San Francisco bandleader, composer, bassist and educator Marcus Shelby never gets tired of performing Duke Ellington’s jazzy 1960 “The Nutcracker Suite” based on Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet score.
“I know the piece really well and just love what has been done. It’s like 40 minutes long so it’s something you can digest and easily relate to,” says Shelby, who has been playing it for more than 15 years.
He adds, “Every section has a different feel—it takes you in a whole different sort of mood, and it’s sort of the full extension of Duke Ellington’s writing that you get to experience.”
Shelby and his New Orchestra are performing it, with narration by poet Enid Pickett and video installations by Andi Wong, in SFJazz’s Miner Auditorium on Dec. 21. The program also includes Tiffany Austin singing original arrangements of holiday music and Black spirituals.
Ellington arranged “The Nutcracker Suite” with his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn, an admirer of Tchaikovsky, and recorded it on Columbia Records. But its popularity has waned, something Shelby wants to remedy.
Still, Shelby recognizes the challenges of performing it live: “It’s just been buried, and for it to be remembered you need somebody playing it, somebody teaching it, and somebody sharing it. It’s a very interesting piece with complicated passages, and you have to have a good clarinet player. The challenge is to find personnel in your own band who fulfill the roles in Ellington’s band.”
The “Nutcracker Suite” recording marked the first time that Strayhorn, who joined Ellington’s band in 1939, was granted equal billing on an album. Though Ellington hired Strayhorn as an auxiliary pianist, his responsibilities grew to include arranging, not only because he was talented, but because Ellington had his hands full touring.
“When Ellington was touring, he was doing maybe three shows a night, six nights a week, with three traveling vocalists with him — most bands only had one — so someone had to write the arrangements,” says Shelby. Strayhorn could help Ellington extend the material that was needed for him to keep things going,” Shelby says, adding, “Then they quickly found out that this dude can do more than just arrange; he was an excellent composer himself.”
By 1940, the band was playing amazing and very expressive pieces that didn’t sound like Ellington; they were Strayhorn’s. Though Strayhorn didn’t get the credit he was due for many of their collaborations, Shelby feels both are responsible for “Nutcracker Suite.”
“From just my knowledge of their writing and the history of studying their scores, I think their roles are equal,” he says. “There might have been things Ellington started and Strayhorn finished; they did that many times, like in the ‘Harlem Suite’ he wrote in 1949, which Ellington wrote 99 percent of, but Strayhorn put the very powerful ending on that piece.”
The nine movements in “Nutcracker Suite” are arrangements of famous passages in the Tchaikovsky opus: the Act 1 “March” is “Peanut Brittle Brigade”; “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is “Sugar Rum Cherry” and the “Arabian Dance” is “Arabesque Cookie.”
“Ellington was writing to a specific audience, the audience he had been developing that knew and appreciated his form,” Shelby says. “He wrote what you would call miniatures—these little suites that when you saw them together give you a full expression about a person, place, thing or something that happens.”
Continuing “Nutcracker’s” around-the-world theme, the SFJazz concert’s second half offers pieces from Japan, West Africa and America’s Deep South, with vocals by Austin.
Shelby says, “We’ve taken songs from other cultures and countries and Ellington-ized them in the coat of blues and swing,” Shelby explains. “We can’t do the whole world, of course, but we’ve taken some music, melodies and lyrics, and I’ve done some arrangements for them.”
When Ellington created “Nutcracker Suite,” Shelby says he found a way to give Tchaikovsky’s themes the same harmonic and rhythmic flavor and tension and release that he would give his own —without overthinking it.
“I don’t think Ellington was trying to be highbrow by taking on the music of a classical composer,” he says. “He just found a way to make Tchaikovsky swing, and it’s as simple as that.”
SFJazz presents The Marcus Shelby New Orchestra with Tiffany Austin at 8 p.m. Dec. 21 in Miner Auditorium, 201 Franklin St. San Francisco. Tickets are $54.50-$124.50 at (866) 920-5299 or sfjazz.org
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