Sonoma County’s premier summer music event, Healdsburg Jazz Festival (HJF) returns to the heart of Northern California’s internationally-renowned wine country for its 27th annual festival from June 13 – 22, 2025 featuring many of today’s top performing jazz legends and emerging artists shaping the future of the genre. Held in exquisite Healdsburg venues, boutique hotels, and acclaimed Sonoma County wineries, Healdsburg Jazz Festival is a one-in-a-kind destination festival with GRAMMY Award-winning stars, NEA Jazz Masters, and rising artists appearing amongst the picturesque Sonoma hills and valleys while music fans take in the sights, sounds, and sips of the finest wines in the world. Healdsburg Jazz Festival is under the artistic direction of lauded composer/bassist Marcus Shelby.
The epicenter of Healdsburg Jazz Festival 2025 are the unforgettable concerts at Bacchus Landing (LINK), where a curated collection of seven boutique wineries — showcasing a wide range of grape varietals and winemaking styles — add to the allure of the world-class live entertainment along with wood-fired pizzas available in the beautiful courtyard with theater style seating. Entice your senses while basking in the delights of Bacchus headliners including five-time GRAMMY winner and NEA Jazz Master Dianne Reeves for an intimate tête-à-tête with Brazilian jazz guitar Romero Lubambo (Friday, June 20). A not-to-be-missed Father’s Day celebration welcomes dads and their families on Sunday, June 15 with Hawaiian-born ukulele maestro Jake Shimabukuro taking the stage at Bacchus Landing. The evening includes Chef Mateo Granados serving Kahlua pig for the Father’s Day occasion, Healdsburg-style, and culinary star Christine Law scooping her craft gelato from her beloved Flora Gelateria. Across a variety of Healdsburg venues, opening weekend also features jazz master Kenny Barron Voices with buzzy vocalist Tyreek McDole (Raven Performing Arts Theater) on Friday, June 13, as well as the 4th annual free Juneteenth Celebration in the Healdsburg Plaza on Saturday, June 14 bringing together the Orrin Evans Trio (The Bad Plus) with The Dynamic Miss Faye Carol, Tyreek McDole Quintet, HJF Poet Laureate Enid Pickett, and a late-night outdoor ticketed set by the Howard Wiley Quartet (Elephant in the Room).
Other Bacchus Landing headliners include GLIDE Ensemble with Kenny Washington and RyanNicole (Monday, June 16); Jason Moran with the Marcus Shelby Orchestra featuring vocalist Darynn Dean (Thursday, June 19); Terri Lyne Carrington celebrates the centennial of pioneering bebop drummer Max Roach with a live presentation of her newly recorded cover album of Roach’s pioneering, We Insist 2025! Ace NYC jazz drummer Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom opens the show; and HJF caps off with a special New Orleans closing night with GRAMMY-winning trumpeter Nicholas Payton and BIG CHIEF Donald Harrison’s famed Crescent City quartet with Parish Cafe serving up New Orleans specialties.
Festival highlights throughout the week includes an exciting lunch concert at one of the region’s premier new wineries and major HJF sponsor Overshine Wines with live music by Destiny Muhammad Quartet featuring SF Poet Laureate Genny Lim on Tuesday, June 17; as well as same-day events including an Artist Talk spotlighting the accomplishments of Black Women in Jazz by Rising Star Artist in Residence Amina Scott at St. Paul’s Church and the 17-piece all women big band Melba’s Kitchen in the Healdsburg Plaza (Tuesday, June 17); a Cocktail Concert with Amina Scott Quartet at the hip and elevated HJF major sponsor Spoonbar/h2hotel (Wednesday, June 18), — each ticket includes an Enelalma cocktail or glass of Healdsburg wine; Master Artist in Residence Bruce Forman with his trio at Elephant in the Room (Thursday, June 19); Los Tangueros del Oeste at Elephant in the Room (Friday, June 20); Healdsburg Jazz Freedom Jazz Choir directed by Tiffany Austin and the Healdsburg Jazz Collective at the Healdsburg Community Church (Saturday, June 21); live concert and jam with the Sylvia Cuenca Trio at Hotel Healdsburg’s Spirit Bar (Saturday, June 21); and the celebrated tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana at the 222 at Paul Mahder Gallery (Sunday, June 22).
