by Maria Gotay

all photos courtesy of BAM and Rebecca Greenfield

Last weekend, the Crossing Brooklyn Ferry music festival lit up the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Fort Greene. The festival was a small-scale borough-centric event, featuring performances from musicians who’ve come to fame in New York.   The event was curated by The National, an epic rock band who hail from Cincinnati but have lived here in Brooklyn for some time. The festival- in its inaugural year- takes its name from the famous Walt Whitman poem which gushed: “I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine; I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it.” There are a number of trendy curated festivals in the US and Europe, the most famous being All Tomorrow’s Parties– which boasts recent hosts like Portishead and Animal Collective- but never have these festivals been based off of the overflowing talent of the land. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, however, provided a rich sampling of music, cultivated from the diverse music scene of this sprawling, bordered landmass we call Brooklyn.