Marcus Shelby Celebrates Miles Davis

On May 10, bassist and bandleader Marcus Shelby brings his New Orchestra to SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium for “Miles at 100: Birth of the Cool Revisited” — a project more than two decades in the making.

Marcus Shelby brings Miles Davis's nonet sessions to life on May 10th at SFJAZZ.

Listen to the full conversation with Marcus below.

Marcus Shelby is a composer who gets the work done. He has written oratorios about Harriet Tubman and the Port Chicago Mutiny, scored Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field, and built one of the Bay Area’s most ambitious jazz ensembles. Each project begins the same way: with research, with questions, with what he calls a kind of method acting. “The first step is to learn, to ask questions, to research — to almost method act, if you will, kind of become a character so that I get really close to a subject,” he said. On Sunday, May 10, that same patient approach finally arrives at his Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool tribute at SFJAZZ’s Miner Auditorium.

Shelby’s relationship with jazz was not the kind you acquire in childhood. He came to this music after his college basketball career ended — in his early twenties, in the late 1980s, starting fresh. Miles Davis was right there from the beginning, not yet as a composer to study but as a sound to chase. Like most listeners, he arrived first at Davis’s mid-1960s quintet, drawn to its urgency. Birth of the Cool, recorded in 1949 and 1950, came last. At the time, he said, “I wasn’t musically mature yet to really understand that music, to really get into the orchestrations as they were written by people like John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, and Gil Evans.”

The Charles Mingus Scholarship brought Shelby to CalArts to study with James Newton and Charlie Haden. The turning point in his relationship with Davis’s nonet came later and more quietly. About 25 years ago, he obtained the scores and played the music with a Bay Area ensemble for the first time — and that was when he understood how it was wired. “I knew. I didn’t know when, but I knew,” he said. “One day, I really want to put together a project that not only plays this music in its authentic instrumentation but also writes with this instrumentation in mind.” He has been waiting for the right moment ever since.

In the early years, before the orchestrations fully made sense, what caught him was the melodies. “They were just intoxicating and infectious,” he said. “They were beautiful, they were layered, they were contrapuntal — still in the spirit of blues and swing. But there was a much more detailed and layered melody and harmonic language on top of all of that.” Understanding what Evans had built in those charts required years of listening, which, in Shelby’s telling, is simply part of the work. That patience, applied to subject after subject across a career, is the through-line of everything he does.

The May 10 SFJAZZ program is the result. “Miles at 100: Birth of the Cool Revisited” will include the original tracks from the 1949–1950 sessions, alongside “Monk in the City,” an original piece Shelby wrote for the nonet’s specific instrumentation, and a rearrangement of “Deception” commissioned from Skyler Tang — a trumpet player who grew up in the SFJAZZ All-Star High School Band and is now studying in New York. Shelby told Tang almost nothing about what the arrangement required. “I trust her instincts,” he said. She sent him the parts in two weeks. Tang will be featured on three pieces in the program, including a performance of “Move” that places her in dialogue with the orchestra’s trumpet lead.

Marcus Shelby Orchestra. Photo: Steve Roby

Miner Auditorium is the right room for this music. Shelby’s New Orchestra plays acoustically — no amplification, minimal monitors — and the hall’s design lets dynamics breathe at their natural scale. “When you play in a place like that,” he said, “you really appreciate being able to relax and play all the dynamics, as they’re naturally written in the music.” For a program built on the careful layering of closely voiced instruments, that transparency isn’t incidental. It’s the point.

Holding the Miles Davis chair is Mike Olmos, a Bay Area stalwart who has played with Shelby on and off for 25 years and brings, in Shelby’s words, “beautiful sound, beautiful tone” and the sensibility of a “beautiful improviser” to the role. Tang joins him as featured soloist on three pieces. The full New Orchestra — built from some of the Bay Area’s most experienced players — rounds out an ensemble that has been in rehearsal for weeks, preparing music that, in Shelby’s estimation, almost never gets played.

What the recording can’t give you, the performance will. “It allows for us — where we are and who we are — to speak in the improvisational areas with as much conviction and force and musicality as possible,” Shelby said. He has spent more than two decades being patient enough to understand, note by note and rehearsal by rehearsal, why Birth of the Cool was built the way it was. Whoever’s in Miner Auditorium on May 10 will reap the benefit of all that patience.

Show Details

Artist: Marcus Shelby New Orchestra

Venue: SFJAZZ Miner Auditorium, San Francisco

Date: Sunday, May 10, 2026

Tickets: sfjazz.org

More on the artist: marcusshelby.com

Listen to the full conversation with Marcus Shelby on the Backstage Bay Area podcast — streaming on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube — and if you can, be at Miner Auditorium on May 10.

Read our review of Marcus Shelby’s Nutcracker Suite concert here.