Healdsburg is accustomed to jazz artists visiting each summer, as they have every year since 1999. The festival itself brings the NEA Jazz Artists to appear for opening night or the festival finale; while other public events such as the Juneteenth Celebration in the Plaza and concerts in tasting rooms and other locations celebrate jazz as “America’s art form.” Jazz is a year-round preoccupation for the organization.
It’s a long year between festivals, and recently the organization Healdsburg Jazz slipped into other seasons—specifically winter, with concert programs showcasing the music. The Winter Festival, an early-year partner to the Midsummer Festival, will return in 2026 as a four-day event, Jan. 29-Feb. 1. Concerts will be held at the Harmon House, Paul Mahder Gallery and Idlewild Tasting Room, with a climactic show at the Raven Performing Arts Theater.
Before that festive week, Healdsburg Jazz creative director Marcus Shelby will bring back his popular winter concert, built around the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn version of “Nutcracker Suite” from the ballet by Tchaikovsky.
Now widely known as “The Harlem Nutcracker,” Ellington and Strayhorn wrote it for Columbia Records, along with film scores and other work. Their “Harlem Nutcracker,” released just in time for the Christmas 1960 record-selling season, was met with a sensational reception, Shelby said recently.
Certainly part of the success was due to the universal familiarity of the melodies—“The March,” the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, “Waltz of the Flowers”—but in a different musical context. Shelby’s New Orchestra, an 18-piece jazz band, will perform the suite as the first part of a two-part holiday concert at the Raven on Saturday, Dec. 20.
Later that same weekend, Shelby and the New Orchestra will perform Ellington’s “Nutcracker Suite” in an even more prestigious venue, the SFJazz Center in San Francisco (201 Franklin St.). It’s for performance only on Sunday, Dec. 21, at 8pm. See them here first.
Tiffany Austin, a Bay Area vocalist long associated with Healdsburg Jazz, will direct the second half of the program of holiday songs and spirituals from around the world in this Healdsburg Jazz seasonal special show. Tickets are now on sale, $25-$100 plus fees; doors open at 6pm, music starts at 7pm at the Raven, 115 North St.
Swing to Swingin’
The previous night, the Raven will showcase two groups associated with the music of Dan Hicks, a popular Bay Area artist (and frequent Raven performer) who died in 2016. His celebrated band the Hot Licks, including original members, perform his classic songs in the style that Dan Hicks invented—a blend of gypsy jazz, folk and swing, with lots of harmonies.
They team up with perennial favorite the Christmas Jug Band (of which Hicks was also an honorary member), whose “100 percent acoustic folk-skiffle-swing holiday high jinks” are an assured crowd pleaser, for a certain type of crowd. (Think washboards, kazoos, slide whistles, jaw harps, accordions, autoharps and various other wind and brass instruments creating an off-beat musical melange of holiday classics.) It’s bound to be a good time, whatever one’s seasonal persuasion.
The Hot Licks and Christmas Jug Band, Friday Dec. 19; doors open at 6:30pm, music starts at 7:30pm. Tickets $25-$60 plus fees. Raven Performing Arts Theater, 115 North St., raventheater.org.
Duke Ellington’s ‘Nutcracker Suite,’ Saturday Dec. 20, 7pm at the Raven Theater. Tickets $25 to $100 plus fees at healdsburgjazz.org.
