Photo Credit David Vann

The 29^th annual Harmony Music festival in Santa Rosa, CA is a quintessential California festival. Located at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, it had a vibe similar to the High Sierra Music Festival, although smaller in scope. The weekend was billed as promoting global cooling; there were many exhibitors teaching green and sustainable living in the Eco-Village, where one could take workshops on converting diesel car to biodiesel, or learn about permaculture and renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power.

Photo credit Michael Didyoung

The lush green prairies and rolling hills of eastern Kansas have always seemed like an oasis in the middle of a desolate flat sea of grain and corn. Nestled along the shores of Lake Clinton, Wakarusa not only provided beautiful landscape and gorgeous weather but one of the summer’s most jam-friendly festivals.

Outstanding headline performances by the likes of Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, Widespread Panic and Les Claypool’s Fancy Band were complemented by stand-out sets from up-and-coming acts like Outformation, Railroad Earth and Tea Leaf Green.

 Photo Credit: Zach Ehlert

Spearhead is not a spectator sport. Twirling under an umbrella of dreadlocks, the band’s 6’6” frontman Michael Franti yelled “How you feeling?!” to a crowd that was up and dancing before he ever reached the microphone.

Spearhead offers socially poignant, high-energy, poetry jams to face the ugliest realities of our current times. On this night the group did so by stringing a group of covers together, from Bob Marley to Sublime to popular songs from Sesame Street (with a fine impression of Kermit the Frog and Cookie Monster). Eyes closed, feeling it, Franti often painted his hands over his guitar and played a game of catch with the chorus, offering it to the crowd and echoing it back—feeding off the exchange without basking in revelry.

A healthy musk of cheap aftershave, beef jerky and Jack Daniels wafted through the rafters of The Ridgefield Playhouse on May 24^th. In the crowd, a coterie of tattooed and mustachioed pranksters intermingled with some of their more buttoned-up baby-boomer brethren, to fill the 500-seat capacity concert hall and await the arrival of their man, Dickey Betts and his band, Great Southern. There was hardly a face in the audience under thirty, and likely many of these folks had been around with Dickey in his heyday, watching him go note for note with Duane Allman as they tore through the outer boundaries of rock music with cathartic and driving dueling leads. Though he is now estranged from The Allman Brothers Band, Dickey’s licks have not missed a step, and his six-man Great Southern ensemble is with him the entire way.