“Blues in the City' premieres Saturday at the YBGFestival. Marcus Shelby's composition focuses on Black Lives Matter, Covid and the visible increase in poor and unhoused people struggling to survive on San Francisco's streets.
In the midst of a pandemic and movements for racial equality, jazz artist Marcus Shelby found himself compelled to write a new composition.
The composition, which is 90 minutes in length, delves into the summer of 2020 when, said Shelby, “You had marches and protests and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and all of these things happening with police brutality. ... Also, in the middle of it, you had an insurrection, which to me was the most glaring example of racism, with the effects of white supremacy playing out, not in secret, but before all of our eyes.
It wasn’t until he attended a Wynton Marsalis concert his fourth year of college that he realized he wanted to pursue music. “All these other kids knew why they were studying and I didn't know why I was studying," he said."Music gave me a vision … I was like, man, I can do that. That's what I want to do.”
While at CalArts, Shelby joined a group called Black/Note and started playing gigs in LA. The group signed with Columbia Records, and at one point opened for Wynton Marsalis, which Shelby said brought his career “full circle.” Currently, he is artistic director of Healdsburg Jazz and an artist in residence with the Yerba Buena Gardens 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. The Marcus Shelby Orchestra has released five CDs.
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