Marcus Shelby’s Dukedom;
Arrangements for Social Change, Part 1
by Thurman Watts
Like any true, great conductor of the communicative sort, Marcus Shelby, even in conversation is able to swing the focus gently back to the groove, to the pocket where the flow of information and ideas converge in meaningful transference.
Shelby shifts easily between topics. Be it the symbiotic connection between Ellington and Strayhorn, music in general, the Civil Rights Movement, or even sports, the wellspring of his creativity is centrally derived from the Black experience.
“I do lead an orchestra and various ensembles and most of the work I do is really inspired by the Black experience, some of which is of the holocaust nature. For example, I composed a suite around the life and work of freedom fighter Harriet Tubman.”
Here Marcus Shelby makes reference to one of many commissioned works he has written in his career. His piece, “Harriet Tubman,” was researched while he was a 2006 Fellow in the Resident Dialogues Program of the Committee for Black Performing Arts at Stanford University. The piece evolved into a two act musical opera that was also released on Cd in May of 2008 on Shelby’s own Noir record label.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Jesse Hamlin first published on 10/15/07, Shelby explained the genesis of his interest in Harriet Tubman. He said it was sparked initially when he was a youngster by a book given to him by his mom on Tubman, the ‘Conductor on the Underground Railroad.’ As an adult, Shelby read the 2003 biography on Tubman, "Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero," written by Kate Clifford Larson. In it, Shelby discovered Harriet Tubman’s close relationship to music, specifically how she used coded spirituals to communicate escape messages to slaves planning to join her on journeys north to freedom.
Another project close to the heart of Marcus Shelby is his piece Blackballed; The Negro Leagues and the Blues. This is how he described it for Cadence.
“Blackballed was a fun and glorious project as it gave new life to the Negro Baseball Leagues and legendary players like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. It combined two passions of mine. “I’m sort of a self-declared baseball historian, so I love baseball, but there’s also Blues and Swing and the similarities that intersect within our country when it comes to the evolution of the Blues, when it got its footing in the late 19th century and the evolution of Black baseball. Black folks have been playing baseball, pretty much as long as White folks in this country.”
When this writer chimed in with, “Yeah ever since Abner Doubleday invented it,” Shelby quickly straightened out my skewed version of baseball history.
“Well actually, that’s the myth. I don’t wanna get too far off the rails here but Doubleday was a military person who had witnessed a game and while watching, notated the rules. Now the thing is, the true history of the invention of the game was glorified and fantasized because they tried to attach the prestige of someone in the Union Army as being the inventor of this national pastime. The truth is, this game had been going on under different names, for some time since before the Civil War, if not under the same rules, then rules that were close. It was called Rounders and also Townball, which was similar to Cricket.
So there were all these variations that had nothing to do with Abner Doubleday. The rules of baseball that we know and understand now were birthed by the New York Knickerbockers Club, a gentleman’s club, a baseball society. Abner Doubleday gets a lot of credit, but my point is that the actual structure of segregated baseball, where Black people finally said, “Ok, if you’re not gonna let us play in the Major Leagues anymore, (because the last Black person to play in the Major Leagues before Jackie Robinson was Fleetwood Walker in 1884) then we’re gonna start our own league. The Negro Leagues were started by people like Rube Foster and other Black baseball club owners at a time when Blues and Swing music, which became Jazz, were popular in African-American culture. The baseball players stayed at the same hotels as the Jazz and Blues musicians. The musicians and athletes had to deal with the same sort of infrastructure; from ownership to promotions, concessions, travel, etc. Parallel industries, if you will.
Blues and Swing, bats and swing, there’s this sort of celebration and buoyancy of the style that was unique to Black life. Some of it is sad and some of it has to do with the songs that have helped us in the struggle.”
Marcus Anthony Shelby was born on February 2, 1966 in Anchorage, Alaska. His family soon moved to Memphis, then finally settling in Sacramento.
