"We don't serve fine wine in half pints, buddy," is one of my favorite lines from Robert Ashley's mysterious magical opera Perfect Lives. And while I didn't see that episode ("The Bar") in Varispeed Collective's rotating site-specific take on this defining piece of the last century, it recurred and shifted for me over and over again in this year's beautiful weekend in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival.
Sets that made me grateful for the work I'd done to meet them on their own terms, that rubbed against what I thought I understood, and that seemed to put the lie to the truism in that line - why the fuck can't we serve fine wine in half pints? That's a deliberate misunderstanding - the bar is the world is society and the work both documents and chafes against that, but what makes it so delicious is the way that idea, that sentence opens up when you turn its facets in the light.
What happens if we take the gatekeeping out and present this serious, exciting, exacting music to you as a gift? Hearing Nate Chinen interview Vijay Iyer and Mary Halvorson one morning also sparked with that thought, as the three of them talked about Anthony Braxton being one of the ways Ashley Capps found to integrate the heavy improvisation/jazz track into what started as a heavily "new music" festival. Halvorson talked about one of the great lessons of Braxton as a mentor being (and I hope I got this right; I wrote it at the time), "Take from everything but don't be beholden to anything."
Varispeed Collective, Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives: The Park
Watching those lines get blurred but also seeing artists and pieces that have a bright-burning single focus, that have spent lives drilling down and compressing into a perfect diamond, and having those experiences a block away, a five-minute walk in the sunshine, from one another, is the greatest gift Big Ears gives me. A friend, when I mentioned I was trying to write a more "formal" report like last year and not just social media exuberance, said it would be hard not to have this be a breathless list of highlights - and then, and then, and then.
They're right, and I don't pretend this isn't at least partly that. But the thoughtfulness of the music on a micro level and the thoughtful sweep of curation meant that more often than not I walked out of a set considering it with what I saw an hour ago, what I saw yesterday, how one colored the perception of the other. And those thoughts didn't weigh me down, didn't make the festival-going experience too academic - they made it more joyous. And if you're not at least trying for the most joy you can get, I don't think anyone can help you.
There's no such thing as an objective look at themes through a year of any festival, especially not one with arms spread as wide as Big Ears - not from an outsider like me. At best, for an observer, objectivity is a benevolent pipe dream. At worst, it's a craven con. I can only comfortably talk about what I saw - 28ish sets, barring things I only stayed for a few minutes of because it was too crowded or I just couldn't get with what they were throwing down. But looking over what caught my eye, I noticed strong themes of history - archiving, working with histories, grappling with ancestors and lines of succession - and community, what it means to work together and what we get out of opening ourselves up.
Lonnie Holley and Friends, UT Downtown Gallery
What caught my eye there is also colored by privilege - the privilege of being in Columbus, where a lot of tours stop (or, at the very least, stop within a couple of hours drive: Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Pittsburgh are all going to see me in the next few months). My goal for the twin investments of time and money in Big Ears was to focus on sets I was excited about that I wasn't likely to get to see again or at least any time soon, even if they're bands I love.
For example: Los Lobos is one of my top ten live bands of all time, but I've seen them a dozen times and they'd have a hard time topping that stellar set at Rose a few years ago with The Mavericks; Mountain Goats have some of the songs that mean the most to me of the last 20 years but similarly, seen them a lot and recently; Alison Russell made my favorite record last year by a mile, but she seems a likely candidate for making an appearance nearby soon; Adeem the Artist is riding a tidal wave of deserved acclaim for White Trash Revelry, which is one of the most heartbreaking records I've heard in years, also seems likely they'll come by somewhere close soon.
Lonnie Holley with Mourning [A] BLKStar, Mill and Mine
After a long day of leading and presenting on conference calls from my hotel room, those twin senses of history and community - and how they intersect - hit me as strongly as the southern sunshine. Georgia's prized son Lonnie Holley, who originally broke through to wider media and white audience consciousness through his stellar visual art and began making beauitful, uncategorizable records in 2012, played several times around Knoxville and also had his visual art on display in the University of Tennessee's Downtown Gallery and the Knoxville Museum of Art as part of the Tennessee Triennial. Cleveland's avant-funk collective Mourning [A] BLKstar share similar senses of curiosity and vision, afrofuturism paired with deep excavations of personal histories, so pairing them sounded like a match made in heaven and it exceeded those expectations handily at the Mill and Mine for the first set I caught, before the Thursday sun had even gone down.
