Big Ears Festival venues range from the Knoxville Museum of Art to downtown clubs such as the Square Room and Scruffy City Hall.
North Carolina singer Rhiannon Giddens will perform at this year's Big Ears.
San Francisco's legendary Kronos Quartet will headline Big Ears 2015 with a variety of performances and artist collaborations.
A lute player, an Inuit throat singer, and a punk rocker walk into a bar in Knoxville, Tennessee … That's not a joke. Actually, it's the setup for Big Ears, a music and arts festival making global waves with its no-holds-barred staging of what its organizers call the "indefinable avant-garde." As for the punchline? One of the world's most high-concept cultural experiences takes place right here in a relatively isolated city in the foothills of the Smokies.
Throughout the weekend-long festival, which returns to downtown Knoxville this March 27-29, music, art, and film merge and multiply in power as genres interweave and dissipate. True to its Big Ears name, the festival presents artists who demand thoughtful listening—whether it's a matter of discerning the message in a wall of distortion, the soul layered in a tape loop, or the precision of a symphonic crescendo. Boomer legends jam with Brooklyn hipsters. Minimalism meets rock bravado. Classical collides with folk. Museum galleries entertain thrash metal. Japanese urbanites mingle with local street buskers. Iconoclasts are welcomed as insiders.
If all goes according to plan, audiences will leave Big Ears with their minds opened, blown, boggled—and everything in between. It's apt to get a little weird at times, but that's just how the global intelligentsia who convene here like it.
The prolific Kronos Quartet holds court as this year's artists in residence, themselves an embodiment of the festival's exploratory credo. For the past 40 years, the San Francisco-based string quartet has released more than 50 albums that skewer and reinvent genres, its contemporary sound as steeped in Béla Bartók as it is in Jimi Hendrix. The 2015 lineup is stacked with other visionaries: performance artist Laurie Anderson, rock guitarists such as Wilco's Nels Cline and the National's Bryce Dessner, composers Terry Riley and Max Richter, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and jazz trio The Bad Plus, folk singers Sam Amidon and Rhiannon Giddens and many more.
A mix of big names and more obscure artists, the lineup avoids obvious boundaries while celebrating a diversity of discovery. "Seeing the look on people's faces and hearing them talk about an amazing artist they'd just seen that they hadn't heard of before they came to town is richly rewarding," Capps said.
Part and parcel of the Big Ears mission is also the way careful curation makes way for in-the-moment collaboration. Last year, Mark Ribot's guitar line riffed over Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, at once reframing the silent classic and becoming completely absorbed by it. With Andy Warhol's 1960s screen tests as their backdrop, husband-and-wife indie rockers Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips performed The Velvet Underground's "Not a Young Man Anymore" while a young Lou Reed sipped out of a glass Coke bottle, earning an outbreak of applause from the rapt audience.
And at the culminating performance of Big Ears 2014, guitarist Jonny Greenwood of mega-group Radiohead took the stage at Knoxville's landmark Tennessee Theatre for an ambient-rock take on minimalist composer Steve Reich's "Electric Counterpoint." Next came the New York-based Ensemble Signal's performance of Reich's 1976 masterpiece, "Music for 18 Musicians," a hypnotic pulsation of pianos, marimbas, xylophones, clarinets, strings and voices. A final bow by Reich himself capped off the weekend.
That's not just lip service. Rolling Stone has praised the festival as "arguably the classiest, most diverse festival in the country" as well as "the most ambitious avant-garde festival to emerge in America in more than a decade." Capps and downtown advocates say that the festival's rising star puts the spotlight on Knoxville's walkable core as well as its homegrown cultural community.
The quality of the festival venues play a key role in that impression. Since the Tennessee Theatre first opened as a cinema in 1928, Glenn Miller, Kenny Rogers, Patricia Neal, Bob Dylan, and B.B. King have darkened its door. In the Tennessee's turn as a Big Ears venue, Rolling Stone writer and Knoxville resident Matt Hendrickson wrote that the setting is "like watching a show inside a Faberge egg." New York Times critic Ben Ratliff called the space "a palace as big as an ocean liner, where sound reveals itself naturally and precisely" in his 2014 review.
