Marcus Shelby’s Bay Area Impact

By Ted Panken I Oct. 22, 2024

“You want people to feel, no matter where they are, that they’re important to the music,” said Marcus Shelby about bandleading.
(Photo: Courtesy marcusshelby.com)

One week after the conclusion of this year’s Healdsburg Jazz Festival, artistic director Marcus Shelby took a restorative Fourth of July holiday road trip with the San Francisco Giants as they won two of three from the Atlanta Braves. “I don’t hunt and I don’t fish,” said the 58-year-old bassist-composer, a Giants season ticket-holder. “Baseball is my only hobby.”

Shelby had booked nine days of consistently interesting concerts, overseeing logistics, putting out fires, MCing avuncularly and bringing his huge tone and impeccable beat to Darrell Grant’s counterpoint-rich MJ-New Quartet, the tradition-centric Person (Eric) to Person (Houston) Quintet and the Marcus Shelby Big Band, which he formed in 1998. This year’s 15-piece edition opened with repertoire from Shelby’s 2019 CD Transitions — four less-traveled Duke Ellington numbers and four excerpts from Black Ball: The Negro League And The Blues. During the second half, Shelby’s big band backed Jazzmeia Horn with signifying Bay Area tenor saxophonist Howard Wiley nailing the vocalist’s spirited charts.

Black Ball follows Port Chicago, Harriet Tubman and Soul Of The Movement: Meditations On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as commercially documented extended works emanating from Shelby’s interdisciplinary deep-dives into various aspects of African-American history, each deploying the blues as a default basis of operations. As yet unrecorded is Shelby’s Beyond The Blues: A Prison Oratorio, a suite for big band and vocal ensemble, a 2015 Yerba Buena Gardens commission that addresses the prison-industrial complex. So are various interdisciplinary productions involving dance, theater and film, such as Blues Legacies And Black Feminism, a 2019 quintet titled for Angela Davis’ book, which analyzes and anthologizes the lyrics sung by Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday.

“One definition of the blues is the pursuit of freedom, which matches the history of Black people in this country from the beginning,” Shelby said. “You find it in every musician playing the blues, or even improvisational music — freedom of interpreting melody, freedom of rhythm, freedom of timbre, which is why there’s room for Billie Holiday next to Ella Fitzgerald. The other definition is tension-and-release, both in harmony — what academics call the blue notes, the flat thirds and the sharp nines, and how they resolve — and rhythm. That’s how bass players play. It’s the music’s heartbeat. The 12-bar structure of the traditional blues contains statement resolution as a storytelling art form.”

The son of a schoolteacher and an Army lifer, Shelby — a four-sport athlete in high school during formative years in Sacramento who received a basketball scholarship from Cal Poly, where he earned an electrical engineering degree — applied a relentless thirst for research, including assiduous fieldwork, in his compositional process.

“I become like a method actor,” said Shelby, who played signifying bass for Anna Deavere Smith on theatrical and HBO productions of her extraordinary 19-character, one-woman show Notes From The Field during the 2010s. “In working on Beyond The Blues, I went to prisons and juvenile halls and held meetings on topics dealing with mass incarceration for seven years.”

When working on Black Ball, Shelby augmented his experiences as a high school outfielder and lifelong Giants fan, joining the Society of Baseball Research, learning sabermetrics and playing catcher in a men’s league. “I love that position,” he said. “Just like a bass player, you’re part of everything that’s happening, controlling the rhythm, calling the pitches. I run my big band from the perspective of the manager dealing with all the personalities and putting people in the best position to succeed.”

Extending the analogy to his duties at Healdsburg, Shelby added, “I think like a general manager.” He credits the template established by festival founder Jessica Felix during her 1999–2020 tenure.

Felix returned the compliment. “Marcus is a great communicator,” she said. “He’s taught me a lot about music through history.” Felix recalled meeting him in 1991, when drum giant Billy Higgins urged her to book Shelby’s first group, Black Note, at an Oakland venue she was booking. Higgins had recently connected with Shelby at his just-opened World Stage cultural center, which Shelby was introduced to soon after moving to L.A. for a job at Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

After leaving the JPL job a few months later, he received a scholarship to California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with Charlie Haden, Darek Oles and James Newton. Meanwhile, with Higgins’ blessing, he rehearsed regularly at World Stage with drummer Willie Jones III and alto saxophonist James Mahone, formulating Black Note’s sound, documented between 1991 and 1995 on four albums, including releases for Columbia and Impulse!

After Black Note disbanded in 1996, Shelby moved to San Francisco’s Mission District, where he still resides. A year later, local tenor saxophone hero Howard Riley suggested he call trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, then 15, for a gig.

“I went to his house to learn the music,” Akinmusire recalled. “He opened the door, wearing this black suit, thin tie, just impeccable. Scores and books all over the place. His sound and groove were amazing. He’s super-intelligent without trying to force it on you. I played hundreds of gigs with Marcus, and I tried to emulate him.”

Shelby’s ongoing impact on young Bay Area musicians is apparent in the film Harriet Tubman: Through the Eyes of Children from 2020, on which Bay Area musicians like pianist Luis Peralta and drummer Genius Wesley, then teenagers, nail his gorgeous reduction of the score.

“Over 28 years here, I’ve encountered a lot of young musicians who’ve spread their wings,” Shelby said. “I’m involved in a lot of music and education. The only way I know how to exist in this music is to do what people like my baba Billy Higgins did for me.” DB