Each year since 1976, the New Jersey Jazz Society has presented Jazzfest, one of the best and oldest mainstream jazz festivals in the entire northeast. This year is no exception as this popular jazz festival serves up nine hours of great music in the air conditioned comfort of two concert halls plus outdoor entertainment, a food court and vendors selling everything from hard-to-find CDs to crafts and interesting merchandise.

Stern Grove Festival will be celebrating their 75th Season of Concerts this year as well. In celebration of their anniversary, Preservation Hall Jazz Band have been commissioned to compose and perform a piece of music. The song will reference the festival's tradition of “the waving of the pink section,” in which audience members wave the SF Chronicle's Sunday Datebook in the air.

Danielle Anderson, who makes a living writing and performing folk songs as Danielle Ate the Sandwich, today releases her new album, Like a King (June 5, 2012/Youngest Daughter Records).

There are those things they teach you in school about poetry, things like rhyme schemes and stresses and metrical feet. Things like sonnets and pastoral poetry and the epic. Regardless of all those rules and terms though, poetry can be one of the most free-form arts, allowing the writer to take on a poetic license, which is really to say that the author can do whatever he pleases.

The Infamous Stringdusters’ Silver Sky tour swings through rural Pennsylvania June 22 and 23 at elseFest in Wagontown, Chester County, outside Philadelphia. elseFest is a two-day bluegrass, jamgrass and acoustic music festival.

Raucous world-roots string wizards, CFMA winners and JUNO nominees, Sultans of String thrill their audiences with their global sonic tapestry of Spanish Flamenco, Arabic folk, Cuban rhythms, and French Manouche Gypsy-jazz, celebrating musical fusion and human creativity with warmth and virtuosity. Fiery violin dances with rumba-flamenco guitar while a funk bass lays down unstoppable grooves.