Traversing and Digging Deep - Another Magical Big Ears
Four days in as close to a utopia as I've ever found, 2026 edition
Big Ears is the kind of community of shared interests that embodies the childhood dream of anyone who was a little obsessive about music (and maybe still is). Simultaneously, a vacation from the sometimes crushing stresses of the world, a reconnection to the world at large, and a reminder of the Mary Oliver adage ringing through my head, walking down the street, much of the weekend: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
Starting with the bus ride from my interstate-abutting hotel (which also shares a parking lot with a Hooters) and seeing two obviously fellow music nerds, connections leapt out, illuminated in shining script. The traditional WDVX Blue Plate special at Barley’s noon on Thursday established so many of what I kept noticing. The great Bloodshot Bill - Canadian “Popeye Rock” (props to Al Huckabee of Ugly Stick and Crimson Sweet for that excellent aphorism) - electrified the air with his deeply dialed-in blend of rockabilly, early R&B, vaudeville (using his voice like a classic horror movie host, a silky balladeer, and like Jack Teagarden’s trombone full of shudders and slurries) - getting deeper and more himself even as he casts such a wide net into the sea of culture over the years of my seeing him (from my hometown punk club Cafe Bourbon Street 20-ish years ago to multiple clubs in Brooklyn to Gonerfest on the other side of the state) and followed by Ukranian accordion and massed vocals band Yagody (finding joy even in the face of what’s happening in their home country).
I followed that with the first time I’ve ever gone to one of the film track, The Last Critic about Robert Christgau, which was moving in a way that even surprised the guy who’s writing at length about this experience and writes about culture every single week, partly because of the extended cameo from Cincinnati band (composed of dear friends-of-friends) Wussy who Christgau calls his favorite American band and beloved Cincy institution Shake It Records.
That sense of the groove, of the music in our bodies, passed between us, is one of the purest forms of the communal love of music for many of us and that sensation rippled throughout my track of the festival this year. Starting my festival proper with the shuttered Greyhound station (an understandably sore spot for many Knoxville residents because they got done the same way Columbus did, the buses now stop far from downtown with no shelter or bathrooms instead of this centrally located downtown terminal) with Turning Jewels to Water, a collaboration of experimental turntablist Val Jeanty who I’ve been a fan of since first seeing her in a collaboration with artist Mickalene Thomas, drummer/composer Terri Lyne Carrington, and trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, and Indian percussionist Ravish Momin, and the most exciting live synthesized percussion I’ve maybe ever seen - drawing from their heritages, finding the seams those traditions blended and productively rubbed one another raw, and making the walls shake.
My favorite set of the entire weekend happened in that same location and hit those same pleasure receptors - adventurous LA chamber ensemble Wild Up played the disco work of Arthur Russell in the most unhinged dance party I’ve ever been to at a Big Ears (not damning with faint praise, every year there are several contenders in fierce competition) with a sweaty, writhing dance floor closing out Friday night. As the various musicians wandered through the audience I worried they might literally get ripped apart by our collective enthusiasm or crushed in a Mary Tyler Moore-finale style vicelike group hug. Even walking out into the street to call a car back to the hotel, hearing the echoing “Bang, go bang, go bang bang” through the streets, left my spine trembling on the way to sleep.
A subtler sense of that groove permeated this same space on a couple other favorite sets: I dropped into the XL version of the great LA quintet SML - augmented here by a second drummer, International Anthem stalward Ben Lumsdaine and astonishing Chicago trumpeter Marquis Hill - with the band seated in the round on the low stage, almost imposible to see as they made eye contact with one another that frustration forced a closer listening, absorbing the shifting, metamorphosizing shapes like mercury rolling on a mirror, joining and dividing.
The great poet Saul Williams, with a band assembled by percussionist Carlos Niño of free jazz lifers, including Darius Jones, fused empathy, close attention, and a powerful oratory tradition as Williams called back to the vintage slam poetry cadence he helped sear in so many of our brains with Slamnation and Slam, even dropping a sample of his Crucialpoetics track with “I am the son of sha-clack-clack” while also pointing a way to a better future based not only in community but shared accountability if we can let go of the racial capitalism and the things that divide and exhaust us.
Those influential strains feeding into Williams struck me in other contexts: Poet R. B. Morris and mixed-media artist Andy Saftel set us all on fire with discussions of the Knoxville scene and how it reverberates to other locales and other families. Gospel-disco band Annie and the Caldwells addressed the church's oratorical style in a more directly programmatic way, keeping the noon crowd dancing, clapping, and testifying.
The powerful grooves of the African diaspora burned brightly in Brit-funk force Cymande - who I never thought I’d see, much less with the kind of intensity they brought to the middle of Saturday - and the free-funk space jazz power trio led by drummer Nate Smith (where I saw several Cymande members in the crowd rocking). The hip-hop/country skewering of Cleo Reed (one of the most powerful songwriting voices working), in the thick soundtracky (like Barry Adamson if the basis was hip-hop instead of post-punk) pummeling dance party of Deantoni Parks’s Technoself, and the gauzy lacerating loops of Qu’ran Shaheed all knocked me for a loop and spoke to one of my favorite elements of the festival, bringing in additional curation as (I believe) the latter three were all part of the umbrella of SML/Jeff Parker/Openness Trio saxophonist and synthesist Josh Johnson.
That community also showed up in other contexts. I saw guitarist Nels Cline lend his intense commitment to tone, groove and listening to the collective quartet with John Medeski, Billy Martin, and Scott Metzger, and his own Lovers project backed by the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra with one violin and one cello but mostly using the reeds to mimic strings Duke Ellington style, as well as a drop-in with Steven Bernstein’s Millenial Territory Orchestra for a ripping solo on Sly Stone’s “Stand!” one of the foundational texts of contemporary music that still vibrates with an urgency. Patricia Brennan and Kaoru Watanabe also put together large ensembles that honored every member and let each member speak in their own language (I’m still mulling over what Tomeka Reid and Chris Thile talked about with Nate Chinen regarding shaping their own instrumental languages, which resonated with so much I saw and heard this weekend).
Another jazz elder statesman, Dave Douglas, who I’ve been a fan of for 30 years, reunited with longtime friend John Zorn’s Masada Quartet in what I heard were packed and astonishing shows, but also reaffirmed his commitment to younger, fresher talent on GIFTS, maybe his most audacious quintet yet and I’ve seen both the earlier two quintets many times in their prime, working with Ellington’s Sacred Concert material into a ebuillent, swinging, atmospheric statement of today with some of the best players including sonic sculptor/guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, cellist Tomeka Reid, saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, and drummer Ian Chang. Watching Douglas step over to the side and delighting in the rest of the group’s interplay put the lie to anyone who thinks getting older means you get more set in your ways, that conservatism is a default. I walked out of that room in joyous tears, texting my dearest friends, and walked across a river I’d never crossed before.
It’s a privilege to make enough to afford the not-cheap tickets, the staying, the travel here, but this year I took some steps to make this a cheaper trip - staying five miles north of town and going to the General Admission tier instead of the downtown hotel and Premier middle tier I’d done the last few years - and I’m happy to say those two things not only didn’t diminish my experience (I was only shut out of one thing I truly cared about and only had two lines I decided not to wait in) they enhanced it by suggesting some more deliberate choices with my 28 sets.
Thanks for taking me there without me going there, wonderful.
Great write-up! Thank you!