Sharel Cassity

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Sharel Cassity is an American saxophonist, composer, and educator based in Chicago, who lived in New York City from 2000 to 2016. She has won the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer award and is in the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. Cassity has performed in 27 countries and serves as a professor and director of jazz performance at the University of Virginia.

She earned a master’s degree in music from Juilliard in 2007 on a full scholarship and a bachelor’s degree from The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music (2002–2005), after transferring from the University of Central Oklahoma (1996–1999).

Cassity has played with many renowned groups and leaders. She joined the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band in 2008, performing with artists such as Roy Hargrove and Jimmy Heath. She also worked with Jimmy Heath in the Jimmy Heath Big Band and Queens Jazz Orchestra from 2012 to 2020, with Nicholas Payton’s Big Band (2011–2012), and with the Roy Hargrove Big Band (2008). She was the lead alto with the DIVA Jazz Orchestra from 2007 to 2013 and performed as a soloist with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra in 2020. Her international appearances include Jazz at Lincoln Center events in Doha (2015) and Shanghai (2016), and a 2016 performance with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. In 2017 she performed with Herbie Hancock at the Kennedy Center to celebrate Jimmy Heath’s 90th birthday.

In 2016 she started her own record label, Relsha Works, and in 2018 launched Jazz Up!, an educational outreach program. Cassity has taught at DePaul University, Columbia College Chicago, and Elgin Community College. She has led the electric band Elektra at the DC Jazz Festival in 2016 and the Fearless quartet at the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2019. She also performed with Natalie Merchant from 2014 to 2015, appearing on the Today Show in 2015 and contributing to the Paradise is Here album and DVD.

Her 2008 album Relentless, released on Jazz Legacy Productions, earned 4 stars from DownBeat and reached #21 on JazzWeek. It features Jeremy Pelt, Dwayne Burno, Michael Dease, Orrin Evans, and E.J. Strickland. In 2018 SF Jazz named her one of “10 Rising Women Instrumentalists You Should Know,” and the Chicago Tribune highlighted her work in 2020.