“I play rock with a jazz attitude,” Shelley Doty said in an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle. “I'm not interested in playing the same song the same way for 18 years. When I write a song, I think of it as its own universe. I give my musicians a recording of the melody, then tell them to come up with their own interpretation.” Those musicians, the members of her X-tet, keep changing. “X is a variable,” she told the East Bay Express. “That’s the one thing I learned in high school algebra that stuck with me.” Shelley keeps playing with new musicians to keep the music fresh. Tonight, she’ll have Julie Wolf on keys and accordion, Mike Sugar on electric and acoustic bass, Dale Fanning on drums and percussion, and don’t be surprised if there are a few special guests. Whoever joins her on stage, Shelley will deliver the goods on electric and acoustic guitar, with “energy, funk, and surprise,” in the words of Guitar Player Magazine, which also praised her “smoky, soulful voice.”

Growing up in Berkeley, Shelley listened mostly to jazz, Coltrane and Miles, and didn’t imagine herself as a musician until her brothers turned her on to rock and roll. Nancy Wilson of Heart was her inspiration, at age 14, for picking up a guitar. She co-founded the popular West Coast band Jambay, touring relentlessly and releasing three independent albums before disbanding in 1996. In 1999, she won the Lilith Fair Acoustic Talent Search and closed the show playing guitar with Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan, and Chrissie Hynde in front of 22,000 cheering fans. Since then she’s immersed herself in a wide array of projects, including co-writing and doing music for Strange Frame: Love and Sax, an animated science fiction film that premiered in London last May. X marks the spot tonight at the Freight, the spot at the crossroads of jazz, rock, folk, and blues, where fans of catchy originals performed with passion and commitment will want to see the Shelley Doty X-tet do their thing.

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Shelley Doty photo by Julie Zielinski