The Mourning [A] BLKstar folks - bass, drums, percussion, keys, trumpet, trombone, three backing singers - were augmented by Alabama native Lee Bains III (who I loved in The Dexateens but whose Glory Fires band left me speechless last year as they've come into their own in a way that's perfectly of the moment) on guitar, and that band wove together styles and illuminated Holley's songs in a way that frequently moved me to tears. Holley sing-speaking a story that started like a ramble but revealed itself to be perfectly chiseled about being placed in the corner as a child and how he learned to find wonder and imagination there, how he "Learned to hear the spirit in the corner," was met with a gorgeous call and response by the band's three singers on the refrain "I survived," casting the song as an ars poetica, an origin story, and a reminder to keep going, was one of many arrangements that made Holley's statement "I ain't gonna lie, we haven't practiced - we're giving it to you raw," all the more stunning.
That sense of the song as vitally important but also malleable based on what other collaborators bring to the party, also shone through in the other Lonnie Holley set I caught in the Downtown Gallery on Saturday, amidst a vibrant selection of his recent work (I knew the sculpture and video facets, his paintings were new to me in the best way) again featured Bains along with a second guitarist, and an almost entirely new suite of collaborators including Shazad Ismaily on bass, a stunning cellist and drummer who seemed to buffet the music along. A soaring song about his Grandmother orbiting around the line "How can I sing a love song?" was one of my top five moments in a weekend that seemed to knock the breath out of my lungs every hour.
When I left Mill and Mine and walked to the Tennessee Theater on Thursday, I was determined to see one of my handful of must-see-no-exceptions acts, Terry Allen and the Mystery Panhandle Band. Similar to Holley, whom he's seven years older than, Allen may have more acclaim for his visual art (anyone in Columbus knows those deer sculptures looking over the river) but starting in the '70s he provided a shining light for the new breed of Lubbock musicians including Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock, and added a surrealist tinge and a healthy disdain for straight reportage to the Texas school of songwriting while still honoring and validating that tradition: when Guy Clark passed, the wake was at Terry and Jo Harvey Allen's ranch.
Richard Bowden and Bukka Allen from Terry Allen’s Panhandle Mystery Band, Tennessee Theater
Still in damn fine voice, Allen brought a crack five-piece band of long time friends and collaborators with the kind of mutual trust that will let them go anywhere, including a thundering, supple rhythm section behind his own piano and vocal, the legendary Richard Bowden (Linda Ronstadt, The Maines Brothers Band, Tish Hinojosa, everybody named earlier) on violin and mandolin, Allen's son Bukka Allen on keys and accordion, and great Texas songwriter Shannon McNally on additional vocals (there was a David Byrne cameo I didn't see as I was trying to make sure I didn't get shut out of my next show).
Allen dug into his past for unassailable, gnarled classics like "Helena Montana" - "The only song I ever wrote about a rodeo" - with its "Yi yi whoopie ty e yi" chorus dripping in irony; the snarling hard-ass wistfulness of "Amarillo Highway"; the defiant fury of "There Oughta Be a Law Against Southern California" with its infectious and mean hook and lines like "And I remember her Daddy, big as a truck. He said 'Fuck with me, boy, if you wanna fuck,'" and the interplay of the band made these songs feel as fresh as if they were brand new. But the quality of power of the new songs - the wrenching postmortem for a small town crumbling piece by piece, "Death of the Last Stripper," (which Allen wrote with his wife Jo Harvey and with Dave Alvin) - kept it from ever feeling like a museum piece or some hollow victory lap.
That sense of digging into a past to create a language was on brilliant display at my favorite - always - venue of the festival, the Bijou Theatre, for Cleveland native Joe Lovano's Trio Tapestry. Joe Lovano's run of 90s-2000s records on Blue Note were as influential on me as any living saxophone player I've ever heard as he alternated between hard blowing firebrand exercises, tributes to artists like Sinatra and Caruso, and more avant-garde contexts. This match with pianist Marilyn Crispell, who I discovered on her records with Anthony Braxton and I've been a fan ever since, she was the first artist I ever took Anne to see at the Village Vanguard, and Carmen Castaldi whose work I didn't know so well, was both a lesson in the power of using the past to find your own language, and the delicious sparks when those languages intersect. "Rare Beauty" reminded me of Monk, a smoky free ballad that shattered into a glass mosaic and then found a groove. "Garden of Expression" started as a fractured film noir and a fugue sprouted up in the middle of it. Every song deepened the one before and shifted perceptions, and the most beautiful thing (saying something) was watching Lovano nod, in awe, or even do a little dance, when Crispell or Castaldi were soloing.
Marilyn Crispell and Joe Lovano from Trio Tapestry, Bijou Theater
One of my favorite things about Big Ears is almost everyone waits to leave until the artist is between songs or between movements to lessen disruption for everybody else. In practice, this meant about 40 minutes into Trio Tapestry, there was what felt like a mass exodus for folks trying to get to another set. This prompted someone behind me to deadpan, "Wow, that last one really pissed them off," setting off a round of laughs.
