The Youth Movement: Finding an above-ground basement show

The Kids are all right and they're all here.The youth music scene in Bend sometimes feels like one of those things
that you're pretty sure exists, but you've never actually seen, so
you're not sure - like a panda bear or a McRib sandwich.
After two
years of trying to track down some sort of high school basement show
where we could send a youthful reporter (or at least youthful looking
reporter), it seemed like we'd found a real-live teen-age rock show.
The show at PoetHouse Art on Saturday night was a fundraiser for Rise
Up International, the Bend-based socially conscious clothing retailer
and humanitarian outfit, and featured a lineup that included names like
Mosley Wotta and Empty Space Orchestra, but it was the other acts on
the bill like Mirf the Bing and others that filled the room with mostly
high-school aged fans.

Braille: read him with your ears.Braille, the Portland-based rapper, is playing in Bend on Saturday night and the show is only his third appearance in town. One of the two other times was when he opened for James Brown at the Les Schwab Amphitheater. That's right…that James Brown, as in The Godfather or Soul, "Sex Machine", sequined cape James Brown.

The clean-mouthed hip-hop artist was picked by Brown's management to open shows for the Godfather between 2005 and 2006 in equal part for his positive (and f-bomb lacking) tunes and also his high-grade musical talent, both of which were thought to bode well with Brown's diverse and generation-spanning crowd. As Braille (real name Bryan Winchester) says, "You know, you don't want to be saying, 'Get your f'in hands in the air' when you've got somebody's grandma out in the crowd."