Jackson Browne

Jackson Browne has written and performed some of the most literate and moving songs in popular music and has defined a genre of songwriting charged with honesty, emotion and personal politics. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Songwriter's Hall of Fame in 2007.

Except for a brief period in NYC in the late 1960s, Jackson has always lived in Southern California. His debut album came out on David Geffen's Asylum Records in 1972. Since then, he has released fourteen studio albums and four collections of live performances. His most recent studio album, Standing In The Breach, is a collection of ten songs, at turns deeply personal and political, exploring love, hope, and defiance in the face of the advancing uncertainties of modern life.

Browne is known for his advocacy on behalf of the environment, human rights, and arts education. He's a co-founder of the groups Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) and Nukefree.org and a member of the Ocean advocacy group, Ocean Elders.

In 2002, he was the fourth recipient of the John Steinbeck Award, given to artists whose works exemplify the environmental and social values that were essential to the great California-born author. He has received Duke University's LEAF award for Lifetime Environmental Achievement in the Fine Arts, and both the Chapin-World Hunger Year and NARM Harry Chapin Humanitarian Awards. In 2004, Jackson was given an honorary Doctorate of Music by Occidental College in Los Angeles, for "a remarkable musical career that has successfully combined an intensely personal artistry with a broader vision of social justice." In 2018 Jackson was the first artist to receive the Gandhi Peace Award. Created by the Promoting Enduring Peace organization in 1960, the Gandhi Peace Award was named after Mahatma Gandhi, a proponent of non-violent resistance who helped spearhead the eventual independence of India from Great Britain in the 1940s, and who inspired similar movements throughout the globe. Other past recipients include Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Benjamin Spock, U Thant, Cesar Chavez and Ralph Nader among many others.

Bonnie Raitt

Bonnie Raitt is a singer, songwriter and guitarist whose unique style blends blues, R&B, rock, and pop. After 20 years as a cult favorite, she broke through to the top in the early 90s with her GRAMMY-award winning albums, 'Nick of Time' and 'Luck of the Draw,' which featured hits, "Something To Talk About" and "I Can't Make You Love Me" among others. The ten-time Grammy winner was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 and Rolling Stone named the slide guitar ace one of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and one of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time."

Raitt's widely-acclaimed 2012 independent release 'Slipstream' sold over a quarter-million copies, making it one of the top selling independent albums, and earned Raitt her 10th Grammy Award (Best Americana Album). A tireless performer with decades of non-stop touring under her belt, in 2012 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance from the Americana Music Association. In February 2016, Raitt released her highly-anticipated 20th album, 'Dig In Deep' (Redwing Records.) On tour for much of 2017 and 2018, Raitt and her band performed overseas in Australia, New Zealand as well as Canada before spending the summer touring as support for James Taylor in stadiums and arenas across the U.S. as well as the UK and Italy followed by headlining shows in Europe.

As known for her lifelong commitment to social activism as she is for her music, Raitt has long been involved with the environmental movement, doing concerts around oil, nuclear power, mining, water and forest protection since the mid 70's. She was a founding member of MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy) which produced the historic concerts, album and movie NO NUKES and continues to work on safe energy issues in addition to environmental protection, social justice and human rights, as well as creator's rights and music education. Every Bonnie Raitt concert includes information tabling opportunities for local, grassroots non-profit organizations as well as fundraising to support organizations working in the public interest.

Mickey Hart and Friends

Best known as a drummer in the renowned expedition into the soul and spirit of rock and roll that is the Grateful Dead, multi-Grammy winner Mickey Hart is also an accomplished writer, energetic painter, restless explorer, and an acclaimed expert on the history and mythology of drums. A true original, armed with an inventor's audacious curiosity, Hart boldly seeks to break the rhythm code of the universe and investigate its deepest vibrations.

Hart's visionary body of work combines music, science, and the visual arts. Hart's fascination with rhythm has driven him to seek sound in unexpected places. He explored the sounds of humanity's earliest music with his groundbreaking At The Edge (1990), and gathered the world's greatest percussion heavyweights to collaborate on the groundbreaking Planet Drum. Both recordings were partner projects with his critically-acclaimed books for HarperSanFrancisco Drumming At The Edge Of Magic and Planet Drum. His 1991 album Planet Drum went on to win the first-ever Grammy award in the World Music category. He would dominate the award category again in 2008 with his Global Drum Project.

