Starting Thursday, a diverse group of musicians and performers come together to hoist a huge new Earth Day festival upon New York City, and hopefully inspire newfound passions for a healthy planet along the way. Confirmed talent for the inaugural Green Apple Music and Arts Festival includes such odd bedfellows as Blues Traveler, Dresden Dolls, GhostFace, Joe Satriani, Richie Havens, and the New York Philharmonic. Also committed to perform are tap dance superstar Savion Glover, singer/songwriter Amy Correia, dance funk nightclub darlings Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, post-bluegrass banjo ensemble Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, jazz-influenced hip-hop artist DJ Logic, 70s rock icon Peter Frampton, and neo-lounge act Nouvelle Vague.

The festival's main purpose is to use the arts to educate and raise awareness of environmental issues, while setting an example by making the event as sustainable as possible, by buying NativeEnergy renewable wind energy credits to offset the festival's own carbon dioxide emissions, using recycled paper and organic cotton T-shirts for promotional items, making recycling and composting available onsite at many venues, working with caterers to provide organic food, and planning for bicycle parking and valet service.

With a boastful style that we love when it comes from the U.S.'s largest metropolis, organizers are declaring their celebrity-laden carnival "America's biggest Earth Day celebration in 2006." The event will showcase more than 70 performing artists gracing over 30 venues' stages, plus kids' concerts, films, and the EarthFair at Grand Central station.

The first consciousness-raising chords will sound on Thursday, April 20, at the 6th Annual Jammys awards show, which honors artists who specialize in live and improvisational music. The Jammys co-creator and one-time owner of the defunct Wetlands club, Peter Shapiro, is co-producing the Green Apple festival with Relix magazine in conjunction with the nonprofit group Earth Day New York.

For the youngest of the environmentally aware crowd, the Green Apple Kids Concerts showcase quirky talent with help from Target, including Dr. Nebula's Planetary Vacation at the American Museum of Natural History and the Dirty Sock Funtime Band, which blends rock, ska, and klezmer, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

The venues are as diverse as the performers playing in them, from the equally sacred grounds of punk-rock dive bar CBGB (scheduled to close later this year) and Carnegie Hall, to BB Kings in Times Square, Southpaw in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village landmark The Blue Note, the Jewish Museum, Lincoln Center, the Theater at Madison Square Garden, Village Vanguard, and the Ziegfeld Theater. There's even a "Green Burlesque" show slated for the Lower East Side's trendy Slipper Room.

At the American Museum of Natural History, the Green Apple Film Festival will screen short films from the avant-garde RESfest alongside two features: "Too Hot To Handle: A Global Warming Primer" and "Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea," about attempts to restore an ecologically disastrous community in southern California, narrated by iconoclast filmmaker John Waters with music by Friends of Dean Martinez. The films are free for paying museum goers. The film festival closes on Sunday at the Ziegfeld Theater with the world premiere of "Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Rock Club," about Shapiro's former venue.

Artists are still jumping on board, so check the festival website for updates.

Photo: BluesTraveler.com