What's new at the Petaluma Music Festival

Music festivals pop up somewhere almost every weekend during the summer, but over the past eight years, the one-day Petaluma Music Festival has steadily built a loyal following.

This year’s festival, set for Aug 6 at the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds in Petaluma, is expected to draw some 4,000 fans, up from 3,500 last year.

“Ticket sales are way up this year,” said the festival’s founder, Cliff Eveland.

Growth has been continuous for the festival, with programming that stressed - until now - a wide variety of musical styles.

“This year, we decided to try a different angle,” Eveland said. “We wanted to see what would happen if we booked a lot of acts that were very similar.”

So the festival booked popular California “jam bands,” groups with an improvisational flair in the tradition of The Grateful Dead, which is considered the model for the genre.

This year’s daylong line-up features more than a dozen nationally known acts, most of them with local roots, including Sacramento singer-songwriter Jackie Greene, Sebastopol-based rock guitarist Steve Kimock, and David Nelson of Petaluma, founder of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, appearing with his own band.

“So far, the response has been great,” Eveland said. “People find it kind of hard to resist. They can appreciate those bands because they’re in the same style of music. Our general admission price is $45, and you could easily pay that much just to see Steve Kimock or Jackie Greene.”

Eveland, 50, band director at Petaluma High School for the past 20 years, started the festival in 2008, with other music teachers at the school, to raise money for his school’s music program.

“We were just going to do a 5K run that was going to be a fund-raiser for the Petaluma High School music program,” Eveland said. “We were going to call it ‘Tuba Trot.’ We went to the Chamber of Commerce because we wanted to piggy-back our event with their Waterfront Jazz Festival. They said, ‘We like your idea, but we’re not sure we’re going to have a music festival this year.’”

Since Eveland and his teacher friends felt they knew more about music than 5K runs anyway, they volunteered to help put on the music festival. By the second year, the chamber had stepped aside, and Eveland began building his own organization to stage the event.

“We grew into the Petaluma Music Festival and for all these years, it has been benefiting the music programs at all of the public schools in the Petaluma area,” Eveland said.

The festival struggled to break even during its first two years, but has raised more than $145,000 in the past six years, he said. The money has been used by school music programs to buy or repair musical instruments and buy sheet music, for example.

“We strive to put a family-friendly event, with a good kids’ area,” Eveland said. “After all, we’re raising money for kids.”

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts.