Launched in 1993, San Francisco's Noise Pop Music Festival has since turned itself into one of the West Coast's most popular musical events.  The central focus is indie rock and pop, but it features comedy performances, film screenings, and art panels.  In past years, the event has done quite a good job at encapsulating San Francisco's artistic nature, the arts being one of the city's most distinctive qualities.  Read more »

210 homes were destroyed in the Montecito Tea Fire, the first blaze of the three Los Angeles wildfires that eventually enveloped all of the greater LA area in smoke, fire or a combination of both at their height on November 14th and 15th. 

In response to the drastic property loss incurred (estimated at $280 million, according to the property insurance publication Insurance Journal), a series of benefit concerts are being organized,one of them already having taken place at downtown Santa Barbara club Stateside Restaurant & Lounge. At the end of the series of concerts, reggae, classical, blues and r&b talents will have done their part to help get eastern Santa Barbara and Montecito families back into their homes.  Read more »

Door Dog Music Productions will present the ninth season of the San Francisco World Music Festival, themed The Reeds Give Way to the Wind, a reference to the poem, Small Song, by A. R. Ammons. The festival runs from November 9th through November 23rd in venues throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

As if they don’t have enough on their plate already, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will be artists in residence at next year’s Monterey Jazz Festival.

The orchestra will be a featured attraction at the festival in September, but the gig is primarily educational in nature: Members will work with student musicians in clinics and one-on-one sessions at both the Next Generation Festival in April and the Monterey Summer Jazz Camp. Marsalis is of course the marquee name, but according to the festival three other members of the orchestra — saxophonists Sherman Irby and Joe Temperley and trumpeter Sean Jones — will be doing the bulk of the educational work.

The artist-in-residence program is one of the key components of the Monterey Jazz Festival’s educational operation, which has grown exponentially since its modest beginning in 1970. The Festival now invests almost a million dollars a year annually in jazz education through a variety of programs.

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The Monterey Jazz Festival has begun accepting applications from student musicians and vocalists for its fifth annual Next Generation Festival, to take place from April 3-5, 2009.

Applications are being accepted through Jan. 23 from middle school, high school, conglomerate, and college big bands; high school combos and vocal jazz ensembles; and college vocal jazz ensembles. Application is free.

A total of nine ensembles will win cash awards and be invited to perform at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September. The event also includes a high school composition competition, with the winning composer receiving cash and the winning composition to be performed at the big festival.

In addition, auditions will also be held for chair positions in the Monterey Jazz Festival’s Next Generation Jazz Orchestra, which tours every year and is a featured ensemble at the festival. More information, and application forms, can be found at montereyjazzfestival.org.

Initially conceived in a roundtable of the elite of Los Angeles's high culture, to include more than 50 cultural and performing arts organizations all based in LA and officially announced by members of LA County's board of supervisors, tbe second largest city in America will in two years produce an intensive two-month tribute to the works not of a local heavyweight composer such as John Williams, but of a favorite son of Leipzig, Germany: Richard Wagner.

Prophesied to be "a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles" by the Los Angeles Opera's General Director and powerhouse tenor Placido Domingo, Ring Festival LA, which is slated to begin on April 15th, 2010, will feature special exhibits and performances, symposia and other events all focused on the Los Angeles Opera's presentation of Wagner's four-epic opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen.  Read more »