Southern California Blues Concert Calendar
Southern California has one of the deepest regional blues scenes in the country, spread across Los Angeles, Orange County, Ventura County, and San Diego. Rather than trying to be a live, constantly-updated events database — which goes stale the moment a venue changes a date — this page is a guide to how the region's blues calendar typically works across a year, so you know what to look for and where to look for it. For a curated rundown of the area's signature festivals, see our guide to Southern California's blues festivals, and for a look back at decades of past shows, browse the archive of past Southern California blues events.
Festival season: spring through late summer
The bulk of the region's outdoor blues festivals cluster between May and September, when weather makes daytime, all-ages events practical. The longest-running of these is the Topanga Blues Festival, an annual day-long show at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon that traces back to 1982 and has hosted acts ranging from Etta James and Willie Dixon in its early decades to contemporary touring blues artists today. Further north in Ventura County, a festival founded in Simi Valley in 2006 grew into the Ventura County Blues Festival, now held at Moorpark College. In Long Beach, the original Long Beach Blues Festival went on hiatus in 2010, but the city's blues tradition continues through the New Blues Festival, typically held in late summer at Shoreline Aquatic Park. Smaller one-day festivals and blues-and-brews events also pop up around San Diego, Orange County, and the Inland Empire during these months, though lineups and dates shift from year to year.
Club nights, jams, and the IBC preliminary season
Outside of festival weekends, the steadiest way to hear live blues in the region is through club calendars and weekly jam nights at venues across Los Angeles and its suburbs — rooms that book touring blues and soul-blues acts alongside local bands, plus open jam sessions where regional musicians sit in. Fall and winter bring a different kind of blues event: regional preliminary competitions tied to the Blues Foundation's International Blues Challenge (IBC), held every January in Memphis. Local blues societies affiliated with the Blues Foundation run their own preliminary contest, and the winning band or solo/duo act represents that organization in Memphis. Southern California's own IBC history includes Zac Harmon, who won the 2004 International Blues Challenge for Best Unsigned Blues Band while sponsored by a Los Angeles-area blues society — a reminder that the region's competitive blues circuit has produced nationally recognized talent.
Where to check for current dates
Because festival lineups, club calendars, and ticket on-sales change constantly, always confirm specifics directly with the source closest to the event: a festival's own website or ticketing page, a club's own calendar, or the Blues Foundation's affiliate directory at blues.org for IBC-related events. Venue listing aggregators and ticketing platforms (such as Eventbrite pages run by individual promoters or venues) are also useful for catching one-off club shows that never make it onto a festival's radar. This site is an independent fan journal about the Southern California blues scene — it is not affiliated with, and does not speak for, any festival organizer, venue, or blues society, including the now-dormant Southern California Blues Society that once ran this domain.
