Presenting her 22nd and final season virtually during a pandemic is not the way Healdsburg Jazz Festival founder and artistic director Jessica Felix envisioned her exit into retirement. But then nothing she has ever done to advance and support the music and musicians has been conventional.
Felix was making and selling jewelry in her Healdsburg shop in 1999 when she hatched her first festival, convinced that a Sonoma Wine Country town could become a destination for some of the most celebrated names in jazz. Sure enough, everyone from Billy Higgins to Bobby Hutcherson, from George Cables to Charlie Haden and Billy Hart, has played the festival. Felix built it, and they all came.
On Saturday, Sept. 26, three top-line Healdsburg Jazz Festival veterans who have headlined over the years — saxophonist-flautist Charles Lloyd, tabla player Zakir Hussain and guitarist Julian Lage — are scheduled to appear as a trio for the first time in a fitting Felix farewell concert, live-streamed from Healdsburg’s Paul Mahder Gallery. A minimum donation of $15 secures online access to the performance and for 72 hours following the end of the 7 p.m. performance.
“I’m anticipating something very emotional,” said Hussain from his Marin County home, especially because this is his “first time being in a room with other musicians, and such great ones, in six months. I bubble over when I think about it. Tears may happen.”
For Lage, a prodigy who played his first Healdsburg Festival at age 11, this is his “musical home and a cultural and community hub. I grew up near here,” he said by phone. “Coming back now is hitting me at a lot of levels.”
Lloydshares the sentiment. “My heart is fluttering in excitement,” he said, adding high praise for both Hussain (the two were on an emotionally charged Grace Cathedral bill shortly after 9/11) and for Lage.
In a phone interview that hopscotched merrily through Felix’s jazz life and times, the 71-year-old outgoing artistic director paused only when asked how she accounted for her success in building a festival from scratch.
“I don’t think I ever thought about it,” said Felix. “I never set out to be a producer. But I have an active mind, and I turned out to be pretty good at it.”
The die was cast shortly after high school, when Felix began to back off Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones after hearing Lloyd’s 1967 album “Forest Flower.” “I opened up to new music, a new feeling, a new form,” Felix noted in her retirement statement. “It opened a door to my soul.”
After moving from Los Angeles to Northern California, Felix gravitated to the North Beach jazz mecca Keystone Korner, where she traded jewelry for tickets and later worked the door “as a bouncer,” she said, with a laugh. Gregarious and driven, she befriended the musicians. Soon enough she was organizing concerts at Yoshi’s, Kimball’s East and other Bay Area venues.
When she opened her jewelry shop on Healdsburg’s square in 1994, Felix named it Art and All That Jazz.
Marcus Shelby, the noted San Francisco musician, composer, bandleader and educator who succeeds Felix as the festival’s artistic director as of Oct. 1, knows he has big shoes to fill and a legacy to protect.
“Jessica eats and breathes this music,” he told The Chronicle. “She is the most pro-artist festival director I have ever met.”
Shelby, 54, wants to affirm and enhance the jazz presence in Healdsburg. That includes the year-round concerts Felix presented outside the annual festival in late May and early June. Shelby hopes to link programs to important milestones such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and Juneteenth, while bringing a “multi-artistic” perspective, adding dance, poetry and theater to the mix.
He also plans to continue an active education program in the Healdsburg public schools, where Shelby has led a choir for fourth- through sixth-graders for a decade.
Some of the planning is long-range. The 2021 Healdsburg Jazz Festival is likely to be a somewhat truncated affair, with programs confined to a single weekend instead of 10 days and, depending on the state of the pandemic, partially or fully virtual.
Those realities are what give Saturday’s trio concert a piquant appeal. Yes, audiences will experience it through their screens, as they have all of this year’s festival. But Lloyd, Hussain and Lage expect to be making music live, in the exploratory, endlessly inventive, tightly collaborative language of jazz.
“With Master Lloyd you cannot anticipate what’s going to come at you,” Hussain said. “You may arrive at the same destination, but the same avenue is not visited every time. That’s the exciting, the unknown part of the journey.”
Lloyd-Hussain-Lage Trio Live from Healdsburg Jazz: 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 26. Minimum donation of $15 for 72-hour access after the live show ends. healdsburgjazz.org