When I reached Marcus Shelby on the phone at his home in San Francisco he was immersed in the music of Duke Ellington. Literally.
“I’m surrounded by big band charts,” he said, while taking a short break from methodically organizing sheet music sent to him by pianist Jason Moran in preparation for their four-night run in the SFJAZZ Center’s Miner Auditorium Feb. 6-9.
“These Ellington charts that Jason got his hands on, some are well known and some are rarely played,” Shelby said. “Some we play traditionally, and some are more experimental. In all of them Jason has found interesting episodes where we go off into different vamps or tangents or extensions.”
One of jazz’s most influential and restlessly creative figures, the Houston-raised, Harlem-based Moran has been a bracing presence at the SFJAZZ Center since it opened. He’s accompanied skateboarders navigating a half-pipe constructed on stage and reinterpreted the joyous music of Fats Waller while adorned with a giant papier-maché head of the ebullient pianist and composer.
For Moran’s first collaboration with Shelby, who presented the pianist in a solo recital last week at Healdsburg Jazz’s inaugural Winter Festival, he’s taken a full-spectrum approach to the Maestro’s canon. He’s an artist given to large-scale, historically informed productions, but in this case the only guiding principle was to avoid a usual-suspects set list.
“Ellington’s body of work is a vast ocean,” said Moran, whose various hats include director of jazz programming at the Kennedy Center. “Too often people will reduce his catalog to seven songs. What?! I’m just choosing the shore that I like, approaching these songs with my love of Ellington. He so deeply informed me as a pianist, partly because of his impact on Thelonious Monk.”
In addition to his responsibilities as artistic director of Healdsburg Jazz, Shelby works regularly as a sideman and leads several ensembles, like the 14-piece orchestra he’s bringing to the SFJAZZ Center. But not all of his creative endeavors get seen in the Bay Area.
He was just on the East Coast renewing his collaboration and providing musical input for the singular actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, who commissioned him to create the score for her 2015 Off Broadway production “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education.” She’s developing a new theatrical work focusing on the struggles of young women on reservations and in inner cities.
While this is his first time sharing the stage with Moran, they independently came to the same conclusion that the time was ripe to introduce the Bay Area to a brilliant young vocalist who recently finished graduate work at the prestigious Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA.
When Shelby mentioned the name Darynn Dean to Moran he was already well acquainted with the singer, who hails from an illustrious jazz family as the granddaughter of Les McCann drummer Donald Dean Sr., the daughter of drummer Donald Dean, and cousin of pianist Jamael Dean. In fact, she’d been one of his students at New England Conservatory.
“We grew very close and I watched as she developed her sense of composition and arranging,” said Moran, whose arrangements for Dean include the standards “Come Sunday” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” and the lesser known “My Heart Sings” and “I Like the Sunrise,” the opening piece from Ellington’s 1947 “Liberian Suite.”
“She moved onto the Hancock Institute, and I’m at a point now that I’m checking in on former students, seeing what opportunities some of them need,” Moran said. “This is my first time working with her on stage, and I’m excited. She doesn’t take any syllable or word for granted.”
She’s not the only rising talent featured on the program. Shelby’s orchestra features many of the top players in the region, like alto saxophonist Tony Peebles, reed expert Patrick Wolff, trumpeter Mike Olmos, trombonist Joel Behrman, and Melecio Magdaluyo on baritone sax and clarinet. But he’s always got his eye out for young standouts, like Riley Baker on trombone and tuba.
The son of Clint Baker, a multi-instrumental specialist in early jazz styles, and former KCSM-FM “Desert Island Jazz” host Alisa Clancy, the 24-year-old was weaned on jazz growing up in San Bruno.
“I remember the day he was born, talking to Alisa not long afterwards,” Shelby said. “He’s been working with us for the last year, and he’s a complete musician. He’s another one definitely carrying on the family trade.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
JASON MORAN
Presents music of Duke Ellington, with Marcus Shelby Orchestra
When & where: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 6-8, 1 p.m. Feb. 9
Where: SFJAZZ Center’s Miner Auditorium, San Francisco; $30-$115; www.sfjazz.org
