Matt McBane attended high school in San Diego, where he frequented local punk clubs before founding the Carlsbad Music Festival. In 2010, the Festival won an ASCAP Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming. “Our slogan,” McBane says, “is adventurous music by the beach.”
A violinist/composer by trade, McBane, too, has appeared on the Carlsbad stage; he started the festival in 2002. He curates the music for the three-day event and says the scope includes new music for classical instruments, jazz, indie rock, and folk. “We like cross-genre collaborations.”
The three-day festival can stage as many as 30 different performers and groups in a broad range. For example, the September 2012 lineup included UC San Diego’s Red Fish Blue Fish, Chinese lute virtuoso Wu Man, the Calder Quartet, and San Diego surf-jazz pioneers Mattson 2. McBane says it costs upward of $80,000 to produce the event, “but that includes paying people year-round.”
McBane spends most of the year living in Brooklyn, where he plays with an indie-classical quintet called Build.