Marcus Shelby Black Ball Preview

May 16, 2019 | by Monisha Sharma

"When people are asked, ‘What is the authentic American invention,’ they tend to say it’s the Constitution. But I really think it’s baseball and the blues." —Marcus Shelby, SFJAZZ Resident Artistic Director.

Resident Artistic Director Marcus Shelby is a long-range planner, assiduously assembling a vision ever since he moved to San Francisco in 1996. He teaches in schools and prisons, collaborates with theater companies, filmmakers and poets and has composed a triptych of big band suites drawn from African-American history. 

Shelby is a baseball freak, an over-the-top fan of the San Francisco Giants, and he intends to combine his love of the game with his passion for history at SFJAZZ. In an extended composition for big band titled “Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues” Shelby draws connections between the barnstorming teams of the old Negro Leagues and the barnstorming territory bands of the swing era.

“[Segregated baseball] was an economic opportunity for black communities during segregation and they used the same infrastructure that many blues artists used...so there is a symbiotic connection between the two. [Black Ball] highlights this history using music and song to talk about the 70-year history of segregated baseball.”

Showmanship in the form of clowns and comedians was a key and unique aspect of the Negro League. Games would often contain comedic outbursts of “shadow ball,” where an invisible baseball would be whipped around a fictitious diamond. All this showmanship, mediated by the blues, will play out onstage, Shelby promises.