Marcus Shelby

Marcus Shelby is a Bay Area powerhouse, as influential as he is musical. A superb bassist and composer whose mentors include Charlie Haden and James Newton, Marcus has found a particular calling in the jazz world: Commenting on events and themes in Afro-American history through the medium of the big band, not unlike Duke Ellington. “I'm not sure I could just play music for its own sake,” he recently told DownBeat. “I use music as a way to reach higher, to understand myself and my community.” His critically-acclaimed jazz oratorios include his Port Chicago, which portrays the story of segregated African American sailors forced to load munitions in unsafe conditions with fatal and legal consequences, Harriet Tubman, which tells the story of the Underground Railroad pioneer of the same name, and this program’s Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “The music soared, the solos uplifted.” — Mission Local