For the festival’s co-founder Bill Welch, putting together the line-up each year is part alchemy and part music science. He’s always loved booking acts at the festival who have some kind of history together, whether the audience is aware of it or not. “We try to book a headliner, and then complement it with some stuff that works well, and then some things that are going to make it really interesting. That’s kind of a wacky theme I’ve had over the years,” he says.
Articles
The Santa Cruz Blues Festival’s Top 20 Moments
I’ll never forget what it felt like to be backstage just before Ray Charles took the stage at the Santa Cruz Blues Festival in 2003. There was a crackling electricity in the air as the man himself stood waiting to be called up to play just a few feet from me. He was bobbing to the music and smiling his famous broad smile, but even so he couldn’t hide his intensity. His chin was slightly raised and his head cocked a little to one side—he was listening. Surveying. No matter how many thousands of times he had done this, no matter that he had to lean hard on his other senses to compensate for his lack of sight, he was not going to let a single detail about what was going on around him escape his attention. Whatever he was measuring—the mood of the crowd, the tightness of the band, the distance up the stairs—he seemed to lock it in just as his name was called, taking the stage to thunderous applause with the confidence of a musical legend.
Guitar Orchestra Redefines String Section
The post rock & roll generation needs little convincing that the guitar is an instrument worth its weight in gold. It contains worlds unto itself, but the buzzsaws and the walls-of-sound, the trippy feedback loops and shoegazey swirls which no longer ring false to the modern ear can seem worlds away from the staid conservatism many associate with the world of classical music.
‘Otter 501’ Tracks Pup From Stranding to Release
A young woman finds a stranded baby sea otter on a beach south of Big Sur after a storm. Peering down at the damp, shivering fur ball, she grabs her cell phone and makes a call, setting in motion a story about the otter’s struggle for survival and humans’ efforts to protect an iconic species.
Santa Cruz Bird Whisperer Tells All
The Westside is foggy and cold when Jon Young and I meet on Delaware Avenue, at the back entrance to Natural Bridges State Beach, for a morning lesson in bird language. With him is Josh Lane, a mentor at Young’s Bonny Doon–based 8 Shields Institute, a nonprofit promoting connection with nature.
Wavy Gravy’s Seva Fundraiser to Rock the Rio
When the Seva Foundation teamed up with Wavy Gravy in 1978, organizers found themselves with a steady supply of funding and musicians. Gravy is knee-deep in famous names and has the personality of an entire circus, hauling everybody he knows into his philanthro-activism. A few phone calls from Gravy and Seva’s latest benefit concert comes together, and it turns out that when the hippie clown blows the horn, water turns into wine and the Avengers assemble: this Sunday’s show at the Rio features Steve Earle, John Trudell, Dave Alvin, Peter Rowan, Nina Gerber and other roots rock luminaries in a benefit for Native American health care.
New Chef, New Name, New Flair for Bonny Doon Vineyard Cafe
With the transfiguration of the Cellar Door bistro into Le Cigare Volant, proprietor/winemaker Randall Grahm plays to his strengths, as well as to his sense of play. Named for Bonny Doon Vineyards’ flagship wine, the restaurant simultaneously debuts chef Ryan Shelton, who brings to the cafe’s exhibition kitchen deep experience in the alchemical ways of tres contemporary French cuisine—molecular cookery replete with scented and spiced foams.
Music in May Turns 5
For its fifth season, this weekend, Music in May festival founder Rebecca Jackson will celebrate her muse. David Arben, the musician whose life experience affirmed and empowered Jackson’s dedication to her art, extended his influence to the festival from the days when Jackson was an undergraduate at the Juilliard School in New York and his pupil in Philadelphia. Arben, the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust, played with the Philadelphia Orchestra for 34 seasons, many of them as associate concertmaster.
Jewel Theatre’s ‘Blithe Spirit’ Skewers Snobs
A specter haunts the Condomine household, but the incorporeal emanation of Charles Condomine’s first wife is the spirit with which Blithe Spirit, which plays at Center Stage through May 20, concerns itself the least. Instead we are invited to laugh at the vanity, arrogance, pretense and pomp of the English middle class.
Fellow Activist’s Film Pays Tribute to Judi Bari
You have a motion-triggered bomb loaded with nails. It’s armed. You, as an anti-clearcutting “Green Mafia” terrorist, are presumably going to deliver this weapon to the Redwood Empire some 200 miles north of the Bay Area. Question: would you first put this bomb under your car seat and take it for a nice twisty drive, 75 miles in the wrong direction, down Highway 17 from Oakland to Santa Cruz?
If you can answer “yes” to this, the FBI needs you.
