After more than two decades of booking and directing the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, Jessica Felix has announced her retirement effective at the end of September.

Felix first formed the festival in 1999, focusing her extensive experience in booking jazz bands throughout Northern California on the small North Sonoma County town.

In addition to bringing the world’s foremost jazz musicians to the region for the annual summertime Healdsburg Jazz Festival, Felix also sponsored numerous music education programs in Healdsburg schools and presented masterful concerts throughout the year.

Now, Felix is ready to pass the reigns of the festival on to a new generation of jazz fans, and plans to spend her retirement traveling and returning to her work in jewelry-making.

“I love this music deeply and feel very proud of the vast and diverse array of incredible artists I have presented over the years, bringing many to the West Coast for the first time,” Felix says. “It’s time to be in the audience. It’s time to just enjoy my life.”

As the head of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, Felix connected the town through music in times both good and bad, facing financial challenges and natural disasters with perseverance and a collaborative spirit that involved the whole town; from the vineyards to the restaurants, hotels, bars, schools and citizens, many of whom became festival volunteers or provided financial support, and some of whom offered up their guest homes to musicians.

With that support network in place, Felix feels confident that the festival will continue without her running the show.

“I have a strong board and staff, and with my artistic director successor—who we’ll be announcing soon—the festival will flourish,” she says.

Drummer Billy Hart, who holds the record for Healdsburg Jazz Festival appearances at 14, says that the festival’s success is due to Felix’s ability to make him and other touring musicians feel like family.

“Healdsburg festivals were around the time of my daughter’s birthday, so Jessica made sure the whole family came up. And she would come by to help us celebrate. You have to understand that being a touring musician puts a strain on families,” Hart says in a statement. “So being able to have your family with you is a special thing. And it wasn’t just me she did that for. Plus, she would find these beautiful homes for us to stay in, peoples’ second homes, where we could have privacy. And had restaurants that gave us great food.”

In addition to hospitality, Felix is an innovative music booker with a deep knowledge of the art form.

“Jessica sort of loves the music like a musician loves it,” Hart says in his statement. “She has some kind of way of communicating with us that shows she understands the creative aspects of what we’re doing. That makes her important to musicians, especially improvising musicians. It makes her very important to me.”

Felix has also earned a reputation as a fierce advocate for the music and the festival.

“Jessica is a warrior,” jazz flutist James Newton says in a statement. “She fights for the music, and ‘no’ is rarely in her vocabulary. You need people like that.”

That advocacy continued up until this summer, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 Healdsburg Jazz Festival. Instead of sitting the summer out, Felix led a team to create an entire online program of music and educational offerings including Zoom classes on important jazz figures, listening parties and more. For more information on these programs, visit the festival’s website.

Former festival board member Gloria Hersch sums up Felix’s lasting impact on the North Bay by saying, “Jessica brought the musicians to Healdsburg, but she also brought Healdsburg to the musicians.”

Wine Country views and world-class music come together each August in the Napa Valley for the Music in the Vineyards chamber music festival.

For 25 years, the nonprofit organization, which hosts fundraising events throughout the year for its musical outreach programs, showcases dozens of artists performing at several winery venues throughout the region.

This August, the 26th annual Music in the Vineyards is forced to move out of the fields and onto the internet, with a virtual iteration of the popular fest, Music in the Vineyards @ Home, streaming via YouTube for free beginning Aug. 5.

The online festival boasts a strong lineup of performers and winery venues partnering together to continue the event’s tradition of pairing wine and music in an intimate setting.

Music in the Vineyards @ Home presents each of the festival’s dozen concerts streaming online at the dates and times of its original concert schedule, running on select dates Aug. 5 through Aug. 23. All streaming concerts will remain online until Aug. 31, and all will be available to watch for free; donations will be accepted in lieu of tickets to help provide funding for the participating musicians and to help plan for a live festival in 2021.

Each concert will feature a unique winery venue, which will each offer discounts for festival patrons to wine order online to enjoy with each performance streamed.

Artistic Directors Michael and Daria T. Adams will introduce each evening’s performance, and the streaming concerts will also include interviews with the musicians, winemaker conversations and other surprise extras.

On Wednesday, Aug. 5, Music in the Vineyards @ Home Festival opens with selections by and inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach, the German composer and master of the Baroque era whom festival organizers write is “the go-to composer for musicians who are sequestered alone.” Broadcast at 7:30pm and hosted by Napa Valley’s picturesque Domaine Carneros winery, the concert begins with a performance of Bach’s “Suite No. 3 in C Major” by cellist Tanya Tomkins. Then, pianist and composer Michael Brown and cellist Nicholas Canellakis perform Brown’s original composition, “Prelude and Dance.” Finally, Music in the Vineyards favorites the Pacifica Quartet perform Felix Mendelssohn’s “String Quartet Op. 44, No.1.”