Healdsburg Jazz Festival 2025 unites Bay Area residents and visitors alike through impeccable programming of brilliant jazz artists set amid the backdrop of 180 surrounding wineries and 30 gourmet restaurants. Healdsburg Jazz Festival partners with GRAMMY-winning artists, Michelin-starred chefs, award-winning wineries, and poets for an unbelievable 10 days in wine country. On any given day, Healdsburg Jazz presents highly curated events throughout its festival in stunning and intimate settings that reflect the natural beauty and creative energy of Healdsburg, Calif.. With ticketed, free, and educational community events (like Healdsburg Jazz’s free pop-up dance classes on Juneteenth), the Healdsburg Jazz Festival truly has something for everyone.
“This year marks the 27th year anniversary of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival and will be my 5th year as artistic director,” says Marcus Shelby, Artistic Director of Healdsburg Jazz Festival. “I am proud to say that we have again created a wonderful summer festival that is musically, artistically, and culturally diverse and takes place in Healdsburg’s incredibly beautiful wineries, public spaces, clubs, and theaters. We will honor the African American holiday ‘Juneteenth’ with a powerful lineup of musical artists, celebrate Father’s Day with our first concert ever with ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, and showcase industry masters and rising stars throughout the week. Healdsburg Jazz Festival is a destination, where people can plan their summer vacations to come and experience all that the festival and region have to offer. We are truly presenting a program at the intersection of the arts with award-winning wine and culinary offerings at the highest levels. For 2025, we are elevating our large format venues with more headliners than ever at Bacchus Landing with VIP packages offering the ultimate festival experience. We are very thankful to the city and community of Healdsburg and hope you can enjoy and cherish 10 days of music and art in wine country. Thank you!”
Highlights of Headlining Artists @ 27th Anniversary of Healdsburg Jazz Festival 2025
Dianne Reeves & Romero Lubambo
In jazz’s royal family, there’s Lady, Duke, Count and several knights of the piano dubbed Sir. And on the contemporary scene, vocalist Dianne Reeves is the undisputed Queen. Possessing a velvet-plush tone and commanding sense of swing, she embodies jazz as a welcoming art form. Invariably described as regal due to her sweepingly generous demeanor, the NEA Jazz Master is a five-time Grammy winner whose blend of jazz, R&B and Caribbean currents flow seamlessly via her vocal virtuosity and improvisational prowess. It’s no wonder that she’s the first singer to ever win GRAMMYs for three consecutive recordings. Reeves will be joined at Bacchus Landing for an intimate tête-à-tête with Brazilian jazz guitar great Romero Lubambo, a brilliant improviser himself who co-founded the all-star New York Brazilian jazz combo Trio da Paz. A musical partner of Reeve’s for more than three decades, he’s an unsurpassed master of duo encounters, providing exquisite melodic, harmonic and rhythmic support. In the stripped down setting with Lubambo, Reeves is at her most expansive, an empress clothed in voluptuously lyrical Brazilian-tinged raiments.
Jake Shimabukuro
Jake Shimabukuro is the Big Daddy of the ukulele, and he’s got a special program to celebrate his Healdsburg Jazz Festival debut on Father’s Day. It’s been almost two decades since the Hawaiian-born maestro catapulted to fame when a clip of him tearing through “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in New York’s Central Park went viral on YouTube. He’s been soaring ever since, expanding the possibilities on his diminutive four-string instrument with his virtuosity and fearless imagination. Blending jazz, bluegrass, flamenco and classical techniques, he’s forged a singular approach sought out by a disparate cast of stars, including Yo-Yo Ma, Bela Fleck and The Flecktones, Ziggy Marley, Sonny Landreth and Willie Nelson. Shimabukuro is at his most unfettered performing solo, or with his partner on bass, his fingers flying over the uke with hummingbird grace.
