Review of 2nd Annual Crown Heights Music Festival
Crown Magazine

After a morning of rain, it was starting to clear up. Parents, teachers and children of Crown Heights schools P. S. 161, 221, and 398 began to file under the waterlogged tent to hear the sounds of the Saturday Arts Academy Steel Pan group. The group featured children excitedly playing steel pans, large barrel drums and handheld percussion, and gave the Second Annual Crown Heights Music Festival an approriately festive beginning.

Sean Noonan looked on eagerly at the music, but continued his hurried preparations for the event. As organizer, performer and conductor, he had little time to join the audience. A year ago, Noonan planned the first of the festivals in order to give a venue for the students he was teaching. Drawing from the three schools, he had assembled a mass of young musicians whom he felt needed a performance outlet to reinforce their growing passion for music.

Noonan works with Crown Heights District 17 at P.S. 161 along with teacher, Ann Aviles. Noonan has been able to bring instruments to many children who didn’t yet have a very clear grasp of what it was to play music. Working with the children, Noonan, who majored in Music Education at the Berklee School of Music, has tried to impart his love for his music without becoming overly domineering. He’s even found himself learning a thing or two from his students, who have backgrounds mostly in Church music and Carribbean music.

Though he’s occasionally found odd results of his efforts, like the time that one of his students left her trumpet in the middle of a busy street, for the most part he’s been met with enthusiasm. And the enthusiasm hasn’t just come from the children. At a friends birthday party, Noonan found himself sitting next to jazz great, Mike Mainieri, and their conversation drifted to the festival. Mainieri was touched by the efforts and asked if he could be involved. Not surprisingly, after the steel pan group had finished performing at the festival, the audience found itself watching a group made up of Noonan (drum set) and Mainieri, and Jaleel Shaw on sax and Matt Pavolka on bass.

Mainieri travelled down from Woodstock for the day, only to return just after his performance. After years of experience that date back to his countless nights playing opposite Miles Davis, the vibraphonist picks his involvements carefully.

Other performers included the vigorous duo of Bob Moses and Jacque Swartz-Bart on drums and sax. The Waaw Band, which featured the Senegalize, Theirno Camara on bass and vocals, as well as Noonan, Dan Magay (from THE HUB), on sax, and Aram Bajakian playing the guitar. But the real attention fell on Noonan’s Crown Youth Wind Ensemble. The Wind Ensemble played, in addition to a “Tribute to Monk, Miles and Coltrane,” a reharmonized J.S. Bach’s 23rd and 32nd Chorales, written specifically for the Crown Youth Wind Ensemble.

The children may have missed occasional notes, but they played with a genuine energy that betrayed their growing excitement for their instruments. It is an energy that Noonan hopes they will retain until next year, at least, for which he’s already planning the third incarnation of the festival. He hopes to bring in Yusef Lateef as a special guest, and to draw a larger crowd than he had this year. He’s certainly wasting no time in getting started with the next set of preparations, though he does worry that some of his older musicians (those entering 7th and 8th grades) may drift away from the cause: he’s seen children grow out of their desire to play music before. And perhaps they will, but for the moment they are with him, rapt with attention at his dynamic drum solos. They even call him “Mr. Noonan.”

Matt Rand
July 8, 2002

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