“My dad was stationed in Alaska and that’s why I was born there. We left a year after I was born. We lived in Memphis, Tennessee for awhile and finally settled in Sacramento when my dad was stationed at McClellan Air Force Base. I was a four sport athlete in high school; football, basketball, track and baseball. I did music in church, but really didn’t consider music as any sort of career path, because I didn’t know anybody that did it professionally. I wanted to play professional basketball. I was really excited about that because as a kid, I saw Michael Jordan. That was my era. I got a basketball scholarship and went to Cal Poly and played for four years while I studied electrical engineering. In my senior year, I saw Wynton Marsalis on kind of a whim. My dad told me he was coming to town and encouraged me to check out this young trumpet player. I wasn’t really into Jazz. I was like, into whatever was popular.
In addition to church, I played in high school but I wasn’t this kid who was on track to become this Jazz musician. So when my dad told me to go see Wynton Marsalis, I didn’t even know why, I had no interest in the music. But I thought it would be an excellent idea for a date. So I took my date and man, from the first note, I forgot about my date! I got hooked on the music. It hit me upside the head. I had never heard or experienced this before. Half of it was the music, but the other half of it was the image. They were wearing suits. Wynton was articulate. There was a certain reverence and respect for the music that made me go, ‘Whatever that is right there, I want it. I want to be that. I want to carry that.
After that, I started listening to the music. I didn’t even start playing again right away. I started listening. And a year later, I saw Marsalis again at the Long Beach Jazz Festival. Bob Hurst was on bass, Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts was on drums, Kenny Kirkland on piano. I’ll never forget that concert because Bob Hurst broke a string and just kept on playin’.
After the concert I said to myself, ‘Alright, I have to join a church.’ I went out and got a bass. I hadn’t played in four years and I wasn’t good at first. I had a lot of energy and excitement but my technique was not good at all. Way behind. But there was a burning passion inside me that insisted I pursue this. I dropped electrical engineering after I graduated and came to L.A. I found Billy Higgins and joined his workshop at the World Stage performance space. I applied for a scholarship to Cal Arts in order to study with James Newton and Charlie Haden. I got it and my whole life changed. That was 1990 and I never looked back. I came to San Francisco in ’96 after spending six years in L.A. I had a group there called Black/Note with Willie Jones III, James Mahone and Eric Reed. We did four records. The ironic thing is, in ’94 we got signed by Wynton Marsalis’ manager and ended up opening for him throughout the U.S. and Europe. To this day, Wynton and I are friends. That was a full circle moment for me.”
Circular orbit or straight ahead trajectory, Marcus Shelby’s creative output and achievements are momentous and diverse. As bandleader of his first professional ensemble effort, Black/Note, the band had record deals with Columbia and Impulse. When he landed in San Francisco in 1996, he seemed to plunge headlong into creating his own métier. Crafting music astride themes that embrace social awareness and justice. Without shame or prejudice he declares, “For me it’s just one way to learn about my history. To create projects around it that require me to go out and research and ask questions about. The music is really the final product and actually the thing that takes the least amount of time. Getting the information and having it sort of live inside of me takes the most time. I’ve had my orchestra now for twenty years and it is the vehicle used to express it when it comes out. Because of getting really close to the subject matter, to me it’s almost like what you might call a character actor who lives the life of a civil rights activist.
I did a project entitled Beyond The Blues: A Prison Oratorio on the prison-industrial complex in this country. I researched that by going into prisons, gaining an understanding of how the prison industry exploded over the last forty years with mass incarceration, and then writing music about it. As I said, that’s the easiest part because after the research, you understand the mood, the feeling, the rhythm, all those things that the music can describe within the context of whatever subject you are trying to talk about.”
Another volatile historical topic tackled by Shelby is a composition entitled Port Chicago. It is a suite that reflects on the munitions explosion and aftermath that occurred on July 17, 1944 at U.S. Naval Base at Port Chicago, California. In all, 320 people were killed and another 390 were injured. Most were African-American who were the personnel assigned to loading the dangerous cargo on ships bound for ships seeing action in WWII. A month after the explosion, hundreds of African-American sailors refused to load munitions resulting in a charge of mutiny for 50 of them.
Shelby is quoted on his website, giving background on his perspective of the work and his compositional intent.