In addition to the Tennessee Theatre, Big Ears takes over the 750-seat Bijou Theatre, an historic landmark that sits just a couple of blocks away and had its first heyday in the 1870s as a hotel. President Rutherford Hayes once gave a speech from its balcony. In the era after reopening as a theater in 1909, vaudeville shows kept its seats filled with both black and white patrons, then a rarity. In the decades since, the site has hosted everything from a fruit stand and used car lot to an adult movie house and burlesque stage. In 2006, the Bijou unveiled an extensive renovation. AC Entertainment manages its programming as well as that of the Tennessee—a business arrangement that was another major part of Capps' decision to locate the festival in Knoxville. "The Tennessee and the Bijou theaters are beautiful, extraordinary places to experience concerts and are especially appropriate for a lot of the music we bring to Big Ears," Capps said.
Performances also happen in intimate downtown music venues such as the Square Room as well as the nearby Knoxville Museum of Art. There's a smile in museum director David Butler's voice when he talks about the festival and the way it has stoked Knoxville's cultural energy. "When Big Ears first started off, none of us really knew what was going to happen or that it would be as big a thing as it was—sure, it sounded like fun," Butler recalled. Last year's festival doubled as a housewarming party for the newly renovated museum, with the packed opening night taking place under internationally renowned Knoxville glass artist Richard Jolley's massive, DNA-like installation, suspended like a celestial thought bubble above the crowd.
Michele Hummel, the director of the Knoxville Central Business Improvement District Management Corporation, credits the influx of visitors with bringing marked vitality to town. During last year's festival, downtown Knoxville swarmed with nearly 2,000 daily attendees. Some 65 percent of festival attendees came from more than 100 miles away, according to Hummel, which lead to sold-out downtown hotels and packed restaurants. "From an anecdotal perspective, I heard from one downtown restaurant that he cracked more eggs that morning than he had the whole time having his restaurant open," added Hummel.
It's no wonder the downtown business community rallied to revive Big Ears when the festival took a three-year hiatus after the 2010 festival. With a stated goal of expanding minds and experiences in Knoxville, the Aslan Foundation stepped up to underwrite last year's event through the Knoxville Central Business Improvement District. Following the successful return of the festival, the Aslan Foundation has pledged its continued support to the tune of $900,000 spread out over the next three years.
Capps intends for Big Ears 2015 to delve even deeper into Knoxville's cultural fabric—from "secret," last-minute shows at offbeat sites to a showpiece collaboration with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. In addition, this year a portion of each ticket sold will benefit music and arts education programs at Knoxville's Joy of Music School and Community School of the Arts, and students will have the chance to get involved with workshops and rehearsals. "The evolution is aimed at strengthening our ties in the community as well as the community's experience of the festival," Capps said.
Even so, not everyone in Knoxville has jumped on the Big Ears bandwagon. A couple of alternative events—or rebel festivals, depending on who you ask—emerged last year to showcase local talent. Hello City bills itself as "an indigenous companion" to Big Ears and last year brought four days of performances, DJ sets, and a gear show to art galleries and the Pilot Light, an experimental independent venue in Knoxville's Old City.
Though Big Ears has built a reputation for the way it eschews labels, this year's lineup makes a point to celebrate at least one distinction: its Appalachian underpinning. Folk music has always had a spot at Big Ears, but this year Capps has placed particular emphasis on traditional Appalachian influences. In fact, he found early inspiration for Big Ears at a new-wave music festival he attended several years ago, called Punkt, in a small sea town on the southern tip of Norway. Ground-breaking electronic music took center stage, but Capps walked away most struck by fiddle player Nils Økland's interpretation of traditional Norwegian folk songs.
The collaborative spirit of Big Ears flows through Amidon's Appalachian-inspired music, which is forged through a symbiotic relationship between ancestral hymns and tunes and radical reinterpretations. When Amidon sings a folk song, it becomes a platform for storytelling as well as experimental composition; the result manages to be rooted in heritage while simultaneously detached from time.
A gathering of the vanguard in Southern Appalachia, where lines between art forms are blurred, redrawn and then exploded? If the formula sounds like a second coming of Black Mountain College and its legendary Happenings, that's purely coincidental. Yet a certain spiritual connection is hard to ignore.
In fact, this past fall the Brooklyn Academy of Music staged a tribute to Black Mountain College's "spirit of radical democracy" in the form of a choral and visual collaboration called "Black Mountain Songs." Capps attended the performance and, in the excitement of the moment, sent out a missive on Twitter for Big Ears fans to take note.