Palm Tree Music Festival

At a quarter to eight on Saturday, October 10, the sky over the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club had gone a deep, inky blue, the hour when the old polo grounds would ordinarily settle into quiet. Not this weekend. Somewhere past a stand of potted palms, a soundstage roughly the size of a modest cathedral was in full swing, and a crowd in crochet, fringe, and cowboy boots was still drifting toward it like iron filings toward a magnet.

Palm Tree Music Festival Montecito had returned for its second year, and this time it brought a friend: a second day. Last October’s debut was a single sold-out day with John Mayer, Sofi Tukker, and Kygo. This year’s edition, on October 10 and 11, featured a bill that included Kygo, The Chainsmokers, Zedd, T-Pain, The All-American Rejects, Loud Luxury, Frank Walker, Myles O’Neal, and Natalie Jinju.

A word, before we go further, about geography. The polo club’s own address says Carpinteria, and the club should know. Local purists may harrumph at the festival’s “Montecito” billing. They might be soothed to learn that the club itself is a Montecito transplant. Its early home was on Middle Road in Montecito, and it didn’t move down the coast until the 1920s, when Max Fleischmann, heir to a yeast fortune, turned a fire-damaged eucalyptus grove in Carpinteria into the field that, since 1952, has hosted the Pacific Coast Open, one of the oldest polo tournaments in the world. Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy, and Walt Disney were among the visitors who came through. A century on, the grounds are held in a trusteeship meant to keep them in polo. For one weekend, at least, the grass belonged to the music.

A Buffett-shaped Idea

Palm Tree Crew is the creation of Kygo, the Norwegian producer born Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll, and his longtime Manager, Myles Shear. Its patron saint is, of all people, Jimmy Buffett. Buffett never just played concerts; he built Margaritaville, an island-living empire in which the songs were only the front door. In a 2022 Forbes interview, Shear recalled arriving at a Buffett show to find some 40,000 fans already tailgating outside, ready for the doors to open. They hadn’t come for the music so much as a day in Buffett’s world, and inside, Buffett owned that world, right down to the tequila. The lesson was about an artist building the whole experience around the music, not just the set. Kygo’s sunny, tropical sound made him a natural heir, and Buffett heard the kinship, too, calling it “close to what I was doing.” He became Palm Tree Crew’s first investor.

A festival was the obvious place to start. Kygo told the magazine he wanted one where they could “book our own artists, people that we like,” and “control what products are being sold at the festival, the whole experience.”

They did. The first Palm Tree festival landed at an airport in Westhampton Beach in 2021, with COVID rules capping the crowd at 3,000. Since then the brand has popped up in Aspen, Napa, Cabo, Croatia, Australia, Saint-Tropez and, now, our own coastal pasture. Besides Kygo himself, two acts from that first Hamptons bill, Zedd and Frank Walker, were back on this year’s lineup, which suggests a certain loyalty in the Palm Tree family.

Why here? Palm Tree Crew CEO Michael Diaz offered an answer before the inaugural edition last year, telling the Santa Barbara Independent that “Santa Barbara quickly stood out as the perfect fit” and calling the polo club “a legendary, premier California landmark.” It is hard to argue with him, particularly at dusk.

The format is refreshingly civilized: one main stage, one act at a time, so nobody sprints across a field in boots to catch two sets at once. Festivalgoers parked on the club’s grass and walked toward a blue gateway arch with the foothills behind it.

The festival village was a small town of brand-built hideaways. There was a Don Julio cocktail bar, a LaCroix cart staffed by women in matching butter-yellow dresses, an archway built from stacked cans, and a pair of surfboards advertising -196 Vodka Seltzer.A glowing green Saint James iced tea bar greeted passersby with “You look thirsty,” and Matua Wine’s aqua lounge had a neon sign promising “Never Been Cooler.” Over it all rose a giant inflatable clamshell stamped with a palm, which changed color with the stage: orange at dusk, red and violet after dark. Golf-sneaker brand Goat Lane parked a simulator trailer on the grass and ran a closest-to-the-pin contest; the winner got a front-row seat and a backstage visit with Kygo. Golf, on a polo field, for a prize at a music festival: the weekend’s most improbable crossover, though less random than it sounds, since this summer Palm Tree Crew bought a golf course in Colorado.

Saturday’s early-evening slot belonged to The All-American Rejects, their name stacked in giant white letters on black screens while the band played through the haze and a beach ball made its rounds over the crowd. An onstage clock counted down each act’s allotted minutes, and every set all weekend ran on time; the kind of punctuality a polo club can respect. Around 6:35 the sky behind the tents went pink and violet, and for a few minutes half the phones turned away from the stage to catch it. Then The Chainsmokers lit up the stage: flame jets along its lip, CO2 cannons blasting white plumes into the dark, LED towers glittering like sequined columns, and a sea of raised hands below. Zedd closed the night behind towering screens done up like stained-glass windows, while green lasers fanned over the festival village like a luminous umbrella.

Tiny Dancers and Familiar Faces

Just after 7 pm. Saturday, with The Chainsmokers throwing smoke and fire from the stage, the weekend’s most committed dancer was nowhere near it. Toward the back of the crowd, a toddler in a blue romper and a pair of oversized ear protectors had claimed a patch of the polo field as a private dance floor: bouncing, spinning, toppling over a few times on the uneven grass and popping right back up. A grown-up in green pants matched every move, and a sheriff’s deputy strolled past, unbothered. Palm Tree sells itself on sunsets and headliners, but this was the better advertisement: a festival where the earmuffed set and their parents share the same lawn, and nobody seems to mind.

A festival this size draws its share of recognizable faces, and even the ones nobody recognized were unreasonably good-looking. On stage and off, the weekend could have passed for a casting call, and this reporter briefly wondered whether attractiveness was a condition of entry. Among the faces we did recognize: Montecito local Orlando Bloom in the VIP section. Over at the Matua Wine lounge, Aesha Scott of Bravo’s Below Deck was laughing beneath a glowing Palm Tree sign. Love Island USA’s Caleb McDaniel, Liv Walker, and Gal Tshnieder were also spotted in the crowd.

Sunday arrived under soft silver clouds that would have made a Dutch master reach for his brushes. Loud Luxury sent purple smoke rolling over the crowd, and at 7 pm Kygo, the man who started all this, took the stage beneath glowing, vintage-style neon signs spelling out his name, while pyrotechnics burst below him. He brought out two surprise guests: Justin Jesso, for “Stargazing,” and Ava Max. T-Pain had the closing hour. After two days of perfect festival weather, the heavens, apparently moved, contributed exactly five minutes of rain to his set. Far from dampening anything, the shower made it more fun; it drifted through the stage lights like confetti while the field stayed packed, arms up, to the last song. Yeast magnate Max Fleischmann, who completed these polo fields in 1928, would not have recognized them.

At 9:55 pm Sunday night the screens flanking the stage switched to a sunny cartoon coastline and a parting message: “Thank you for coming!”

Organizers have not released attendance figures, and there is no word yet on a third edition. But if the turnout and the mood are any guide, the polo fields may have found a second calling.