Kenny Barron
What better way to open the Festival than a bona fide legend described by Jazz Weekly as “the most lyrical piano player of our time”? With his consummate mix of power and melodic invention, NEA Jazz Master Kenny Barron has elevated the jazz scene since 1962, when Dizzy Gillespie hired the 19-year-old pianist straight outta Philly. He’s been a creative force ever since, both as a sideman for a succession of jazz stars like Freddie Hubbard, Milt Jackson and Stan Getz and as a bandleader, composer and educator. In recent decades his group has served a proving ground for some of the music’s most prodigious young players, like the extraordinary drummer who powers Barron’s trio, Johnathan Blake (a fellow Philadelphian) and bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa. Joining them is 25-year-old Haitian-American vocalist Tyreek McDole, a phenomenon who in 2023 became only the second male singer to win the Sarah Vaughan International Vocal Competition. Introducing himself to Healdsburg Jazz audiences with Barron’s trio continues his magic carpet ride in luxuriant style.
We’ll be rolling out the red carpet and celebrating in grand style this opening night, so dress up if you like, and join us for this special night on the town — Sparkling included!
Tyreek McDole
Winner of the 2023 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, Tyreek McDole joins Kenny Baron Voices at HJF. At the Sarah Vaughan competition, McDole’s win marks only the second time a male vocalist has won in the contest’s 12-year history. The 25-year-old Haitian-American vocalist from Florida, McDole is making waves in the New York and international music scene. His journey began with a standout debut at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2018 Essentially Ellington Competition, where he won the Outstanding Vocalist Award, presented by Wynton Marsalis. Since then, he has shared the stage with artists like Rodney Whitaker, Theo Croker, Gary Bartz, Maurice Brown, and Joey Alexander. McDole earned a degree in jazz performance from The Oberlin Conservatory of Music, under the guidance of esteemed instructors LaTanya Hall, Gary Bartz, Gerald Cannon, Eddie Henderson, Billy Hart, Dan Wall, Sullivan Fortner, and Weedie Braimah. McDole’s upcoming release, Open Up Your Senses, drops soon on Artwork Records.
Jason Moran
Warmed up after an acclaimed four-night winter run at the SFJAZZ Center, piano great Jason Moran rejoins forces with the Marcus Shelby Orchestra for a deep dive into Ellingtonia, the supremely sophisticated, wittily sardonic, and unspeakably beautiful body of music created by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The evening opens with a 30-minute solo performance by Moran, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center, and among the most celebrated pianists of his generation. Afterwards, he’ll be joined by Shelby’s talent-packed orchestra featuring rising vocal star Darynn Dean, a strikingly gifted chanteuse who hails from an illustrious Los Angeles jazz clan. Her February performances with Moran and Shelby announced the arrival of a major new talent, just as the SFJAZZ residency revealed the deep conceptual and sonic affinities between Moran, described by Rolling Stone as “the most provocative thinker in current jazz,” and Shelby, whose deeply informed works revel in the soulful sinew connecting Harlem stride piano, Ellington, Monk and Andrew Hill.
Prior to Jason Moran, Marcus Shelby will perform with his Orchestra, a big band comprised of some of the Bay Area’s most respected and well-known instrumentalists. In many ways, Shelby has turned his orchestra into an exemplar of the kind of equitable society he advocates for off the bandstand. It’s an ensemble that embodies the diversity that makes the Bay Area such a creative hothouse, where the horn section features veteran masters sitting next to rising teenagers, and it’s all part of the mix.
*Prior to the performance, Jason Moran and DownBeat’s Ted Panken will host an educational Duke Ellington Listening Session. This will the most insightful 45 minutes.
