For RexFest, music is life

It all started with a love for music.

Rex Savin, the three-year-old eponymous inspiration for the RexFest Foundation, was born in 2010 with Down Syndrome.

The RexFest Foundation is a nonprofit organization that shares its name with a music festival, which raises funds to support families whose members have been diagnosed with Down Syndrome. The organization uses the funding generated to spread awareness about the healing power of music.

The first festival was held in 2011 and it continues to grow each year, moving from a front porch function to the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles.

Rex’s mother, Michelle Savin, a Cal State Long Beach alumna, said Rex has always had an affection for music, which fueled the Foundation’s goal of using music as a means of therapy for development.

“One day, I approached a music teacher and asked if she’d let [Rex] in her class and she said, ‘Sure, I will,’” Savin said.

That conversation gave her the drive she needed to start the foundation with her husband, who earned his master’s degree at CSULB.

Not long after Rex was born, the seeds of what would later become RexFest were planted.

Rex’s older sister Hailey recalled when her mother first mentioned the idea of holding a RexFest. She originally thought it was a crazy idea.

However, with the help of students and alumni from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the family visits frequently on vacation, the festivities began. Fans of Rex from Santa Barbara to Long Beach unexpectedly united and kicked off the first RexFest.

“The year Rex turned one, we made t-shirts and joked with them, saying we’d go home and have the first RexFest on our porch,” Savin said. “Actually, about a hundred people showed up wearing the t-shirts and we had the first RexFest in our front yard.”

During the first RexFest, she said that attendees started giving the family money to donate.

“We are the charity,” Savin said.

After two years of government delays, the RexFest Foundation was finally able to gain nonprofit status.

Today, the foundation donates money to families that use music therapy for their disabled children.

“It’s tax-free, non-profit when you give to our organization,” she said. “At the second RexFest, we donated all the money to parents of Down Syndrome kids who took a music class.”

Savin said that the festival was not only to spread awareness for the cause, but also to take attention away from Rex’s disability and direct it towards his lovableness.

“People tell you, ‘he’s a little different, so I don’t know if we can include him with the other children,’” she said. “You just want to be normal, like everyone else. I just started feeling like I wanted to help people.”

She said a major goal for both the Foundation and herself is to stop people from seeing Rex as the “special child,” and instead, just see him as Rex.

“I didn’t want anybody to ask me who he was anymore,” she said. “He’s so recognizable now that people don’t say, ‘what’s wrong with your baby?’ Instead they say, ‘Hey Rex!’ He’s just Rex.”

Their ambitions don’t rest solely with the RexFest Foundation. The Savin family also started their own recording and publishing companies, which have developed a symbiotic relationship with the bands that record under RexFest.

Under RexFest Records, the company released its first album, RexFest Vol. 1, which features a compilation of local artists that produced music solely for the event that took place in November of last year.

To name a few, Moi Ses of Tomorrow’s Bad Seeds and local band Livication volunteered to make last year’s benefit album release concert something to remember. Today, Livication is signed with RexFest Records.

RexFest Vol. 1 includes tracks from these artists as well as local bands 80 Proof and Ease Up.

In addition to the success of the album launch, Savin said she has ambitions to create a documentary under the RexFest Film Company with the assistance of College Beat.

Senior film major Kevin Tran and sophomore film major Erica Aloia of CSULB’s College Beat Productions are assisting with the film.

The documentary, though, is still in its preliminary stages.

Tran said the film will not only focus on how RexFest was started, but also on how the Savins have dealt with having a child diagnosed with Down Syndrome.

For more information, visit the RexFest Foundation’s homepage at rexfest.org. The RexFest foundation can also be found on Facebook and Twitter under the handle, @rexfestorg.