Throughout the 1990s, Hart produced his acclaimed series, The World -- showcasing such global percussion greats as Babatunde Olatunji, Zakir Hussain, and Hamza El Din; groundbreaking releases by Tibet's Gyuto Monks and the Latvian Women's Choir, and several of his own classic solo projects. He additionally produced a series of archival recordings for The Endangered Music Project, in tandem with the Library of Congress.

On October 11, 2011, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings released the 'Mickey Hart Collection' to preserve and further the Grateful Dead percussionist's endeavor to cross borders and expand musical horizons. Hart has collaborated with astrophysicists to create music reflecting the origins of the universe. He recorded vibrations from the Golden Gate Bridge -- which he described as a giant wind harp -- and collected data from stem cells, heartbeats, and brainwaves in order to produce compositions. These pursuits culminated in two recordings: Mysterium Tremendum (2012), using sounds from the cosmos via NASA, and Superorganism (2013), with sounds sourced directly from electrical signals in Hart's own brain.

Hart's writings have documented a lifelong fascination with the history and mythology of music. His books include Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Planet Drum (Harper SanFrancisco); Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music (Grateful Dead Books), and Songcatchers: In Search of the World's Music (National Geographic).

Hart's near-mythic career, now spanning 50 years, recently achieved another pinnacle, reaching new generations in a series of record-breaking shows. In the summer of 2015, Hart joined the other surviving Grateful Dead members -- Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann to create the historic Fare Thee Well concerts. The Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary celebration weekend proved to be among the most successful events in the history of live entertainment, with the legendary band's three final nights at Chicago's Soldier Field smashing all-time attendance records.

Today, Hart continues his long, strange Grateful Dead trip with Weir and Kreutzmann -- and now John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti -- in Dead & Company. The new superband launched a nationwide tour in October 2015, playing sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and beyond, and garnering widespread praise from critics, Deadheads, and new fans alike. "Hart and Kreutzmann got a chance to take center stage, hypnotizing the crowd with a 10-minute riff on drums and percussion leading up to the big finale,” noted USA Today.

"Underneath the world's extraordinary musical diversity is another, deeper realm,” says Hart about his lifelong quest to explore rhythm. "There is no better or worse, no music versus folk music, not distinctions at all but rather an almost organic compulsion to translate the emotional fact of being alive into sound, into rhythm, into something you can dance to.”

Joan Osborne

Joan Osborne has rightfully earned a reputation as one of the great voices of her generation -- both a commanding, passionate performer and a frank, emotionally evocative songwriter. A multi-platinum selling recording artist and seven-time Grammy nominee, the soulful vocalist is a highly sought-after collaborator and guest performer who has performed alongside many notable artists, including Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Luciano Pavarotti, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, and Mavis Staples, to name a few.

Counting such legendary artists as Etta James and Ray Charles as influences, Osborne has released several acclaimed albums and continues to tour extensively in various configurations -- with her own band, as Joan Osborne's Soul Revue, and as an acoustic duo and trio. In 2003, Osborne joined forces with the surviving members of The Grateful Dead when they regrouped to tour as The Dead. In addition to her own solo shows and frequent guest appearances, Osborne currently also tours as a member of the rock/soul supergroup Trigger Hippy, founded by Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman and built from each musician's shared love of R&B and soul. The band's self-titled debut album arrived in 2014.

Osborne has showcased her far-ranging talent during three residencies in 2016 at the Cotton Club in Tokyo, Japan; the Blue Note in Honolulu, Hawaii; and Cafe Carlyle at The Carlyle Hotel in New York City. The latter, titled "Joan Osborne Sings The Songs of Bob Dylan," received critical acclaim from outlets such as The New York Times ("At every point in the evening, you had a sense of Ms. Osborne as an artist who knew exactly what she was doing") and the Huffington Post ("Her set was magic...the evening was a rediscovery of familiar Dylan, re-mined for new riches...hearing Osborne singing and dancing the Dylan greats was further testament to their versatility, beauty, and his genius"). Osborne felt this would be a great chance to work out an idea she had of doing a "Songbook Series" of albums -- the way Ella Fitzgerald did in recording the songs of Gershwin, Cole Porter, and others -- but with the songs of more recent writers. Dylan was an obvious choice. As a result of the successful Cafe Carlyle residency, the "Joan Osborne Sings The Songs of Bob Dylan" show is now on the road and has been a huge success.