“The black sailors who lost their lives on July 17th, 1944 in a massive explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Weapon’s Base were true, if unwitting, American heroes. The explosion drew investigation, which revealed Jim Crow-like racial segregation in the naval forces, involving disadvantaged, dangerous, and ultimately deadly working conditions for black sailors. In response to the public exposure of these truths, the Navy quietly desegregated its ranks; in 1948, President Harry Truman desegregated all U.S. armed forces. Ironically, the Port Chicago tragedy revealed and corrected a grave injustice, and brought America closer to equal justice for all, the very foundation of true democracy. Indeed, these sailors’ lives were not lost in vain. “Port Chicago” the composition is an abstract representation that chronicles the story of these African American sailors. It pays homage to the men and to the sacrifices they made for the moral development of their country. It also honors the survivors—those who have had to bear the burden of history’s continuing injustice. “Port Chicago” hopes to again shed light on those injustices, and to join the efforts to exonerate the survivors. “
Another unique representation of Shelby’s skills is the collaborative play for which he composed the music, Isfahan Blues. The storyline of the play, written by Iranian-American playwright Torange Yeghiazarian, is a fictionalized account of a relationship that developed between a member of Duke Ellington’s band and an Iranian actress, when President Kennedy’s State Department sent Ellington’s aggregation on a goodwill tour in 1963 at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. and the height of the Cold War.
With a solid past behind him and the promise of a continued bright future ahead, Marcus Shelby has established a comfortable rhythmic pace to his life. In May of 2019, Shelby begins a two-year term as a Resident Artistic Director at SFJAZZ. His first show features author Daniel Handler and will examine the Blues traditions in San Francisco neighborhoods, tracing their development from the Barbary Coast period to present day.
His second show will present his quintet in performance with Professor Angela Davis in a dialogue entitled Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (from her book of the same title) which sheds new light on the legacies of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billy Holiday.
“I actually have a lot of off days,” says Shelby. I’m fifty-two years old. At this point in my career, I’ve gone from gigging and playing everyday, seven days a week, somewhere, you know, Have Bass Will Travel, all kind of gigs for twenty-somethin’ years. So now, I’m workin’ on projects that allow me to spend multi-years developing them. Some of those years are strictly research. Many of my projects are works in progress. I might do smaller, ensemble versions of big band pieces I’ve written and do presentations in a public space where I can get feedback, or even share elements of a larger final piece. I’ve done that, pretty much, with every project that I’ve had over the last twenty years. So, some of that is daily work, some of it, not so much. I’ve developed my work ethic so that I’m not always playin’, not always teachin’, not always writin’. There’s also times when I’m not doing music at all. I spend a lot of time at the ballpark. I spend a lot of time at school activities with my kids. I’ve also been on the Arts Commission for the city of San Francisco for going on six years.”
The response to what was intended to be the last question for Mr. Shelby to share a little about his compositional technique goes a little deep. “Yeah, I play piano and have a nice one at home. I have drums, a couple of basses and guitars. To answer your question, if I’m creating original music, you know, a lot of what we understand about composition is not so much the melody that we remember. There are certain melodies that are just memorial. We walk away, we never forget it. Like for example Body and Soul is a beautiful melody. Where the work goes in for a big band composer is the orchestration and arranging. And for that, you don’t need a piano. You just have to understand harmony, obviously. You have to understand rhythm, all of those compositional tools. You have a piano as a tool. You’ll want to work out harmonic and melodic passages. But after awhile, after so many years, it’s like being a chef. There are certain things you’ve done over and over again that you’re able to cull from and because you’ve done it so many times, you know how it’s going to sound. When I started writing for a big band, I didn’t know anything at all about it. But I was so in love with Duke Ellington’s music. It hit me hard. I spent the first six years of my career just playing Coltrane, Miles Davis and Monk. To me, at first, Ellington was old hat, not as immediate, at my own juvenile level, at that point. The irony is, if you ask any old veteran of the music who to listen to, they say Duke Ellington. When I first played Duke, it was like, ‘Where is it at? I don’t get it. When I put Coltrane on, I heard that right away.
