Come party on the bluffs in style while the music plays inside from sold-out shows Thursday by Charlie Musselwhite and Skerryvore Friday. Still a few tickets left for the grand finale on Saturday!

Mendo folks, let’s put away the pajama outfits for one night and make Daisy MacCallum proud!

San Francisco dreaming in Mendocino is live now at the 39th annual Mendocino Music Festival. Although all the shows but Saturday’s finale are sold out, many people are having a blast just hanging out outside the full tents on Mendocino’s headlands.

There are three big-name concerts coming up, with a world-renowned Blues man, Charlie Musselwhite tonight, a hot Scottish rock-folk band, Skerryvore Friday and the annual grand finale Saturday night when the orchestra assembles with other top orchestra musicians from around the Bay Area and Sacramento to put on a big show.

The melodies of the music festival emanate from bright white circus-style tents perched on the edge of cliffs that plummet 50 feet down to the rocks and surf. Pelicans flying by on the ocean have been known to fly over the tents to see what all the noise is about. Ravens gather for the leavings and even barge in and try to snag some nice bread in olive oil from a tablecloth.

I went by and met lots of new friends listening outside the tent on Wednesday night. 

The Mendocino Music Festival is all sold out through Saturday and tickets to the big festival orchestra’s performance on Saturday is selling out fast, said Raquel Taylor, office manager for the big annual musical events. 

Taylor said there was no final count, but with all the sellouts that have been happening, it has been one of the best years ever. 

“With everything that is happening in the world, people are really liking getting out and enjoying some music and each other’s company,” Taylor said.

The following is my story from one year ago in the Mendocino Voice  It details how more than 80 host families host top Orchestra players from San Francisco, Sacramento and they have their annual “summer vacation” that goes back 39 years to when the festival was pretty much all classical.

This year I want to focus on the party outside the tents. So come on! Let’s not be andrognyous Mendo pajama people for one day!

 If you hang out front, it’s fun to dress up, something rarely done in Mendo. Maybe put away the sneakers, sweats and hoodies for one night of the year and come out for the kind of cultural exchange that the likes of Daisy MaCallum once dreamed of for Mendocino. (see the end to find out my personal relationship with Daisy)

There was just one act that couldnt make it this year, Taylor said. The festival was able to get Kenny Washington to fill in an achepella group, doing his innovative jazz singing.

“He really knocked it out of the park,” said Taylor

THURSDAY 

On Thursday night at 7:30 PM, tickets are sold out for Blues legend Charlie Musselwhite, 81. He helped create the Chicago Blues scene in the 1960s.  Musselwhite is sometimes called the third Blues Brother, partly for his unusually light ethnicity and partly for being on that musical “Mission from God.”

Sitting out behind the tent on the bluffs I heard the most amazing muffled and faint music while breathing in, hearing and smelling the ocean. I was listening to his Birds of a Feather just now and imagining hearing that among the skunks and pelagic comorants, then some of the less swinging and more heartbreaking riffs.

On Friday at 4:00 PM the Emerging Artists Recital will be held in the historic Mendocino Presbyterian Church’s Preston Hall. Always filled to capacity and a big favorite. Then another globally famous act, Skerryvore, arrives to play in the big tent at  7:30 PM

Saturday ends also at 7:30 PM with the Festival Orchestra 4 playing there. Right of Spring, will be performed. By the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, the featured musician. The composer wrote the once highly controversial musical, with choreographed dancing and music in French with a Paris flair, where is supposedly shocked audiences.

The crash pads for musicians are thanks to an arts tradition that dates back to before Mary and Joseph searched for their room at the inn. More than 70 Mendocino Coast host families will be sharing their homes, kitchens and art studios in 2024 for a long-standing exchange of friendship as well as breakfast tables.

Back in the 1980s, the Mendocino hippies weren’t really old yet and Mendocino had a strong art scene led by retirees from elsewhere. The future for a terrific annual orchestra fest on the bluffs across from the redwood forest seemed like it held endless promise. While the festival has changed as artistic tastes have expanded beyond classical’s European legacy, all music now faces perhaps its fastest changes and biggest challenges ever. The festival still features a classical instrument and a classical musician each year. Every year Susan Waterfall, festival associate artistic director, features a classic musician whose work is covered in different genres. This year it is French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845 –1924.)  The musical instrument last year was the cello.  I have not been able to determine what the instrument is this year, as it appears to be an informal choice. Come out to the bluffs and ask everybody?

This year the featured musician appears to be Stravinsky.

The fun that many people miss at many music festivals is the host families and locals sipping and exchanging tales with the musicians.  Te MMF is unique in that it presents a full orchestra more or less in the middle of nowhere.  Ticket buyers benefit because volunteer artist housing keeps ticket prices much lower than if we were paying for housing. It’s a multi-layered thing that creates an extraordinary sense of place during the Festival—artists, audience members, locals and visitors all happily co-mingle throughout Mendocino and not just in the concert venues.”

Most of the Festival Orchestra players are Bay Area orchestral professionals on their summer breaks. The players are hired by our Orchestra Personnel Manager, who also lives in the Bay Area. The visiting bands are hired after being selected by a small committee, with the Artistic Director making the final choice. 

The middle of nowhere? HUMMMPH!  AND NO!! 

Say, Mendocino’s stylish ladies of the past 150 years..

When the founding mothers of Mendocino City go to work on promoting Mendocino, they wanted it to be the place cultured matrons from San Francisco could come and enjoy, the arts and the class.  I read humorous articles in the 19th-century Mendocino Beacon about how the wives of the lumber barons thought the lumbermen who built Mendocino were Philistines, great at making money, but GACK, what a mess they made of everything. 

So working with Mendocino Beacon Publisher William Heeser (whose gender seems to have been excused), the likes of Daisy MacCallum worked to make sure Mendocino was a snazzy place for arts and music.  There was the whole New England Village act and Mendocino became something of the artist village, Rockport to Gloucester (Fort Bragg) in New England, or a slightly less stuffy version of Carmel by the Sea to Fort Bragg, always a wanna bee Monterey.

Daisy, in her grand hoop dress would have loved to stay at the elegant inn named for her and mosey down the headlands to see those cultured San Francisco folks and talk about that dashing and deplorable young Oakland author Jack London, who was a favorite of hers. I have some of Daisy’s books that I bought at the Kelley House sale with her name in them.  She was born before the Civll War and died in the early 1950s. She’d be glad those ugly piles of metal and tools and grubby men were gone and would have loved the art center too.  Sometimes people speak to you from the past when you read the books they put their names in!

I have never been to the Mendocino Music Festival. I work weekends at the hospital the last four years and have always been scared of the tiny folding chairs. I’d kill them and they would kill me simultaneous We had planned to go see the Scottish Band this year and bring our own chairs (if they let us)  But then Linda broke her leg and Anne mom suggested her first outing in a long while would be fun to go to the fabulous Westport Inn for our 4th wedding anniversary, with mom buying!  I stopped in the other day and met the couple who has been working to make it a masterpiece. The dinners being served and the interior deco blew me away. Of Course, we will have a full report on our Anniversary dinner in Westport, California.