Terri Lyne Carrington
More than one of jazz’s most exciting and widely esteemed drummers, Terri Lyne Carrington is a GRAMMY Award-winning producer, composer, educator, activist and visionary who has radically expanded the space for women in jazz. Celebrating the centennial of pioneering bebop drummer Max Roach, Carrington recently recorded 1960’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, one of the first major jazz statements in clarion support of the civil rights movement. Paying homage to the legacy of Roach, vocalist Abbey Lincoln and lyricist Oscar Brown, Jr., she sonically reimagines the suite while maintaining its powerful social justice message. One of the youngest musicians ever anointed as an NEA Jazz Master, she’s the founder and director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Among her most consequential initiatives, she compiled and edited the book New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets By Women Composers, which has led to an exponential increase in performances by a century of jazz women, from Lil Hardin Armstrong to Melissa Aldana.
Allison Miller Quartet
With power, poise and a mile-deep pocket, Allison Miller has become a definitive 21st century drummer and bandleader. Whether touring with the all-women all-star band Artemis, her own celebrated band Boom Tic Boom or the Lux Quartet, which she co-leads with piano great Myra Melford, Miller is a trap set marvel with an infinitely shaded rhythmic palette. While based in New York, she’s put down deep ties in the region as artistic director for Jazz Camp West, and her love of the Bay Area turns her performances here into joyous celebrations.
Opening for Nicholas Payton is Donald Harrison and his famed New Orleans Quartet. So many verdant musical lineages converge in the person of saxophonist Big Chief Donald Harrison that it’s hard to take his measure. Once hailed as a brilliant young lion, he’s now a New Orleans institution who has embraced the Mardi Gras Indians mantle once worn by his father. He put in a formative stint in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Terence Blanchard, infusing new energy into a group legendary as a proving ground for young talent. They went on to form one of the best bands of the 1980s, and Harrison has been recognized as a leading force on the alto and soprano sax ever since. An NEA Jazz Master whose rhythmic fluency melds bebop and funk, R&B and Caribbean currents, Harrison can often be found mentoring rising young players, like the blazing cast in his working quartet. Performing with Harrison: Joe Dyson on drums, Dan Kaufman on piano, and Nori Naraoka on bass.
Nicholas Payton
GRAMMY Award-winning New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Payton infuses everything he plays with the singular history of his hometown. Blues and funk, parade rhythms and R&B and a century of evolving jazz idioms course through his horn, delivered with power, precision and poise. Hailing from an esteemed musical family — he’s the son of bassist and sousaphone expert Walter Payton — he started playing in brass bands at 10 and got his first steady gig from banjo legend Danny Barker, who played with first-generation jazz artists like Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson and Sidney Bechet. Payton has been a creative force since his late teens, collaborating with a daunting array of masters and recording prolifically as a leader, mostly in recent years for his Paytone Records. A conceptualist who rejects the term jazz in favor of Black American Music (BAM), his coinage for a more embracing approach to musical creation, Payton makes labels superfluous with his bountiful soul and unfussy virtuosity.
Melissa Aldana
Melissa Aldana cemented her reputation as a blazing young star in 2013 when the Chilean-born tenorist won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition (a contest in which her father had been a semi-finalist in 1991). At 24, she was the youngest person to take top honors, as well as the first female and the first South American. With her brawny tone and hurtling delivery, she’s delivering one galvanizing performance after another, but in recent years she’s emerged as an equally formidable composer, with a concept deeply informed by Wayne Shorter. Her group is anchored by bassist Pablo Menares, who like Aldana grew up in Santiago. He’s played a central role in her music since she founded her first touring group 12 years ago, Crash Trio. Drummer Kush Abadey is a New York mainstay who joined powerhouse trumpeter Wallace Roney’s band at 16, and pianist Glenn Zaleski is a similarly sought-after sideman who’s made a name for himself playing with the likes of Ravi Coltrane, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Ken Peplowski. Under Aldana’s direction, the quartet ventures deep into the tantalizing unknown.
