Philly Youth Music Fest celebrates the city’s young talent

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About 1,000 kids came to the Dell Music Center in East Fairmount Park on Tuesday for the second annual Philadelphia Youth Music Fest, featuring a lineup of performances by young people from a dozen music organizations across the city.

“One of the joys of Philadelphia is we have so many amazing, community-based organizations doing really, really powerful work,” said Matthew Kerr, founder of the youth music program Beyond the Bars, which spearheaded the festival.

“We always work indirectly with each other, and one of the biggest things we want to do is, ‘Let’s come together,’” he said. “Let’s celebrate everyone.”

Kerr said young people in Philadelphia sometimes get a “bad rap” for delinquent behavior, which he says is a too-broad condemnation for a demographic brimming with creative talent.

“There are young people all over our city organizing food drives, organizing music lessons, organizing the most beautiful, community-based things,” he said. “When you watch the nightly news and you hear about violence in our city, you got to be hearing about the amazing love and community building that our young people are doing.”

Philly Youth Music Fest 2025

The Village of Arts and Humanities was one of about two dozen community programs in the city that sent its young people on stage to perform. A chorus from the North Philly neighborhood arts program sang “Optimistic” by Sounds of Blackness, backed by a live band and led by Jour-nae Barnes, an artist instructor currently studying music education at Berklee College of Music in Boston, spending her summer at VAH teaching teenagers to sing.

“Teaching is something that I’m passionate about. Here at the village it gives me that opportunity to teach and to apply the things that I’m learning,” Barnes said. “It gives us that safe space to be creative and to use our voices on and off the stage.”

Philly Youth Music Fest launched last year at Venice Island in Manayunk, with about 200 people attending. For its second year, it moved to the much larger Dell Music Center with the aspiration that it would grow exponentially, which was born out. Although just a fraction of the Dell’s 5,300 seats were taken, the festival more than quadrupled in size.

The festival was held on a weekday to attract recreation centers and day camps. Twenty-four buses unloaded kids at the Dell.

Performances ranged from performers at FamFrequency rapping to original beat tracks, the full School District of Philadelphia’s All-Star Marching Band, students from Rock to the Future doing a fuzzed guitar cover of Elle Kings’ “Ex’s & Oh’s,” and Project 440, a youth development organization, sent out one of its newest students, Nevaeh Fiers, to sing a cover of Sade’s R&B classic “Smooth Operator.”

The festival goes beyond music. There were about 30 vendors on site, representing a range of services and opportunities, including the mental health resource center The Black Brain Campaign, the literacy group Come Read With Us, and Ronald Martin, also known as Ron Da Barber, giving away free haircuts to encourage young people to consider barbering as a lifelong career.

Martin believes there should be more haircuts at music festivals.

“Come get a cut and go listen to music, this is one great event for all the youth,” he said. “I think we need to have more of this.”

There was also plenty of unstructured activity. A group of kids played a fantasy board game while another threw around a football on the Dell green.

Kerr said the festival was never supposed to be only about music.

“People need more than music. People need more than food. People need more than shelter. We need all these things,” he said. “That’s what community is. When young people are supported by all of these things, everyone thrives. It’s not rocket science.”

Editor’s Note: This story is part of a series that explores the impact of creativity on student learning and success. WHYY and this series are supported by the Marrazzo Family Foundation, a foundation focused on fostering creativity in Philadelphia youth, which is led by Ellie and Jeffrey Marrazzo. WHYY News produces independent, fact-based news content for audiences in Greater Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey.