Being a very fortunate guy, I’ve lived within sight of the California Coast my entire life. I’ve also been a reader and collector of books about and/or set in this fabled zone, and one of…
Posts published by “Steve Heilig”
Way back in high school I somehow got the wild idea to ride a bicycle down the entire West Coast, from the Canadian to Mexican borders. Well why not? Summer was coming, I was all…
Just last year I attended a dramatic reading of ancient texts about mortality. What fun, right? But it drew a full house of over 1,000 people to San Francisco’s ornate Castro Theatre. It also left…
The fabled Reggae on the River festival has been through more trials and tribulations than your average 30-something native Californian, with a real rough patch in recent years due to disorganization, in-fighting, and financial struggles.…
Way back in the early 1970s I stumbled upon a then-new record titled "Blue Moses" by pianist Randy Weston. It had a very colorful, almost psychedelic cover and a roster of top jazz stars like…
Standing on stage in front of thousands of people can be a kind of out-of-body experience, especially if one is essentially shy in public. But on the big stage at the Sierra Nevada World Music…
This year marks the 25th annual version of the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, and its 13th year in Boonville. Begun in 1994 in the foothills of the mountain range it's named for, the organizers…
Ahh, those Anderson Valley mornings. At the Mosswood before things heated up it was calm and happy, the smiling lovely staff providing truly wonderful coffee, and there were open seats out front. I plunked my…
The Sierra Nevada World Music Festival (SNWMF) relocated to Boonville in 2006, after operating in the Sierra foothills since 1994, making this the 12th year here. After some challenges with an extreme heatwave and then extreme fires in the first couple years, it's been pretty much smooth sailing since, albeit with some adjustments to volume and such. Any notable changes planned for this year?