We sent Jason Quigley on down to Parkrose Middle School for the second year in a row. He was nice enough to shoot the festivities and report back for us on LocalCut. Took us a while to get ‘em up here, but some good things are worth waiting for. Here’s J-Quigs:

I managed to snap a few photos of World’s Greatest Ghosts fielding awkward questions from a choir class before I got word that the principal was not allowing any photography in classrooms and no students should be identifiable in any photos. This was a big change from last year, so it cramped my style a little (and it also defeated the purpose of documenting a show at a school) but that’s just my opinion. Greg Borenstein suggested I ask Jona if I could borrow some of his ingenious Flickrblockers to keep students anonymous, but I suspected he didn’t have enough for several hundred people sitting in his car, so I had to make do.

Ohmega Watts:

YACHT:

Soul P:

World’s Greatest Ghosts:

Despite the fact that a lot of the students, especially the older ones, were too jaded to appear like they were having a good time, it was apparent that some of the kids really enjoyed having live music in their school. YACHT had a section of girls screaming “DO WHAT YOU LOVE, LOVE WHAT YOU DO” at the top of their lungs while attempting to copy Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans’ spastic dance grooves. Soul P, being the only artist who played at last year’s event, knew exactly how to get the crowd going, and had a couple kids in a dance battle at the end of his set (set to deafening screams).

All the performers were subjected to Q&A classroom sessions, answering all kinds of questions, mostly non-music related (”Are you on Facebook?”). There were also lyric writing workshops, a Girls Rock Camp booth, and lunchtime turntable lessons courtesy of SPUN Academy. All in all, a fun event, the kind of thing that could and should spread to more local schools to get kids interested in all the music in their hometown.

Links:
Jason Quigley Photography
PDX Pop Now!
Yacht
World’s Greatest Ghosts
Soul P
Ohmega Watts