July 2019 – BLU NOTES

Marcus Shelby at San Francisco Giants Spring training. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Twenty years ago, when bassist Marcus Shelby formed a 15-piece jazz orchestra, he began to think big and thematically.

“I have been on a mission for the past 20 years to compose and create music about African-American history,” he says. These pieces have included an oratorio on Harriet Tubman and a suite about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.

Shelby, in a different sort of uniform, playing bass. Photo courtesy of the artist.

On “Transitions,” released on his own MSO Records, Shelby’s lush arrangements of classic tunes by Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, and Cole Porter frame the album’s centerpiece: “Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues,” his smart, slick and soulful four-part suite inspired by the history of Negro League Baseball. Here, Shelby merges his mission with his two driving passions—jazz and baseball.

While working on my next column for Jazziz magazine, I spoke with Shelby about these passions. Continue reading “Now Batting, Marcus Shelby…”

The 2019 class of Doris Duke Artists includes drummer-composer Terri Lyne Carrington (left) and trombonist-composer George Lewis.

In announcing the names of the 2019 Doris Duke Artists, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has singled out two musicians who have helped changed the current landscape for jazz, as well as jazz’s place within a larger cultural context: trombonist-composer George Lewis and drummer-composer-producer Terri Lyne Carrington.

Through his own music and that of the many composers he has mentored, Lewis has helped foster a sense of composition that defies customary borders between jazz, classical and folk music, and between composition and improvisation. Carrington, the first female musician to win a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, has, through a career that began when she was 10 years old, consistently broken barriers. Both musicians are also forceful educators—Lewis as Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, and Carrington as founder and Artistic Director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Continue reading “George Lewis and Terri Lyne Carrington Named Among 2019 Doris Duke Artists”