Restring your guitars

It was an impressive list of 28 performers that Youth on the Ridge artist network director Stephen Moore handed me—mostly local or former-local young musicians, dancers and spoken-word artists coming to YOR’s upcoming Broken Strings II music festival.

The all-day music and art event looks to upstage last year’s festival, which brought about 200 people out to hear 12 groups, from inexperienced young local bands to widely known signed groups Switchfoot and One Block Radius, on two stages. This year’s much larger concert is being put on by a combined force of about 200 staff members and performers on three stages—one indoors and two outside.

YOR was started by a group of Paradise high school students who felt strongly that local youth needed a forum to express their voice. Enter VOICE magazine, a free, full-color, bi-monthly visual art and writing magazine, noteworthy as much for its slick, high-quality, heavy-on-the-graphic-art look as for its inclusion of interviews with high-profile artists from around the world alongside the work of young locals.

“I mean, how cool is it for a kid from Magalia to say, ‘Hey, that’s my art right here’ and turn the page, ‘that’s the guy who invented Spiderman'?” said the curly-haired Moore. (Joe Quesada, artist and editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, was featured in the January 2005 issue of VOICE.)

True to YOR’s and VOICE’s focus on the importance of building self-esteem, skill and networking among young artists, Broken Strings II presents junior high-age bands Straightjacket Buddhist and Jet Fuel Only on the same bill with more seasoned and acclaimed bands like local instrumental noise-makers La Fin du Monde and major label hip-hop fusion crew The Resonators.

“It’s a chance for artists to unite,” said Dan Seward, the 31-year-old executive director of YOR. “It’s musicians helping other musicians.

“The youngest band there is Straightjacket Buddhist. They’re seventh- and eighth-graders. David Woolsey [who graduated from Paradise and now lives in Napa Valley] will be there. He’s a cross between rockabilly and country, and some blues. The Resonators will be there. They are really good. We’ve been listening to them a lot here at the office.”

The 12-hour event will feature a laundry list of artists, including techno crew Misled Milkmen; well-known S.F. visual artist/ musician Daniel Vera; acoustic hip-hop outfit Gnostic Apostle; Chico-turned-Santa-Cruz trip-rock band 2nd House Specialty. Knowvella, comic-punk rocker Burke and the Paradise Youth Symphony and Paradise Dancers will return as well.

The 28-year-old Moore, whose recent two-year stint as an art teacher in Singapore has gotten him in the habit of speaking in outline format, expanded on YOR’s impressive track record.

“Well, No. 1, there’s VOICE magazine, No. 2, we do art and writing workshops connecting the adult art community with youth, and, No. 3, we put on events, like open mics and art shows,” Moore said. “Basically, Broken Strings is VOICE magazine-goes-performance-art. We thought of it the same way. It’s hard to print music, dance or spoken word. We had to have an event to cover those.”

Moore said there are already talks about Broken Strings III.

“Next year it might even turn into a two-day festival, ‘cause we had to turn away a lot of bands, even with three stages and 12 hours.”