Big Ears 2023

At some point midway through this year’s Big Ears Festival I was at St John’s Cathedral in Knoxville, TN watching a woman rustle around with a bunch of objects inside a piano. This was a piece by composer Annea Lockwood and, as I stood around the periphery of the pews taking this all in, the thought crossed my mind: is this even music? This is Big Ears in a nutshell. Because, what even is music and what isn’t, and, maybe most importantly, who gets to decide? Over the course of the weekend that question seemed to be a short scooter ride to what even is being alive, being human, and what isn’t and, most importantly, who gets to decide? The fact that this is all happening inside a church makes it all the more delicious!

That’s part of the beauty of Big Ears, big questions like that fill your head from time to time. For me, another beauty of the weekend is that you sometimes get to experience those big questions in real time with a group of people, to feel a room get uncomfortable as one by one everyone gets to decide if they’re listening to “music” or just a bunch of noise and if they like it and to wonder if the people around them like it or not and if you don’t like it or do like it, should you get up and leave and go see one of the other half-dozen things going on around town. I absolutely love that shit.

Big questions and big thoughts and little questions and little thoughts intermingle at Big Ears in much the same way they do in our lives and so it becomes much more than a music festival. As you walk up and down Gay St in downtown Knoxville, hopping from church to club to theater to performance space, from classical to metal to electronic to rock to bluegrass to jazz to things that have no word to describe them, the vast secrets of humanity seem to unfold in real time. And just like in real life, we all get to forge our own path, navigate the unfathomable options at our own pace and to suit our own tastes. There is no right way to Big Ears, once you’ve made the important decision to go at all. And, I cannot emphasize this enough, you should definitely make that decision to go.

Big Ears is a music festival, but by the midpoint of the first day, I was ready to declare it more of a study on the depths of human creativity, human expression and communication, humanity itself. A bit grandiose, I agree, but it’s all there. The music is there, of course. I saw some of the best music being made today. A hefty dose of John Zorn’s most awe-inspiring projects, lots of Bill Frisell, Vijay Iyer, and on and on. The best guitarists (Frisell! Lage! Riley! Ribot!), the best songwriters (Morby! Bird!), composers, improvisers, electronic innovators, ensembles, and on and on. Literally the best of the best in just about every facet of musicmaking.

Not just the best, but the ones operating around the periphery of the church of creativity. The Overton window on possibilities is severely shifted at Big Ears, so that what you thought were the fringes are actually dead center and what’s actually at the fringe is something you hadn’t contemplated yet. The quietest, the loudest, the funkiest, the decidedly least-funky. Music that speaks to your soul, to your body, to your brain. Friday my night ended with a dance party with brains, a smoke-filled stage for Caterina Barbieri performing solo electronics at the big club, the Mill and Mine. Saturday I got up early and went to the Knoxville Museum of Art for another Lockwood piece that was barely anything at all. 6 musicians wandering around a garden, matching the flow of tributaries into the bayou, literally coming together as the waters do, light percussion and horns barely audible above the birds chirping and the trains in the distance. From there we got breakfast and then went to see John Zorn’s Nove Cantici per Francesco d’Assisi which is Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, and Gyan Riley playing some of the most stunning acoustic guitar music you could imagine in a giant, lovely theater. Any of those on their own is not Big Ears, but together…

So, they play solo and in duos and in trios and in front of massive orchestras. They perform in theaters and clubs and churches and in parking lots and the gardens outside art museums. The context of the venues becomes an integral part of the performance and, in turn, the city of Knoxville itself (Knoxville! Who knew!) becomes the living, breathing engine that drives all this creativity. And the music prompted conversations, like interactions in John Zorn’s ridiculous Cobra gamepiece, one on one and trios and foursomes and large groups, jabbering between friends and strangers, about music that happened and had yet to happen, war stories and anecdotes and creative I-once-caught-one-THIS-big fishing tales, and so the discussion about the music mirrors the music itself prompting more, enhancing and retracing, and the fractal networked nature of human communication was laid bare in ways you rarely experience. A fucking trip!

My personal Big Ears was a total mirror to my reality. My restlessness and little-bit-of-everything philosophy of knowledge processing has found a permanent home there in springtime Knoxville. I caught about 80 acts in 3.5 days, bouncing from one to the other, this year employing a scooter to quicken the pace between these microexperiences. Big Ears is my multiverse and I hop from one universe to the other with reckless abandon, blazing a Rick-and-Morty trail of mindpretzel behind me as I go from theater to club, one side of town to the other, Jake Xerxes Fussel making beautiful old timey folk with the help of Steve Gunn one moment, Pino Palladino & Blake Mills doing progressive instrumental groove the next. I danced, I pondered, I laughed out loud, I marveled, I cried, I had my cerebrum handed to me over and over again… and then I bounced to the next. For some, that whiplash might induce a headache or two, barely a moment to digest one awe-inspiring performance before heading to the next. For me, it was heaven.

It would be impossible to even begin to legitimately review the weekend, but some quickie bullet-point highlights (just scratching the surface here, I assure you), in chronological order:

THURSDAY

• BB Wisely @ the Jig & Reel is Bridget Keaerny, Benjamin Lazar Davis, and Will Graefe, doing songwriter stuff through an progressive jazz lens and dang, did it work! Amazing Wilco cover taboot!
• Mivos Quartet plays Steve Reich @ St John’s: hurt my brain, in the best way
• WREST @ Pilot Light: the weirdest you-had-to-be-there shit of the weekend for me (which is saying something!)
• Exploding Star Orchestra @ Civic Auditorium: electricmiles shit of the highest order, one of those hard-to-leave sets of the weekend
• Kali Malone @ St John’s: one of my favorite moments of the first day was sitting in the back of the church in the dark as Kali and Stephen O’Malley played 4-hands on the glorious “surround sound” organ at St John’s. You have to experience this organ sometime.
• Vijay Iyer/Tyshawn Sorey/Linda May Han Oh @ Bijou: quite possibly the best jazz group going right now and, on this night, quite easy to skip for something else. I was glad to get a dose of this, because even in small bites, it’s quite delicious.
• Rich Ruth @ Old City PAC: instrumental groove perfection.
• Liturgy @ The Standard: loud metal that I normally wouldn’t go see, but damn, so damn good.

