SAN DIEGO — San Diego seemed busier than ever when it came to music in 2024.

The year included the opening of intimate and large new concert venues alike, the return of a major three-day festival, an outdoor concert season that stretched into December and the November announcement that at least eight former and current San Diego artists had earned 2025 Grammy nominations, among them Eddie Vedder, Shemekia Copeland, Alicia Keys, Gregory Porter and sitar great Anoushka Shankar, who in 2016 co-hosted a portion of that year’s pre-Grammys telecast.

Here are five of the highlights of this nearly concluded year

Taylor Swift’s Taylor-made guitars

By virtually any conventional metrics, 2024 belonged to Taylor Swift.

In February at the Grammy Awards, she surpassed Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon and Frank Sinatra to become the first artist to ever win Album of the Year honors for the fourth time. She also took home the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album.

Her 18-month “Eras” world tour concluded Dec. 8 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and earned a record-setting $2,077,618,725 in ticket revenues — with a dizzying average cost of $204 per seat. The tour, which drew more than 10 million attendees, was documented by Swift’s top-grossing concert film, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version)” and the 246-page “The Official Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Book.”

The “Eras” tour did not come to San Diego, where Swift’s most recent performance was a sold-out 2015 concert at Petco Park (at which a ticketless man somehow climbed on stage, mid-song, and had to be subdued by four security guards).

But the tour saw Swift showcasing San Diego to the world, in a manner. On each night on her sold-out, 149-date concert trek, she performed on acoustic guitars that were made for her by Taylor Guitars, the San Diego company that was launched in 1974.

Swift has played Taylors since starting her career at the age of 18. She has paid several visits to the company’s El Cajon headquarters, where she performed informally for employees after the release of her 2008 album, “Fearless.” In 2009, Taylor introduced its Taylor Baby Taylor model for beginning guitarists. The past year has seen a surge in the number of young women taking up the instrument, thanks in part to Swift’s oversized impact.

Her new “The Eras Tour Book” devotes multiple pages to large color photos of her guitars, including all her Taylors. One of them — her blue Taylor Grand Symphony six-string — appears in the photo at the top of this article. It is also featured in the 2022 video for her song, “Anti-Hero.”

Take a bow, Taylor — and Taylor.

San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival

Several years in the making, the San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival debuted in October with three days of indoor and outdoor concerts in the two neighboring border cities

The brainchild of longtime La Jolla Athenaeum jazz program curator Daniel Atkinson — who is also the founder of San Diego Jazz Ventures — and Tijuana Blues & Jazz Festival founder/director Julián Plascencia, the festival featured 11 performances by eight international artists at three venues on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border.

The lineup included: Cindy Blackman Santana; Tijuana’s Nortec Collective with Ensenada trumpeter Ivan Trujillo; a rare teaming of top San Diego trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos and Rolling Stones’ touring saxophonist Karl Denson; a striking tribute to Jelly Roll Morton by piano great Gerald Clayton; and a memorable collaboration by Mexico City-bred singer Magos Herrera and San Diego’s Hausmann Quartet. As a bonus, young musicians from Castellanos’ Young Lions Jazz Conservatory performed with students from Trujillo’s Instituto Contemporáneo de Música de Baja California as the Binational Youth Ensemble.

Admission to two of the three concerts was free and total attendance topped 4,000. Thanks to $400,000 in seed money from Qualcomm founding chairman and CEO Emeritus Irwin Jacobs, the festival will return in 2025.

Harry Partch instruments return

A 33-year-long transcontinental odyssey concluded in October with the long-overdue return to San Diego of a treasure trove of priceless, one-of-a-kind musical instruments conceived and built between 1930 and 1972 by Harry Partch, the iconoclastic composer who died here in 1974 at the age of 73.

Partch, whose fans include former composer Lou Harrison and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Tom Waits and Paul Simon, rejected the 12-tone Western music scale as far too limiting. He then created an array of ear- and eye-popping instruments — some of which weigh 700 pounds and are 7 feet or taller — that could accommodate music written for the 43-tone scale he devised.

Their return here, after languishing in storage in Seattle for the past five years, was an extended labor of love for former Harry Partch Ensemble percussionist and San Diego Symphony mainstay Jon Szanto. The instruments are being securely kept at an undisclosed location, where their condition will be evaluated and any necessary restorations undertaken.

After that, funding will be sought to showcase the instruments in a public forum so that people from San Diego and beyond can experience anew such wondrous Partch instruments as the Chromelodeon, Surrogate Kithara and Quadrangularis Reversum. It won’t be a moment too soon.

Wonderfront festival resumes

After debuting in 2019 on seven outdoor stages downtown alongside San Diego Bay, the Wonderfront Music & Arts Festival was dark the next two years because of the pandemic shutdown. It resumed in 2022 — with Gwen Stefani, Kings of Leon and Zac Brown Band headlining — only to go dark again in 2023 to facilitate a shift from November to May.

Wonderfront’s return this year on Mother’s Day weekend saw the homegrown festival start to hit its stride. Its opening night drew a capacity crowd of 15,000 and total attendance for the three-day event was 42,000. The lineup mixed such veteran acts as The Roots, Beck, Weezer and Steel Pulse with such fresh talents as Dominic Fike, Samm Henshaw, Mt. Joy and JID.

The festival will be back again at Embarcadero Marina Park North next May, on the weekend after Mother’s Day, with an expanded footprint and at least one new stage at nearby Ruocco Park. Its new owner, La Jolla-based Events.com, has big plans for Wonderfront’s future. An announcement of the 2025 lineup is expected in January.

Multiple new venues open

Is there another city in California, if not the nation, that has witnessed the opening of as many new concert venues as San Diego in the wake of the 2020 pandemic shutdown?

In 2021, the San Diego Symphony unveiled its bayside outdoor venue, the $85 million Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, followed in 2022 by both UC San Diego’s $68 million Epstein Family Amphitheater and the Del Mar Fairgrounds’ $17 million indoor venue, The Sound. In between came the 2021 opening of the Jazz Lounge, the intimate supper-club music venue operated by leading jazz and pop singer Leonard Patton.

But that was just the start — this year has seen the opening of at least two new venues and the grand re-opening of another.

On Jan. 20, Lou Lou’s Jungle Room opened as a jazz-oriented supper club in North Park’s Lafayette Hotel with a sold-out show by San Diego neo-soul favorites Thee Sacred Souls. On Sept. 15, the $85 million Frontwave Arena opened in Oceanside. While it will serve as the home of three sports teams — the San Diego Sockers, the San Diego Clippers and the San Diego Strike Force — its owners ambitiously plan to have concerts constitute about half of the150 annual events at the new venue.

And on Sept. 28, the San Diego Symphony unveiled its Jacobs Music Center (formerly known as Copley Symphony Hall) after a four-year, $125 million redesign that has yielded breathtaking results for the orchestra and for such stellar guests artists as pianist Inon Barnatan and vocal wizard Leila Josefowicz. Last month’s symphony-produced tribute to jazz vocal icons Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, drew a sell-out crowd to the 1,831-seat venue.

©2024 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Visit sandiegouniontribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.