First Nations Artists, Pura Fé & Cary Morin

Although she was originally born and raised in New York City, Pura Fé has chosen to lay her guitars in Saskatchewan, Canada. Pura Fé, an heir to the Tuscarora Indian Nation, is an artist, an activist, and much more. She still draws a large part of her inspiration from her rich First Nation heritage when she writes about today's problems.

Saying that Pura Fé was brought up in a musical environment is an understatement. On her maternal side, she claims no less than eight generations of Tuscarora singers. Her mother, gifted with a Wagnerian operatic voice, was the featured vocalist in several of Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts. "She would have deserved to be heard all over the world, but those were difficult times for a woman of color," regrets Pura Fé whose father, born in Puerto Rico, boasted First Nation and Corsican blood.

Initially working as a background singer, in the studio as well as in Broadway musicals, she eventually felt the need to express herself through her own songs. "It came out just like that, all of a sudden!" she recalls. This outburst took the name of Ulali in 1987. This singing trio, formed with Soni Moreno and Jennifer Kreisberg, rapidly made waves with its bluesy Native American sounds.

The connection between Native music and the African-American primal art form, abundantly explored by one of Pura Fé's most ardent fans, Taj Mahal, then became her trademark as she started her solo career with the help of the Music Maker Relief Foundation. When she's not touring or fighting for civil rights, Pura Fé sings her Tuscarora blues songs at home, to the sound of her lap-steel guitar.

Cary Morin has been described as, "One of the best pickers on the scene today." Morin brings together the great musical traditions of America like no other. Deft fingerstyle guitar, vocals that convey melodic elation and gritty world-weariness, Morin crafts a style often characterized as full-throttle Native Americana . Morin hails from Montana, relocating to Colorado in the early 80's, where he currently resides. Morin has toured Europe, Canada, Japan, and the U.S. as a solo artist and as a member of The Pura Fé Trio for the past 10 years.

"A man and a guitar, a lot of soul, and an understanding of the history of soulful men with guitars in American music can sometimes achieve this kind of timelessness in their work...," comments Richard Higgs (Public Radio Tulsa). "Morin has the chops. [His] performances... would stand out, variously, among the old-school delta blues pliers, the Greenwich Village folk crowd at the end of the 1950s, the back-to-nature bards of the late '60s, or today's thriving scene. Morin references all these styles, but he's no dilettante. His engaging sound is his alone...."

Together, Pura Fé and Cary Morin are a powerful First Nations duo, with strong vocal harmonies, and masterful guitar work.

Wavy Gravy

Formerly known as Hugh Romney, in 1969, Wavy stood on stage in front of nearly half a million people at Woodstock and announced 'what we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000'.

Named by B.B. King ... Wavy Gravy has spent the past 45 years putting his best red nose forward in the world, one bubble at a time, to help make the world a sweeter and more humane place. Now entering his 80th year full steam ahead, still in the guise of an eternal hippie clown, occasionally walking a fish on a leash, Wavy Gravy shares each day with a little grace, a lot of humor and a major dose of goodness.

Wavy has devoted his life to supporting many good causes but his two true legacies are, his deep involvement with Seva Foundation, a Berkeley based organization he co-founded with Ram Dass & Dr. Larry Brilliant in 1979. Seva Foundation has restored eyesight for nearly 4 million people with programs reaching many of the poorest places in the world.

Wavy is also co-founder, with his wife Jahanara, of Camp Winnarainbow, a circus and performing arts children's camp in northern California that nurtures creativity, skills mastery, personal growth and community.

A full-length documentary film 'Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Story, chronicles Wavy's early days to recent past with a message of activism, inspiration & hope.