Other highlights for me that also shone a light on that sense of tradition came from some cross-generational pairings. Tarbaby, the collective trio of pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Nasheet Waits, have a long history of pairing with saxophonists but never feeling like they're a rhythm section welded to a "guest artist." I'd seen them as a standalone unit and with the since-retired Oliver Lake, and I'd seen David Murray who appeared with them here in other contexts, but I had a feeling this meeting would be special and Lord, was it. Ballads snowballed into apocalyptic statements; a hard-swinging blues built in intensity until it was a shuddering, firey freight train. Murray redefined free tenor playing when he burst on the scene in the '70s and he kept doing it through those classic World Saxophone Quartet records. Evans, Revis, and Waits, with dozens of collaborators, have expanded and exploded the language of their respective instruments (I can still remember the first time I heard each of these artists). This set refined and honed that attack in the service of beauty and of speaking out.
Eric Revis and David Murray, Bijou Theater
Trio Imagination rose from the ashes of the great Trio 3 with Andrew Cyrille on drums and Reggie Workman on bass, both in their 80s, wanting to continue their powerful statements after Oliver Lake retired and lighting on Cuban pianist David Vireilles (not quite 40) who's made a stunning impression on records by Chris Potter, Henry Threadgill, and others. This was a chance to see artists who defined the language as we know it - Workman with John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard and many others; Cyrille with Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams, Leroy Jenkins, and many others - still find inspiration in playing off the ideas of someone who grew up absorbing their work as part of his diet of playing, still delighting in sparking off one another. Watching Reggie Workman shoot a look at one of his partners and play a line, arco or pizzicato, that shifted the entire direction of the piece, simultaneously knocked me back in my chair with, "Jesus, he brought that power to John Coltrane," and also forget that history and just be wowed by the empathy and telepathy on display.
More direct grappling with history from the bandstand abounded here and paid off big. Composer Kali Malone's brushing-up-against-midnight set at the St. John's Cathedral pipe organ, stretching out these long tones and feeling like she was playing the air, recalled the traditions of that music, near and far, from Messiaen to Radigue (made even more apparent in Malone's synthesizer sets elsewhere in the festival) to Oliveros, but was a voice I hadn't quite heard before.
Kali Malone, St John’s Cathedral
I love her records, and I was utterly entranced and struck being in a church soaking it in live. The adventurous New York string quartet JACK took on composer Catherine Lamb's work with microtones and difficult intonation in that same church on a different afternoon and brought out the beauty and mystery in her ineffable approach.
Guitarist Marc Ribot's ever-refreshing relationship with John Zorn paid off in several appearances around the Zorn Marathon festival-within-a-festival celebrating the composer's 70th birthday, and in seeing him pop in other sets with collaborators and friends of his. He also brought two sets as the name above the marquee. One I've been looking forward to since I first heard mention of it, The Jazz-Bins, took the crowd at The Standard (the most club-like venue) to a classic Saturday night jukejoint church, but with all the wildness and frayed edges that might not get talked about with soul jazz or instrumental R&B anymore.
Teaming up with B-3 virtuoso Greg Lewis - who I've seen a few times as Organ Monk, including at Columbus' Jazz and Rib Fest - and a great young drummer who I'm 99% sure was not the names I found online, they tore through long, sweaty, grooves that simultaneously reminded all of us Ribot played with both Brother Jack McDuff and Solomon Burke and brought every color of their collective palettes and every taste they've developed to bear.
Ribot's Los Cubanos Postizos, always a welcome return to the stage, closed out my personal festival on Sunday night with the songs that got me to deep dive into salsa, a bandstand full of love and decades-long friendships with Ribot, including keyboardist Anthony Coleman and bassist Brad Jones, and a reminder that this was never intended as Cuban music, it's New York music, as the composer being paid tribute to, Arsenio Rodriguez, started on the music that made his name - and the collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie and others that introduced the world to Afro-Cuban music - after emigrating to NYC in 1952.
Mary Halvorson and two members of the Mivos Quartet, Bijou Theater
Mary Halvorson, a favorite of mine since seeing her with Trevor Dunn's Trio Convulsant and in duo with Jessica Pavone 20+ years ago, returned with the ensembles from her two great new records last year, Amaryllis and Belladonna, as well as appearing in Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra and a slew of the Zorn sets. I only managed to catch one, but it was a doozy. Her collaboration with The Mivos Quartet on the Belladonna material brought a vibrancy and a richness I didn't fully comprehend from the recording - watching the way that quartet interpreted her language, and more clearly reminding me how much it was her language, an extension instead of just voice-with-strings was a marvel. As was seeing Nate Chinen, one of my writing heroes, interview her in conjunction with fellow MacArthur Genuis Award recipient Vijay Iyer (another favorite of mine but whose shows hit capacity before I could get to).
