Discussion 2: Marcus Shelby Presents Beyond the Blues: Ending the Prison Industrial Complex with guest speaker Naima Shalhoub

Naima Shalhoub is a soul-stirring songstress, musician, actress and educator. With a passion to sing freedom songs and uplift the spirit, her multicultural upbringing, background in community organizing, MA in postcolonial anthropology, and music study has paved the way to build a creative life revolving around creating music that speaks to the contradictions in life–the joys, sorrows and spaces between. She has performed in Bay Area venues such as Yoshi’s, The Great American Music Hall, Union Square, The New Parish, received invitations to sing internationally in cities such as Beirut, Cairo, Kashmir and recently presented a TedX talk in Lebanon on freedom and the voice. In May 2014 Naima began facilitating weekly music sessions with a group of incarcerated women in San Francisco county jail and continues to build this into a larger project involving her upcoming debut album borderlands set for release in Summer 2015. Shalhoub is currently performing, teaching, writing, and moved by unsung heroes around the world.

Marcus Anthony Shelby is an accomplished teacher, composer, arranger, and bassist who currently lives in San Francisco, California. Over the past 24 years, he has built a diverse biography. From 1990-1996, Shelby was bandleader of Columbia Records and GRP Impulse! Recording Artists Black/Note and is currently the Artistic Director and leader of The Marcus Shelby Orchestra.

Shelby was awarded a 2009 Black Metropolis Research Consortium Fellowship in Chicago for summer 2009 to conduct research for his commission to compose “Soul of the Movement”—a 12 part musical suite on MLK and the Civil Rights Movement. Shelby was also a 2006 Fellow in the Resident Dialogues Program of the Committee for Black Performing Arts at Stanford University to conduct research for his commission to compose “Harriet Tubman.”

Shelby has also worked extensively in Bay Area Theater and dance composing scores for Margo Hall’s “Bebop Baby” and “Sonny’s Blues”, and Joanna Haigood’s dance theater work “Dying While Black and Brown”, and many other productions. Currently Shelby is an artist in residence with the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, who support the community-based projects developed by Shelby and where his orchestra performs annually.

Shelby also has arranged for and conducted the Count Basie Orchestra featuring Ledisi, performed and recorded with Tom Waits, and received the City Flight Magazine 2005 award as one of the “Top Ten Most Influential African Americans in the Bay Area”. Shelby is currently working with playwright and actress Anna Deveare Smith on her new work “Pipeline to Prison”. As the 1991 winner of the Charles Mingus Scholarship, Shelby’s studies include work under the tutelage of composer James Newton and legendary bassist Charlie Haden.

Shelby is also very active in music education and currently teaches at The Community Music Center and the Stanford Jazz Workshop. Shelby also has led many of the San Francisco Jazz Festival Family Matinee Concerts and is the music director of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival Freedom Jazz Choir. In March 2013, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee appointed Shelby to the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Learn more about Marcus here: www.marcusshelby.com

You can also catch “Beyond the Blues: A Prison Oratorio,” commissioned by the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, premiering at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival on September 27, 2015.