A Report From Big Ears
I didn't go, but my friend Steve did
The annual Big Ears festival was held last weekend, from March 26 to 29, in Knoxville, Tennessee. I’ve never attended, but this year the writer Steve Dollar went on BA’s behalf and filed the report below.
Steve — who I first met at the Vision Festival in 1998, and has been a friend ever since — is one of the organizers of the annual Tallahassee Film Festival. They’re currently raising funds for the 2026 edition, so consider helping out.
“Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.” The closing sentence of Andre Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja is the kind of line stoned English majors used to drop to impress the gals — or purloin to seem provocative at open mike nights. It was fun to throw around, until it became a pseud’s cliche. But those words boomeranged with fresh meaning for me at Big Ears, the annual anything-and-everything music festival that drew 35,000 ardent listeners to Knoxville, Tennessee the last weekend in March.
Since its launch in 2009, Big Ears has made Knoxville a crossroads for every sort of contemporary musical tangent. The annual festival serves as something like a kaleidoscopic playlist tracking avant-garde vibrations across genres and generations, with touchstones in 1960s minimalism, New York downtown jazz, and the Appalachian cultural heritage that surrounds the city, and an affection for visionary outliers of all stripes.
It’s not the only festival like this. Poland’s Unsound has been going strong in Krakow since 2003, with a distinctly edgier and obviously European vibe, although there’s plenty of overlap; in downtown Brooklyn, the Long Play Festival marks its fifth edition next month, produced by the Bang on a Can nonprofit and hardwired to its resident composers (Julia Wolfe, David Lang and Michael Gordon), themselves no strangers to Big Ears. And like South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, Big Ears offers a walkable civic sprawl, with venues scattered and clustered from downtown (which boasts the opulent 1928 show palace, the Tennessee Theater, and its neighbor, the gem-like Bijou) to the historic Old Town, with performances in a variety of railroad-adjacent reconfigured former industrial spaces, a decommissioned Greyhound station, a pizza parlor, and a Scottish pub, along with a cathedral or two and the city’s art museum and sports arena.
To the uninitiated, I’d describe it as NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts on steroids (and maybe a little LSD), or maybe the hipster’s Bonnaroo, since founder (and Knoxville native) Ashley Capps also launched that latter-day Lollapalooza. What’s certain is that even a random stumble amid its polymorphous, polyglot array of 250 shows will arrive at spirit-altering revelations, wild discoveries and an inevitable moment where exhaustion yields to exhilaration. That’s where the convulsive part comes in, if we can apply the idea to the extremes of performance on display, reflective not only of musical fireworks or fierce technique, but something more mysterious and poetic.
Some of that vibe was evoked by the more-or-less annual performance of John Zorn’s Cobra, one of umpteen sets related to the prolific composer who, now a vigorous 72, represents an oxymoron: the venerable iconoclast. The best-known of Zorn’s game pieces, Cobra fills the stage. The Saturday morning Bijou show featured a familiar assortment of collaborators old and new, 13 in all, from keyboardist Ikue Mori to bassist Simon Hanes, who redefined the meaning of “musical theater” with a whiz-bang spree of unpredictable ruptures and blurts of sound. “Playful ordered chaos blueprint” is what I typed into my phone, although “gonzo improv psych-out” would have been as accurate. It was a joyful, often hilarious ruckus that among other facets offered a bold contrast in styles between its trio of drummers: the indefatigable Ches Smith, one of the festival’s most visible players, rear stage right on the more conventional kit; Slayer co-founder Dave Lombardo in the center, a one-man arena juggernaut behind a mass of cymbals and double kick drums; and avant-everything William Winant far stage left, making mischief on a quirky array of percussive items. His use of a squeaking balloon set up a mocking Bambi vs. Godzilla dynamic with Lombardo that illustrated how this exercise in sonic ADHD could spark instantaneous theatrics.
I had to miss some other large ensemble happenings: The Los Angeles-based collective Wild Up staged a late-night disco party (at the Greyhound, no less), reviving Arthur Russell’s dance epic 24 to 24 Music (parts of which date back to 1981, the glory days of East Village punk/funk/noise), and Hanes, who popped up everywhere, led his aptly named Gargantua project, a 15-piece big band. But feverish imagination could also serve solo performances. Athens, Georgia guitarist — and member of the much-loved Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet — Shane Parish gave one of the first live performances drawn from his new album Autechre Guitar.