FRIDAY

• Bonny Light Horseman @ Civic Aud: seen em a bunch, but no way I wasn’t going to see ’em again. Love everything about this band and they did not disappoint
• Steve Gunn/David Moore @ PAC: ambient guitar/piano duo was one of the more lovely, head-clearing sets of the weekend. Just gorgeous. When a car alarm was going off outside during their last number, it somehow fit in perfectly, because of course.
• Arooj Aftab/Vijay Iyer/Shahzad Ismaily @ Tennesse Theatre: was this the live debut of this trio? Not sure I’ve seen the piano played as well as it was during this set, but the whole thing was just hypnotic magic in the dark at the Tennessee. Weekend highlight.
• Tyshawn Sorey Trio (Frisell/Lovano) @ Bijou: I mean, what’s not to love? One of 8 times I saw Frisell over the weekend and near the top. He owned the Bijou this year.
• Gyan Riley @ St John’s Cathedral: seen Gyan a lot, but this was one of the best I’ve seen him (until a few days later at Barbes). In the gorgeous space. Wow!
• Jake Xerxes Fussell @ Jig & Reel: Jake played every night in this venue, which is a back room of a pub and man, did he sound great. Steve Gunn came out and played the final bits with him and it was a match made in Knoxville heaven.
• Andrew Bird @ Civic Aud: there were a few artists at Big Ears that I’d call “genius” without irony and Bird is one of them. He’s playing in a trio for this tour and they were in the zone. Very cool Andrew-Bird-esque light show too.
• Caterina Barbieri @ Mill & Mine: glorious electronica grooves for the late night day closer. Loved this one.

SATURDAY

• Frisell/Riley/Lage @ Tennessee Theatre: three of my absolute favorite guitarists in a mutual-admiration-society acoustic trio playing stunning John Zorn compositions in a beautiful theater? Yes, yes, yes, and yes!
• Maeve Gilchris Harpweaver @ The Point: the Point was a schlep, but pure beauty sets like this made it worth the extra half-mile
• Kevin Morby @ Mill & Mine: quite simply my favorite songwriter these days and never a disappointment live. Seen him a dozen or so times and will keep going until proven otherwise.
• Charles Lloyd Chapel Trio (Frisell//Morgan) @ Civic Aud: a drop-dead version of Shenandoah led by Frisell was chef’s kiss. I think that was Frisell’s best of the weekend.
• Vijay Iyer + Parker Quartet @ St John’s: Everything at the Church was amazing, but this was a real jaw-dropper. Iyer’s compositions for string quartet were something else and this quartet was… something else. Wow.
• Luke Schneider @ Jig & Reel: mindblowing ambient pedal steel music in low lighting from Schneider. This might have been my favorite of the weekend.
• Zorn’s Bagatelles @ Tennesse Theatre: every one of these was special Mary Halvorson Quartet, Trigger, Nova Quartet, Asmodeus, four completely different feels, all capturing that Zorn wizardry at the highest level. Wow.
• SUSS @ Jig & Reel: more pedal steel ambient luxury. A great later-night set. Hypnotic magic.
• Charlotte Adigery/Bolis Pupul @ Mill & Mine: I love this duo, total dance party, so much fun, with a little smarts and commentary taboot. A great end to a killer day of music.

SUNDAY

• Gnostic Trio (Frisell/Wollesen/Emmanuel) @ Tennessee Theatre: harp, Frisell, vibraphone, one of my favorite Zorn bands and they sounded delicious to kick off the afternoon on the last day
• Sierra Hull @ Mill & Mine: it’s wild that you can have all this great music and still have some of the best freakin’ bluegrass at this festival. Hull is oe of the best and her band killed it at the M&M. They did a Flecktones cover that I still have stuck in my head because it was such a great version.
• James Brandon Lewis Trio @ The Standard: this one probably caught me more off guard than any set, wish I had caught more. Like Comet is Coming meets Wayne Krantz. Earplugs in sax-jazz, brash and boogie-ready. Wow!
• Kate NV @ Civic Auditorium: infectious, fun electronic music. I need to get more of that in my life
• Bela Fleck + Bassekou Kouyate @ St John’s. I mean, this was a late-announced secret set and how sweet was this. The kind of thing that makes this festival special. And, pro tip, wait for the second half and you walk right in without waiting. Excellent.
• Caroline @ Jackson Terminal: orchestral postrock in the round. Triumphant shit, I loved this one.
• Los Cubanos Postizos @ Mill & Mine: Marc Ribot is a national treasure and this is one of his best groups. Been a while, but they sounded great. Dance party, Ribot style.
• Cobra @ Tennessee Theatre: I’d seen Cobra once before so I wasn’t sure this was going to work as a festival closer, but MAN, did it work. A theater packed with weirdos going nuts for this like they’re at a Springsteen show, except they’re at this very esoteric thing with bizarre rules and shit. Hard to describe, but it was a freakin’ hoot!

I set out to try and capture the magnitude and frequency of Big Ears, the way it vibrates in ways that other music festivals just don’t, resonates in places that few things do. To try and describe how it encapsulates everything all at once and is also whatever you make of it. It’s also just a lot of fucking fun and a music lovers paradise. Not sure if I’ve succeeded, but I do hope you’ll consider joining us next year. You won’t regret it.