The essentials for a great music festival are pretty straightforward: a stimulating setting, scintillating sound, and good security. If you’ve got those, you’ve got something.
Come this weekend – June 22 through 24 – the Mendocino County Fairgrounds in Nevada is the setting for what promoters of the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival call a celebration of “conscious” music – music promoting peace, unity and brotherhood. Music that transcends divisions of race and culture.
Head of it all this year is Jimmy Cliff, one of the seminal shapers of modern music. He’s been at it or some 50 years now, and shows scant sign of slowing down. Cliff headlines the Saturday, June 23 performance on the festival’s Valley Stage. Third World is featured on Friday, June 22. And it’s Luciano on Sunday.
It’s performers such as these, and settings such as the this promoters hope will conjure “a unique sense of unity and belonging, a semi-utopian moment in time where love, generosity, joy and innocence can be reclaimed.”
To that end, there’s a Family Camp area suffused with songfests, storytelling, arts, crafts and sports. In the Global Kids Culture Zone world folk musician Asheba will perform along with children’s artist Tim Cain. If you’re looking for a way to wear the kids out so they’ll get a good night’s sleep, the high-octane energy emanating from the Duniya Dance and Drum Company can’t hurt.
This festival teems with exotic colors and aromas. There are crafts and food from Indonesia, West Africa, Jamaica, Ethiopia and India. To make sure you don’t lose site of the overarching idea behind the festival there will be booths where you can learn about the efforts of social and environmental organizations to make this a more habitable, peaceable place.
All this sound like a throwback to the sixties? Nah. It’s light years beyond that. Promoters hope it’s a consciousness-raising portal to a better planet.
(Image: PeterTea)
