When was the last time you listened to live music that really moved you?
If you are a Ventura Music Festival family member, some of our 2025 concerts are surely on your list.
While tradition says, "celebrate your 30th wedding anniversary with pearls," the Ventura Music Festival presented or cosponsored its most ambitious ever 30th season in 2025--with a string of 30 treasured performances over eight months for audiences of every music taste in a dazzling array of music styles.
If music moves with hands and feet, our concerts made footprints into adventuresome new venues, large and small, all over Ventura County, beyond Ventura College. Our expanded season went far beyond our traditional "summer of love," two long weekends that straddled July and August. Our featured performers' hands and voices brought in new audience fans beyond our exquisite classical and jazz offerings--reaching out to cutting-edge rhythms of Latin Sounds, vintage and local So-Cal talent.
And we have found ways to give back to our community. Our new "Play it Forward" campaign designates $30,000 in outbound grants to local arts and music organizations.
Our youthful quinceañera-aged music education program, Music in the Schools, grew beyond Ventura classrooms to underserved populations in Oxnard. The Songcraft Summer Camp for young creatives added a dynamic new dimension to our annual programming. Every participant wrote an original song, which was professionally recorded and produced. The festival also launched a Music & Mental Health program at Community Memorial Hospital, offering supportive musical engagement for patients, staff, and visitors alike
These astonishing feats were nurtured by a fresh crop of festival staff, board of directors, partnerships, donors, sponsors, volunteers and, of course, community audiences--heavily salted with our many veteran supporters from the past years to the present.
And now moving on to our "best in show" performers.
The Spring Season saw pop history with Bob Eubanks and his Backstage with the Beatles show. Using multimedia, this unlikely impresario, the famed The Newlywed Game host, undimmed by 87 years, recounted his Quixotic quest to be the first to bring the relatively unknown Beatles to America. His talk was leavened with live performances of iconic hits from cover band Ticket To Ride. During the Gala after the show, Bob continued his memories with Ivor Davis, author of the widely acclaimed book, The Beatles and Me on Tour, his personal account of the 1964 Beatles’ North American tour.
Also sky high at the Crowne Plaza ballroom, now bedecked with Vegas-style tinsel, Donny Most & his 17-piece Big Band performed a spectacular night of swing, jazz, and big band classics! Best known as Ralph Malph from Happy Days, Donny brings the timeless music of legends like Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, and Dean Martin to life with his smooth vocals and captivating stage presence. Mack the Knife, anyone?
During our Spring Festival, music wafted over the great lawn at Mission Park, fronting the historic Mission San Buenaventura. The outdoor free community festival celebrated local California music culture: with Native American blues by Blue Mountain Tribe, chart toppers by the Ventura High School Jazz Ensemble, and Philip Glass trances by the Ventura College Chamber Orchestra.
Ventura favs, the eight-piece powerhouse collective Barrelhouse Wailers' infectious energy of hot jazz and blues prepared the audience to get up on their feet and march down Main Street in a New Orleans' style procession led by Mariachi Los Toreros to a second stage and nighttime block party across from restaurant sponsor Limon y Sal. The packed crowd danced to the best in local Latin Sounds featuring Conjunto Zacamandú's Veracruz son jarocho, Rey Fresco's rock & reggae and salsa from Son Mayor.
The doors of summer opened with Nouveau Flamenco guitar legend Ottmar Liebert at the 1920s Majestic Ventura Theater before a rapt, silent audience of devotees. The Zen-master blends elegance, passion, and global rhythms to create a spellbinding atmosphere with every note.
Faithfully, the Ventura Music Festival tends the classical music coals of its origins with a glowing July heritage series of classical performers beginning with artists from the West Coast's premiere professional musician conservatory, the Colburn School. On piano, Ray Ushikubo dazzled with Chopin's Heroic Polonaise and Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, then switched to violin for Milstein's Paganiniana, an unbelievably technique-driven companion to the violin's "Everest" high catalogue. Pianist Chi-Jo Lee mounted a variety show of classics: one of Scarlatti's 550 inventive sonatas and a Petrarch unrequited love sonnet by Liszt, and an opera paraphrase. She selected from Ravel's evocative Miroirs, fluttering night moths, the call of lonely birds, and a boat rocking on the waves.
The Beijing Guitar Duo, classical guitarists direct from Carnegie Hall and world stages, performed a parade of acoustic classics at Ventura College by Frank, Debussy, Gnattali, Granados, Piazzolla, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's Tan Dun.
For the season's "Classical Edge" talk/performance, spellbinding storyteller VMF Music Director Nuvi Mehta and acclaimed pianist/composer Greg Anderson explored the life, times, and unforgettable music of legendary American composer George Gershwin in a dazzling multimedia and live performance experience.
Jazz giant and tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman and his quartet delivered an evening of deep diving explorations of sounds inspired a very long train of influences from John Coltrane to Earth, Wind, and Fire that expanded the jazz repertoire into dialogues beyond thought and feeling, reason and emotion, and between music and what lies beneath.
Ventura's own Big Bad Voodoo Daddy drove summer to a raucous close. The nine-piece ensemble, founded in 1989 (the same year as Nirvana) create a musical riot on stage with their songbook that sparked the rebirth of 1940s-1950s swing music nationwide and the Jungle Book tune, "I Wanna Be Like You."
The new October season brought the Mehta/Anderson duo together again for a sold-out Classical Edge multimedia storytelling and performance experience, Mozart and the Mind, at a new intimate venue, The Ojai Underground.
Words fail to capture the inimitable variety of The Moanin' Frogs who returned with their six saxophones to the Ventura Music Hall, our city's favorite mid-sized live music venue, once a bowling alley. Conservatory trained but supreme entertainers, this "saxtet" brings a thrilling, high energy mix of ragtime, classical, jazz and pop--making them one of the most unique performers on today's chamber music landscape. "The Moanin' Frogs have sax appeal," exclaims San Francisco conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.
The Branford Marsalis Quartet has continued to push the boundaries of jazz while honoring its traditions. A member of the legendary Marsalis family of New Orleans and music director of Jay Leno's Tonight Show, Branford has reimagined Keith Jarrett's famed Belonging album and revisited his many collaborations with pop stars and classical orchestras to create spontaneous, ever-evolving explorations, melding chamber-music-like jazz meditations over a wide world of other musical styles.
Self-conducted chamber orchestra Delirium Musicum pulses with ferocious passion and infuses L.A.'s crackling energy into every performance, disrupting expectations and redefining “classical” music as the new red-hot concert experience. At the Rancho Campana Performing Arts Center in Camarillo, they dove deep into the classical catalog, both ancient and modern, with Shostakovich's Octet, Barber's Adagio, Gabriella Smith's climate action Desert Ecology, Philip Glass, and Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
The festival's favorite troubadour Diego "Twanguero" Garcia, entranced Museum of Ventura County's audiences with his solo acoustic guitar "side roads of sound." In his year-long motorcycle diary-style quest to absorb guitar traditions from Canada to Argentina, he searched for the shaman-like dimensions of music, such as how the forest sings in Costa Rica. For his second act his electric guitar trio's rockabilly showcase remembered the jolting tunes he learned from a nearby American airbase radio station in his native Spain. Both at the museum and at the festival finale inside the intimate Ojai Underground venue he unveiled a future multicultural collective called Soñando California or "Dreaming California"—three female guest singer/songwriters performing a vibrant night of music where tradition meets a modern edge.
Wow, what a year it's been!
But it's been no dream. In 2025, the Ventura Music Festival's "30 for 30" programming shone once again as the ultimate cultural crossroads for those who love music in California.