But after a while, like anything else in life, you can swim on top of the ocean, but when you swim deeper, you understand that’s where the richness of the life force is. Not the stuff that floats on top of the ocean. Now, I’m not sayin’ that Coltrane and them are junk. The deeper you go in the water is where you find Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. And if you swim deep enough, Buddy Bolden.
So, at some point I hit a wall like we all do and had to go to Ellington. It was like I opened up this door and found this unlimited amount of information that I felt I needed to get. And then it put all the John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk stuff in perspective. It made it even richer for me. Ellington’s stuff was the life force. Bessie Smith was the ultimate life force. Everything really came out of her. So I just kind of fell in love with Ellington and wanted to write exactly like him. So how could I do that? I didn’t even have a big band.
I started learning and playing Ellington’s music, part by part. I started collecting scores. I got over two-hundred, close to three-hundred scores that I’ve collected over the years and I’ve studied them. I started collecting classical scores so that I could study instrumentation and learn how the great Classical composers used it. Then I got into Billy Strayhorn. I discovered that despite their symbiotic connection, musically Ellington and Strayhorn were very distinct. Now, I can listen to an arrangement by either of them and know right off whose arrangement it is.”
At this juncture I ask Marcus Shelby who had the most affinity for the Blues? Ellington or Strayhorn?
“I would say neither one of them did. I think both of them grew up in what was called the East Coast Blues. It wasn’t as authentic as the Mississippi Delta Blues or the King Oliver, Buddy Bolden Blues of New Orleans. The East Coast Blues was sophisticated, academic Blues. Ellington was from Washington, D.C. Strayhorn was from Pittsburgh. They did not come out of the fountain of Blues that informed Louis Armstrong. But they were practitioners of the Blues and could compose beautiful Blues melodies that could go over Blues changes. Between the two of them, Ellington would be the one that had the most Blues sensibilities. Strayhorn was more of an impressionist. You could hear it in his playing and writing. He was really refined. Where Ellington wasn’t as refined as Strayhorn, Strayhorn had developed an amazing ability to write in a really light way. None of his arrangements are heavy or overwritten. It’s well-balanced, with a certain ease and comfort to it when you look at it and listen to it.
Of course, there would be no Strayhorn as we know him without Ellington. If you listen to how Ellington’s music evolved over the years, it becomes evident that he is just a pure genius. While he didn’t have the technical skills that Strayhorn had, the way he was always able to land in the right spots was genius. I’ve studied Duke Ellington for twenty-five years. I can’t tell you a lot about a lot of things, but I can tell you a lot about Duke Ellington.
One thing to know about Ellington is that he grew up in two different churches. His dad went to one church and his mom went to another one. So he got two different musical experiences through the church. On the other hand, Billy Strayhorn did not grow up in the church. That’s a very important distinction. The foundation of the two different composers are informed from two different histories. Ellington was all about call and response. Billy Strayhorn was listening to Debussy, Liddell, Tchaikovsky and Chopin. That’s why his writing had that impressionistic element to it.”
There you have it. Marcus Shelby is San Francisco’s cosmopolitan man. Bandleader, Historian, Researcher, Collaborator, Artistic director and Arts Commissioner. Quoted in a Bay Area newspaper on why he chooses to live in Francisco as opposed to say, New York he said, “In New York, I’m not sure I could’ve built the vision. This is my city. This is where I am. My kids go to school here. I work in the schools. I believe in them.”
Somewhere on the planet there are probably students who will eventually discover Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn as well as Marcus Shelby and perhaps study them all intently with that burning passion that Shelby referred to. We can only imagine what kind of contributions to the music these students will make. That music will come to be in time, or, as Ellington himself wrote A Hundred Dreams From Now.
For more information on Marcus Shelby, visit his website www.marcusshelby.com
Thurman Watts has written features for Cadence Magazine, Glide Magazine, Blues Blast Magazine and many others. He is a radio producer at KPFZ 88.1 fm in Lakeport, CA as well as road manager for the legendary Sugar Pie DeSanto.