GLIDE Ensemble with Kenny Washington and MC RyanNicole
An evening of gospel with the GLIDE Ensemble Choir and Change Band, GRAMMY-nominated Kenny Washington, and MC RyanNicole. From its humble beginnings on Christmas Day, 1966, when it was only 10 singers and jazz legend John Handy, the Glide Ensemble grew to include more than 100 voices and eight musicians. Beginning with the first choir director, Faith Winthrop, the Glide Ensemble has benefitted from the direction of such talented leaders as Donnell Hickman, Ronald Sutherland, John F. Turk, Jr., Clifford Coulter, and Vernon Bush, and has teamed up with a host of notable musicians such as Sammy Davis Jr., Leonard Bernstein, Marvin Gaye, Bono, Bobby McFerrin, Maya Angelou, and Joan Baez.
Every Sunday, at Glide Memorial Church, the drums pulse and the brass rise and fall as the Glide Ensemble take center stage with their signature opening song, “Pass Me Not Oh Gentle Savior.” They beckon San Francisco, and the world, for a transcendent spiritual experience that heals and saves lives. Touching thousands of people every year, the Glide Ensemble draw together those with disparate spiritual paths and life circumstances to sing of liberation, truth telling, love and hope.
This is a debut for GLIDE at our Healdsburg Jazz Festival and this is a concert you should not miss!
From north of the Golden Gate Bridge all the way to the Oregon border, Healdsburg Jazz Festival is the place to truly experience a boutique jazz festival committed to hosting celebrated artists on venerable stages with the culinary and wine excellence of Sonoma County within arms-reach. Stay tuned to healdsburgjazz.org.
MAJOR Festival Sponsors: Foley Family Foundation, Healdsburg Chamber – Stay Healdsburg, Hotel Healdsburg, and Overshine
Healdsburg Jazz Festival 2025
When: June 13 – 22, 2025
Where: Downtown Healdsburg, Calif.
Admission: www.healdsburgjazz.org
Tickets: Free – $275 (On Sale to Patron/Angel/Advocate Members on March 31; All Members on April 5; General Public on April 10)
More Info: www.healdsburgjazz.org
Healdsburg Jazz Festival 2025 Artist Lineup
DIANNE REEVES, JASON MORAN, KENNY BARRON, TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON, JAKE SHIMABUKURO, MELISSA ALDANA, BIG CHIEF DONALD HARRISON, ORRIN EVANS, NICHOLAS PAYTON, TYREEK MCDOLE, FAYE CAROL, BRUCE FORMAN, AMINA SCOTT, MARCUS SHELBY ORCHESTRA, ALLISON MILLER, HOWARD WILEY, GLIDE MEMORIAL CHOIR, KENNY WASHINGTON, DESTINY MUHAMMAD QUINTET, GENNY LIM, MELBA’S KITCHEN BIG BAND, LORCA HART, SYLVIA CUENCA, TIFFANY AUSTIN & THE HEALDSBURG FREEDOM JAZZ CHOIR, ENID PICKETT, SUSANNA ARENAS, HEALDSBURG JAZZ COLLECTIVE, LOS TANGUEROS DEL OESTE
About Healdsburg Jazz Festival
The Healdsburg Jazz Festival is a celebration of the indigenous American art form known as Jazz. Over the past 27 years, the festival has become a favorite local tradition with a growing national and international reputation. The 10-day festival of public performances by world-renowned musicians in diverse settings primarily outdoors including Bacchus Landing, Healdsburg Plaza, the glamorous Hotel Healdsburg and h2hotel, Paul Mahder Gallery; historic theaters, nightclubs and other unique settings such as Spoonbar, The Raven Theater, Elephant In The Room, St. Paul’s Church, Healdsburg Community Church; and Overshine Wine.
In addition to the annual festival, held in June each year, the non-profit 501(c)(3) organization sponsors numerous music education programs in Healdsburg area schools for primary and secondary school students, and presents a series of Jazz Masters concerts throughout the year.
For more information, please visit: www.healdsburgjazz.org
