Healdsburg Jazz Festival

Every June, Healdsburg hands its evenings to jazz. For ten days the Healdsburg Jazz Festival books internationally known musicians into wineries, restaurants, public plazas and historic theaters around town, so one weekend can run from an afternoon set among the vines to a theater seat at night.

The festival is presented by Healdsburg Jazz, a nonprofit that also stages a winter festival and teaches music in Sonoma County schools. Bassist, bandleader and educator Marcus Shelby is its artistic director.

The appeal is closeness. Players with international reputations perform in rooms and gardens sized for a small town, so the music reaches you without a screen or a stadium in between, and the audience is part of the room.

Healdsburg fills in around the concerts. Tasting rooms and galleries line the streets off the Plaza, dinner can sit between an afternoon show and an evening one, and H2 Hotel has joined in with festival music and jazz-night menus of its own.