Saturday night, August 8 – Saratoga, CA - Mountain Winery

A beautiful setting combined with a great summer evening for a pretty good night of reggae in the South Bay Area foothills as Ziggy Marley played a mean roots reggae set.

The Mountain Winery overlooks the entire Santa Clara Valley and the grape vines covering the grounds make it one of the Bay Area's most inspiring settings for good music. The disappointment of the evening was a no-show out of Toots and the Maytals. Ticket takers yelled loudly, “No Toots tonight” to the disappointed crowd. In a way, I was more excited for the legendary Toots than another drawn out set of mediocre reggae peppered with Bob cover songs. Ziggy took the stage at 7:30 with a mellow first few songs, including a rendition of No Woman, No Cry.

I don’t follow Ziggy at all and am not too familiar with his stuff other than Tomorrow People, which felt heavily pop influenced to me. Regardless of that, this was a pretty nice set with some deep reggae riffs that grabbed me proper. As with all the Marley brothers there was the usual dose of dad, which in the perfect weather wasn’t that bad. The ska jam Black Cat was a great surprise for me, to hear a little up-beat ska sweet. After wrapping up a nearly 3 hour set, Ziggy was called to the stage again by an appreciating audience. The encore set rocked hard ending with Love is my Religion, Jamming and Get Up, Stand Up. It was my first shot at Ziggy and I expected something different, something more digitized, safer for a yuppie audience, but I had a blast with some solid roots reggae from a great performer.