Who’s who at this year’s Sound Summit

Sound Summit is one of the Bay Area’s most scenic music festivals, held every year at the Cushing Memorial Amphitheater on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais. Yet it’s more than just a nice location: It’s the site of one of California’s first-ever rock festivals, the 1967 Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, which took place a week before the far more famous Monterey Pop (that’s the one where Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire).

And the festival itself directly contributes to preserving the greenery around it; it’s hosted by the Roots & Branches Conservancy, a nonprofit devoted to preserving green space in the Bay Area. The festival has hosted no shortage of luminaries since its 2015 inauguration, from legends like Herbie Hancock and Dr. John to rising stars like Nikki Lane and Faye Webster.

This year, it runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. today. For tickets ($70 to $138.50) and more information, go to soundsummit.net.

Here’s the lowdown on the five acts featured this year:

Courtney Barnett

Australian indie rocker Courtney Barnett’s lyrics achieve a level of detail and density more often associated with rappers than rock musicians, but the impression that most commonly comes across in her music is of stasis: of circular thought processes, not linear storylines. First coming to international prominence with 2013’s “The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas,” Barnett found herself the darling of both the indie universe and a rock ‘n’ roll establishment often slow to embrace new singer-songwriters, especially young and queer ones; she won a rave review from Rolling Stone for her full-length debut “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit” and was nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy in 2016. Her three albums since, including a collab with fellow Sound Summit headliner Kurt Vile, have dialed down the unrelenting intensity of her earlier lyrical approach but feel no less warm, witty and homespun.

Kurt Vile & the Violators

Kurt Vile is his real name, and he’s one of rock’s most gifted purveyors of mood music to emerge in the last two decades. Though capable of writing tight pop songs (“Jesus Fever,” “Loading Zones”) he’s more often given to the endless ruminations on his life, his artistic process and the bittersweet transience of all things. Vile found acclaim early on as a member of the War on Drugs, which headlined Sound Summit in 2022, and for his solo work, but he really broke through into rarified territory on 2013’s “Wakin on a Pretty Daze,” which found him adding multi-instrumentalist Rob Laakso to his backing band the Violators. Last year’s “Back to Moon Beach,” recorded at West Marin’s Panoramic House, chronicles some of his last sessions with Laakso, who died in 2023 after a battle with cancer.

The California Honeydrops

Lech Wierzynski’s sheer love of music found life, shape and form in the California Honeydrops, a Bay Area roots-rock ensemble with a pan-genre attitude and an aesthetic that feels vintage without teetering into cosplay. With his happy-go-lucky cap and rumpled coats, the Polish-born powerhouse’s magnetism is undeniable, and so is the righteous ruckus of the band behind him. Starting out busking in Oakland subway stations, the California Honeydrops have since become one of the Bay Area’s most reliable live-music attractions, shifting effortlessly from New Orleans R&B to blues to soul to ska and everything in between at their sweaty live sets.

Grace Bowers & the Hodge Podge

East Bay-born, Nashville-based guitar whiz Grace Bowers has already racked up a formidable resume despite barely being out of high school. She’s worked with rising country star Tyler Childers, blues prodigy Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and jam-scene queen Susan Tedeschi — and to cap it all off, she’s found a fan in no less than Dolly Parton. “Wine on Venus,” her debut album with her backing band the Hodge Podge, is rock ‘n’ roll at its core, but with an old-school Americana flair internalized from years of playing dive bars (and, presumably given her age, waiting outside after her set was over).

Skyway Man

Oakland-based artist James Wallace, who records as Skyway Man, couches his spaced-out pop rock in a trippy mythology that encompasses decades of West Coast woo-woo about aliens and extrasensory perception — think of the intersection between Paul McCartney and public access television. His newest album, 2023’s “Flight of the Long Distance Healer,” came about after Wallace discovered a box of letters between two participants in some sort of UFO religion; at that point, it was less a matter of if Wallace would make a concept album than when. Aside from Skyway Man, Wallace is best-known for his musical contributions to the Max/Adult Swim show “Joe Pera Talks With You.”