Shanta

RZ: So you’ve been involved in music since you were five years old—can you tell me about that?

SN: OK. My great aunt, Nanny Strayhorn Reed, was a classical pianist. She was born and raised in Meridian, Mississippi, as was my grandmother, her sister. She moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, in the early to mid twenties. On my mother’s side and my father’s side and my grandmother’s side and my grandfather’s side, they moved to Chicago. My aunt was pursuing this career but she took on piano students and my brother and I studied with her. So I did that from age five to fifteen. At the same time I was doing tap dancing with Tommy Sutton at Mayfair Academy. He was a childhood friend of my father and he learned how to tap by going and standing outside the stage door in the alley at the Regal on 47th and King Drive when Bojangles was in town (Bill Robinson). And Bojangles would come out and teach the kids steps. That’s how his dance career got started. He and Daddy were friends and when he opened his first studio it was in the same neighborhood where we were living.

RZ: And where was that?

SN: Chatham. So we were on 85th and Vernon, his studio was on 79th and King Drive (South Parkway at the time). So I was in one of the first classes that he taught. I kept that up from five to fifteen, and at fifteen I was done with both of those things. - Conversations About Art Transforming Politics & Community in Chicago & Beyond

Shanta has been a lecturer and teacher at various institutions around Chicago, while playing in music groups as sitarist and bassist as well as playing West African instruments such as the mbira, four-string harp, and reed zither. Her storytelling career took flight in the late seventies and she wrote regularly in publications like Ebony Jr. and Black Books Bulletin on gender, race and music. [Note: These and other details of her life and work are documented in D. Antoinette Handy’s Black Women in American Bands and Orchestras.] In addition to playing sitar in groups like Insight, Shanta co-founded Sojourner and Samana, two pathbreaking all-women bands in the 1980s and 1990s. - South Asia Digital Archive

Light Worker

A captivating African-American storyteller, musician and writer, Shanta Nurullah utilizes original stories, traditional folktales and musical instruments from around the world.

Shanta's stories are about empowerment, peace, healing and self-discovery... and the many different ways in which people attain them. She has appeared on numerous radio and television shows, as well as in print in Ebony, Jr., Hot Wire, Cadence and Black Books Bulletin.

Shanta is also a talented multi-instrumentalist and long-time member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Joining with other members from this institution of innovative Chicago jazz, Shanta co-founded Sojourner and Samana, two all-woman groups in which she played percussion, bass and sitar.
- WTTW11-artsonline