The idea itself seemed a bit mad: a cycle of tracks from the UK electronic duo that rose to popularity in the 1990s, arranged for nylon-stringed acoustic guitar. Parish made elemental sources that already were minimal, while imbuing the melodies with his own flesh and blood — his face throughout the performance was a map of the endeavor’s difficulty. His purity of intention shone through the spare elegance of his adaptations.
A singular figure in his own way, the 80-year-old Brooklyn minimalist Charlemagne Palestine gave two concerts, one in a cathedral with a giant pipe organ, the other on piano in an event space. I caught the latter, which had the extravagant artist holding court aside his “circusfied” piano and stage decor, a rainbow-hued riot of his signature stuffed animals and scrap fabrics. He then proceeded to play a distinctly energetic and tightly repetitive series of notes for about an hour — minimalism as outsider art — as projections of his drawings supplied moody washes of color. A performer in every sense, Palestine belongs to a gleefully wayward breed of artist they don’t really make anymore yet usually find their way to Big Ears.
For me, the festival’s most exciting “get” was Barbara Hannigan. I’ve been wanting to see the classical vocalist and conductor for years now, and Big Ears finally offered the opportunity via its mainstay Zorn, whose compositions the soprano took on in two different concerts. The first one, on Friday night at the Bijou, was the lucky call. Its centerpiece was a rare performance of “Jumalattaret,” a piece that came with its own legend.
Zorn wrote it in 2012, but was unable to find anyone who would dare attempt to sing it until he met Hannigan a few years later. It’s a song cycle each of whose sections are dedicated to a different Sámi goddess out of Finnish mythology, and draws from the country’s national epic, the Kalevala. Accompanied by pianist Stephen Gosling, Hannigan made the impossible look like second nature, embodying something of a Sámi goddess herself, albeit one draped in shimmering red silk that caught the light in ways that magnified the singer’s movement and gestures, heightening drama amid zigzagging tempos, suspenseful ellipses and repeated dashes through all manner of gymnastics — most startlingly when the score demanded a rush of indescribable vocalese, and the mastery of fiendishly attenuated susurrations. It was a performance of incantatory majesty, a spell cast by an oracular dynamo.
Afterwards, Hannigan slipped into the bar adjacent to the venue to meet a family friend, and my Big Ears buddy and I got to talk with her a bit. She had the score handy and showed us. “It’s crazy,” she said, holding up a sheaf covered in the most intense notations. Our jaws dropped a bit. But as Hannigan, who lives by the sea on the northern coast of France, told her friend, “I love a good storm.”
Given that, she would have loved Darius Jones. Not too long into his Saturday night set, the alto saxophonist and composer noted a few walkouts from the full house at the Black Box, a rudimentary warehouse space in the Old City. He smiled with approval. “I’m glad to see that,” he said. “It means I’m doing my job.” Now, he added, things “were going to get weird.” Coming off a European tour with the trio of bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Gerald Cleaver, Jones has has been focused on a deep dig into his 2024 album Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye). Given the often stark expression of his pieces, with their prayerful lyricism building into transfigured squalls of ecstasy and anguish, the humor was an invitation to hang tight, like a conspiratorial wink. On pieces like “We Outside” and “We Inside Now,” Jones might kick back in his folding chair and smile broadly as Lightcap and Cleaver locked into mighty, locomotive grooves, the bassist asserting an iron grip on his strings while the drummer struck with sustained force, two sticks in each hand.
All this climaxed in the final piece, “No More My Lord,” based on a work song recorded on Feb. 9, 1948, by Alan Lomax at the notorious Parchman Farm — also known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary. The singer was Henry Jimpson Wallace, about whom, Jones said in his introduction, nothing else is known. This song is all the world has of him, and Jones made his own interpretation an act of monumental remembrance that aspired to swallow the world — or burn it down. Lightcap locked down a sustained drone while Cleaver unleashed a rumbling cascade of smash and scatteration. Even before Jones got going, the room felt like it was filling up with ghosts. And once he began beseeching, sequences of short phrases gradually escalating in pitch and length, blues meditation refined into ascendant scree, it was absolutely shattering. A convulsive moment, for sure, but also the kind of transcendent occurrence that gives a festival like Big Ears its meaning.
Thanks as always for reading. We’ll be back on Friday with a major announcement.
You definitely sent the right friend to cover the festival for you.
Alan Lomax did so much for music. His recordings blew my mind open… decades ago.