I sought out less of the groove that characterized my time last year, but the ass-shaking I did was next level. Yoking this to my personal history, one of my gateway drugs for live instrumental or avant music was seeing Chicago Underground Duo with Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor at an iteration of the art space Firexit (RIP) with my buddy Matt Holman at 19 or 20. So it was a beautiful thing to catch Mazurek in another duo, New Future City Radio with Damon Locks whose Black Monument Ensemble destroyed me last year at the Lincoln, kicking off my Saturday the the Standard. Locks on spoken word, queuing up beats and samples, and musical curve balls, and Mazurek locking eyes with him and throwing out percussion lines and blistering trumpet and a drum machine of his own, was an improv tightrope that also reminded me of all the so-called alternative hip hop I loved in early college.
Rob Mazurek and Damon Locks of New Future City Radio
Meridian Brothers, the shapeshifting project of Bogota, Colombia's Eblis Álvarez, tore the roof off the Jackson Terminal with powerful, sexy grooves that touched on weirdo '70s fusion, deep funk, early house, and a panoply of Latin styles including a couple of ferocious tunes from last year's "collaboration" with fictional salsa band El Grupo Renacimiento. I left that room wrung out after an hour, clothes stuck to me with sweat.
'70s hard-grooving gospel group The Staples Jr. Singers, after their lost classic When Do I Get Paid resurfaced, made a couple of barnstorming appearances at the festival and the one I saw in tiny scotch bar Jig and Reel was a beautiful testament to spirit, tuning into a powerful vibration.
Staples Jr Singers, Jig and Reel
The keen attunement to what's about to bubble up is one of the finest features of the festival. I didn't make it to much of the singer-songwriter track though I'm glad it exists, but catching Peter One, a huge country star in his native Cote d’Ivoire before emigrating to the US in the '90s at the Jig and Reel with a crackling five-piece band as he tore through a series of gorgeous songs in English and French, was one of those moments, like the Staples Jr. Singers, where I couldn't believe I was in that room hearing something that beautiful. The guitar work around those songs (I'm blanking on his name, but I met the lead guitar player through Todd May when the guitarist was playing with Lilly Hiatt) interweaving with Luke Schneider's pedal steel also got me to check Schneider's solo set of pedal steel atmospheres.
James Brandon Lewis, one of my favorite saxophone players from the past few years, has steadily broadened his pallette, working with instrumental rock bands like The Messthetics and also free jazz forebears like William Parker. Riding his justifiably acclaimed record Eye of I, he brought a trio of Josh Werner on bass and Chad Taylor (Tortoise, Fly or Die, Chicago Underground Duo) on drums, for a mix of oceanic grooves, hard hitting cri de coeurs and mixes of moods and colors that were consistently surprising but always organic and right.
Josh Werner, Chad Taylor, James Brandon Lewis, at The Standard
Etran de l'Air took the Tuareg blues-rock that's been having a moment in the last few years with Bombino, Tinariwen, and Mdou Moctar and while it will appeal to any fan of those great groups, it brings in a punchier, rawer more garage rock sensibility with beautifully frayed drums and sharp, spiky solos.
Tying a few of those threads together, I love seeing the ways Big Ears has really stepped up its game in community engagement over the last few years. Working with local schools, providing scholarships, engaging nonprofits, shinging light on local musicians and clubs keeping these flames alive, and a strain of free programming open to the public helping make this expensive festival feel less hermetic, less closed off. My favorite personal example this year, part of their street party taking over the Southern Terminal (originally a working railroad terminal but a winery and event space in the years I've been going) with a big stage, food trucks, and more of the beer-in-a-parking-lot vibe I started out associating with "music festival."
Andrea Kukuly Uriarte of Rica Chicha at Southern Terminal
This year's iteration turned me onto locals Rica Chicha who might be my favorite new band. Led by singer-guitarist Andrea Kukuly Uriarte, who fronted a blistering-hot band featuring a three-piece horn section, bass, drums, keys, a percussionist, and a banjo player, digging into psychedelic rock steeped in Peruvian and Argentinian traditions. Their recasting of Dolly Parton's East Tennessee anthem "Jolene" as a cumbia about a woman in love with another woman was the most heartwarming thing I saw all weekend.
I'm as fatigued by festivals as anybody. But once in a while, I'm lucky to get a four-day weekend like this that lets me put aside the workday and other responsibilities and dig in. An opportunity and context to focus on what I'm seeing and where we all are, to revel in appreciation for being here and the people I'm experiencing it with. And nothing gives me that experience more consistently and fulfillingly than Big Ears
Peter One, Jig and Reel
Richard's a native to Columbus and had his head turned around by campus record stores, used bookshops, bars, and too many older, cooler friends than he can name. He still thinks the next thing he sees just might be the best thing he's ever seen.