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.
Marcus Shelby performs with the Teen Jazz Orchestra in the courtyard of the San Francisco Community Music Center.
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]
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.
^Johnston, Richard. "Hearing the big picture: Marcus Shelby & the art of storytelling on bass." Bass Player. October 2008: 36+.
^Gilbert, Andrew (August 10, 2020). "Two Greats' Posthumous Album Bridges Generations of Bay Area Jazz". KQED. Archived from the original on April 19, 2021. Retrieved September 25, 2020. 'One of the reasons I had moved up to San Francisco was because I had seen groups like Broun Fellinis,' says Shelby…. 'Black/Note had just broken up and I needed to go somewhere I could grow. David Boyce was playing a totally different style than what I was doing, but I liked the music and the energy and fell in love with that band.'
