Music Festival

The buzz in San Francisco is how killer the lineup is for this year's Outside Lands , the music-and-food festival Aug. 10-12 at Golden Gate Park . When it premiered back in 2008, it gave events such as Coachella and SXSW in Austin, Texas, a run for their money. More recently, though, the mix has been weaker (when the Beastie Boys canceled in 2009, ticketholders got Tenacious D instead) and the logistics questionable. (One blogger opined that the “organizational failures and layout problems” have been “too much to withstand.”)

Nearly four dozen percussionists were scattered about Libbey Park late Thursday afternoon. They were joined by a couple of piccolo players tooting in the trees. The sun was bright and warming. The grounds were crowded with strollers, vendors, artists, frolicking children and dogs, to say nothing of a gaggle of concertgoers preparing for the start of the 66th Ojai Music Festival. The magnificent occasion was a performance of "Inuksuit" by Alaskan composer John Luther Adams.

Ojai Music Festival Where: Libbey Bowl, Ojai When: Thursday through Sunday; complete schedule at http://www.ojaifestival.org Information: (805 ) 646-2053

Southwest Chamber Music's L.A. International New Music Festival is more a Los Angeles interstitial new music festival. Skirting touristy Europe, these Southwesterners are not interested in inclusiveness but in filling gaps that very much need filling. Monday's installment, the third of the festival's four concerts at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall, did feature two admired L.A. composers who do not lack local institutional attention. Anne LeBaron, on the faculty at CalArts, happens to be the local composer of the moment with her breathtaking opera "Crescent City" currently in production and a piece on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's opening Hollywood Bowl concert in July.

INDIO, Calif. - In one corner stands a music promoter that made its mark in L.A.'s punk scene, throwing gritty events at warehouses and velodromes, giving voice to songs like "Beat Me Senseless" and "I Kill Children" before birthing an annual desert bacchanal that might be the world's most successful music festival. In the other corner is the master-planned community that put the O.C. in Orange County, where safety, schooling and temperance are hallmarks and a homeowners association can overrule one's choice of house paint.

Successful, micro-targeted neighborhood music festivals have been proliferating — including Make Music Pasadena, the Eagle Rock Music Festival, Venice's Abbott Kinney Music Festival and Echo Park's Culture Collide — and now we can now add "The Nice Stretch of West Hollywood That's West of Fairfax Avenue but East of the Sunset Strip Festival. " Sunday's festival is actually called the Hudson Block Party, and for a second year the classy-casual bar and restaurant that throws it has booked an unexpectedly buzzy bill of local and national acts, including White Rabbits, LP and Haim.

MUSIC Dance your heart out in the desert at the 10th Annual Joshua Tree Music Festival. This fantastic roster of bands including Fork Knox Five, Gaudi, Breakestra and MC Rai is guaranteed to satisfy all your world-music and open-space cravings. The Joshua Tree Lake Campground, 2601 Sunfair Road, Joshua Tree. Various times, Fri. to Sun. $120. http://www.joshuatreemusicfestival.com.

Although its title suggests geo-cultural all-inclusiveness, Southwest Chamber Music's ambitious new LA International New Music Festival - which opened Wednesday at Zipper Hall - arrives with certain GPS parameters in check. As founder/director/conductor Jeff von der Schmidt explains, the festival's perspective grew out of his operation's recent travels and collaborations in Vietnam and Mexico, awakening interest in contemporary music from Asia and Latin America. In a sense, the festival offers an equal time focus, far from the Euro-centric crowd.

INDIO, Calif. - Deep in California's low desert, the sun would soon be up, not that anyone was keeping track anymore. After two exhilarating days of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, most in the crowd of 85,000 had had enough. But for a small group of revelers, the party went on. Fueled by a stew of youth, passion and substances unknown, they wore feathered headdresses and Zorro masks as a DJ spun bass spasms so powerful they could cure sciatica. The kids gyrated and leaped in unison - all in silence.

Anyone who's ever been to Coachella or any music festival understands the idea of "the moment," that magical, jewel-encrusted feeling you get when everything clicks -- the sound, the lights, the emotion, the music -- and you feel at one with the world. On Friday at this year's Coachella Music and Arts Festival, a chilly night where the clouds hung low after a day of rain, Mazzy Star induced one of those arm-tingling feelings when it performed its languid, drifting love song "Fade Into You" on the Outdoor Stage.