BIG EARS FESTIVAL 2020 • MARCH 26-29, KNOXVILLE, TN
Tickets On Sale Thursday, October 10, At Noon EDT
Information and Tickets: bigearsfestival.org
Click Here for First Round Highlights and Lineup
Drooling over each year’s Big Ears Festival announcement and lineup has become something of an expected activity in Knoxville this time of year. Newbies to the Big Ears experience may see the mind-boggling list as merely a dizzying array of cutting-edge musicians and performers, acts, and collaborations, some of which are undoubtedly new to them. Big Ears veterans, on the other hand, understand that the original lineup is just the tip of the iceberg, representing a general direction and flavor that one can expect, with gaps filled in and peripheral programs added later that fully flesh out the experience. Still, Big Ears has used the adjective “kaleidoscopic” to describe the 2020 festival lineup—admittedly, I am forced to concur.
The minimalist icon, Terry Riley, celebrating his 85th birthday this year, will certainly be one of the anchoring facets of the festival and will be involved in a number of performances, including with his guitarist son, Gyan Riley. Also iconic is Kronos Quartet, who will be celebrating their long-time association with Riley, as well as performing “A Thousand Thoughts,” a collaboration with filmmaker Sam Green. It is expected that Riley will do a solo performance on the new pipe organ at St. John’s Cathedral, a venue expected to see other notable solo performers.
Returning to Big Ears and also celebrating a milestone birthday—his 75th—is jazz icon Anthony Braxton, who can be found at the festival in a number of performances, including a solo show as well as his Diamond Curtain Wall Trio, and the world premiere of the Thunder Music Ensemble.
Performances by the equally iconic and multi-disciplinary artist Meredith Monk were absolutely packed in last year’s festival. So, she’s back this year—this time with the Bang on a Can All-Stars and their collaborative work, Memory Game.
Also high on the intrigue level — Caroline Shaw, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Partita for 8 Voices, will be presenting her work, including a collaboration with Sō Percussion.
Finnish classical cellist Anssi Karttunen has joined forces with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones to form a duo called Sons of Chipotle. I’ll bite.
While noting the presence of some intriguing roots music performers in this year’s festival, like the Haden Triplets, there seems to be a significant trend toward a broad, diverse range of jazz performers, both domestic and international. We asked Big Ears founder Ashley Capps if this was an intentional focus in this year’s festival.
“We made that decision to explore some other regional traditions like jazz,” Capps explains. “We kind of took the regional music concept and opened it up beyond Appalachia to move down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and start poking around out in the Caribbean.”
“Although we haven’t firmly articulated it, there’s something of a Haiti connection in this year’s festival. It’s the 20th anniversary of the Haiti earthquake—I don’t know if that’s something you want to celebrate an anniversary of, still…”
“Nathalie Joachim’s Women of Haiti program partially inspired this,” Capps offers. “Marc Ribot is going to be paying tribute to the Haitian classical guitarist Frantz Casseus, his teacher and friend for forty years. Andrew Cyrille, the drummer, is from Haiti—he’s one of the great jazz drummers of all time, he’ll be playing with Marc Ribot also. And he’s also playing with [the German jazz saxophonist] Peter Brötzmann. There’s this incredible—I call them a voodoo blues band from Haiti—called Moonlight Benjamin, is another of the festival highlights.”
In a broader sense, though, Big Ears 2020 is harkening back to the idea that the difference between old and new, big and small, famous and not so much, means very little when the house lights go down and music magic begins.
“One of the guiding principals behind Big Ears is to be multi-generational and to reach back to artists who have been highly influential, sometimes in very subtle ways,” Capps says. “They may not be known to a lot of people, but they are known to a lot of musicians and have been a tremendous influence on those musicians, and therefore, on music that people do know, even if they themselves are unknown.”
For example, Annette Peacock.
“Annette Peacock is an icon. I first became fascinated with her work in the late 60s and early 70s, she was married to the pianist Paul Bley for a while, wrote a lot of music that he and others performed, some really enigmatic jazz tunes. She was also one of the first artists to introduce Moog synthesizers into a jazz and improvisational context. And she also had this alternative rock slant to her work in the 70s and 80s. She rarely performs live, so I’m really excited to be bringing her.”
Tickets for Big Ears 2020 go on sale on Thursday, October 10 at bigearsfestival.org
