach, where the bandleader shouted to the drummer to “Play louder,” to drown out Shelby’s mistakes. “I was horrible,” he says.
He practiced maniacally. He moved to Los Angeles and found a home at the World Stage, a community arts and performance center founded by Billy Higgins, who was one of jazz’s most infectiously swinging drummers. Higgins saw the spark in Shelby and his friends, mentored them, taught them the connection between community and music. At the World Stage, the young bassist and his pals formed the Black-Notes, the group that later recorded for Columbia Records and toured Europe in 1994, opening for Marsalis.
We’ll have to fast-forward through Shelby’s two years at Cal Arts, his studying with flutist-composer James Newton, his self-education in classical music, his obsessing on Tchaikovsky and attending more than 100 Los Angeles Philharmonic rehearsals at the Hollywood Bowl with pocket scores in hand.
No wasting time
We’ll jump to 1996, the year Shelby performed at a Billy Higgins tribute in San Francisco. He soon moved to the Mission, began gigging and meeting with arts administrators. He “got into the middle of our stuff immediately,” remembers percussionist-educator John Santos. “He’s a mover. He’s not a guy who’s wasting time.”
Shelby has never stopped moving. He teaches the music-history connection in two schools. His daughters, 4 and 11, play in the teen jazz band he directs at the Community Music Center in the Mission. He has become a mentor to a new generation: “Without Marcus, there is no me,” says Oakland-reared trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who’s now a star, tours the world, but still texts Shelby for advice “whenever I’m feeling stuck or boxed in.”
Last year, Shelby was appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission: “I’m here 18 years, man,” he jokes. “Sooner or later, people will call you for things.”
He’s here. He plays bass. He swings, infectiously, like Billy Higgins. And he’s got something big on tap for Friday, his Ellington extravaganza. Expect sweet thunder.
Contact Richard Scheinin at 408-920-5069, read his stories and reviews at www.mercurynews.com/richard-scheinin, and follow him at Twitter.com/richardscheinin.
Marcus Shelby Orchestra
Performing “The Legacy of Duke Ellington: 50 Years of Swing!” with members of Cal Shakes for “Such Sweet Thunder,” the Ellington-Strayhorn suite
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley
Tickets: $22-$56; 510-642-9988, www.calperformances.org
Online: See videos of Marcus Shelby in performance at www.mercurynews.com/entertainment.
THE MUSIC OF MARCUS SHELBY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MARCUS SHELBY:
Marcus Shelby solo
A LIVE Chat with Musician Marcus Shelby
'I Will Not Stand Still' by Marcus Shelby from Harriet's Spirit
Such Sweet Thunder - Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra
I Walk The Line - Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra feat. Tiffany ...
BLUES IN THE CITY with Marcus Shelby and Eva Paterson