On Friday, Aug. 7, Leap Frog Winery hosts a streaming concert that musically travels to France to examine classical works by composers such as Chevalier de St-Georges—classical music’s first known composer of African descent—as well as French superstar composers César Franck, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

On Saturday, Aug. 8, Music in the Vineyards @ Home presents an evening of music, this time presented with host winery Charles Krug, which focuses on a theme of “Virtuosity.” Masterful performers such as the San Francisco–based Thalea String Quartet musically present that notion of expertise, with selections including “Dimensions for String Quartet” by contemporary European composer Garth Knox and the famously difficult Paganini Caprice No. 5 for violin played on the viola by Canadian musician Pierre Lapointe.

Sunday, Aug. 9, features a concert presented in partnership with Chimney Rock Winery that is dedicated to the memory of those who have recently died, with plaintive music from Bach and two Laments from the British Isles.

Many other international artists and acclaimed wineries join the Music in the Vineyards @ Home Festival during the remainder of the online schedule, and a full list of shows and performers can be found online, as well as winery-discount deals from participating venue hosts. Tune in to the free virtual festival on the MITV website and on YouTube.

Sonoma County septet the King Street Giants are the North Bay’s liveliest disseminators of traditional, New Orleans–style jazz.

Inspired by the boisterous and raucous music that can be found in the halls, clubs and streets of the French Quarter, the band originated their sound in street-busking sessions throughout the Bay Area, and in recent years they’ve shared the stage with iconic artists including Bonnie Raitt, Galactic, Rebirth Brass Band, Charlie Musselwhite, New Orleans Suspects and many more at major festivals throughout the West Coast.

On August 3, the King Street Giants will release their third full-length LP, Everything Must Go. The 11-track record is the band’s first release to feature vocals and it is the first release under the group’s current name, as the band previously played under the name Dixie Giants until changing the name two years ago.

“We were gearing up to do our first trip to New Orleans (in 2018), and as we were talking to friends and colleagues who had moved or toured down there, we started getting a lot of questions about the name Dixie Giants,” says band co-founder and sousaphone player Nick Pulley.

As the group did research into the name, they found that the word Dixie still has a strong connotation with the Confederacy in the South.

“We all grew up on the West Coast, and the term Dixieland Jazz doesn’t bat an eye,” Pulley says. “But, we learned that Dixieland Jazz was a term that white record labels used in the 1920s and ’30s to tell the public this is white musicians playing this music.”

Dropping the potentially offensive term from their moniker, the group quickly decided to rebrand the band with a name inspired by their at-the-time practice space on King Street in Santa Rosa.

“And, of course we changed the name, and then we moved,” Pulley laughs. “Recently, seeing the Dixie Chicks change their name and seeing (New Orleans–based) Dixie Beer change their name, it’s good to get that reinforcement from people who have an international platform who are making those same changes and learning those same histories.”

For the record, the King Street Giants were warmly welcomed in New Orleans in 2018, and the band—made up of Pulley on sousaphone, Casey Jones on clarinet and tenor sax, Jesse Shantor on alto sax, Jason Thor on trombone, Daniel Charles on banjo and both Libby Cuffie and Dylan Garrison on drums—have made a new name for themselves over the past two years, treating the North Bay to raucous live shows up until the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the scene.

At the time of the shutdown, the King Street Giants had just recorded Everything Must Go at Prairie Sun Studios. The album features all original tunes, several with vocals, that range from freewheeling shuffles to sonorous ballads and even an old fashioned dirge. Pulley says the album title reflects the group’s attitude about getting rid of bad habits and working on bettering oneself. He also says there is a political angle, and that despite the group’s ebullient musical output, he and other members of the band are currently writing more somber music to reflect the ongoing pandemic and protest movements.

Originally, the group was going to release the album in mid-July, and they were hoping to perform live to celebrate the occasion. Even as the pandemic keeps people isolated, the group went ahead with the album release, set for August 3.

“We’re very proud of it and there’s no point in sitting on it and keeping it a secret and waiting for a release show to happen,” Pulley says. “The response that we’ve been getting from close friends who’ve heard it has been positive, so why wait? People have time to listen to it, and I think people need something new to listen to.”

The King Street Giants will be featured in the Online Petaluma Music Festival on Saturday, Aug. 1, at petalumamusicfestival.org; and in the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts’ online video series ‘Luther Locals’ on Friday, Aug. 7, at lutherburbankcenter.org. ‘Everything Must Go’ is available Monday, Aug. 3, at thekingstreetgiants.com.