Ears!!! It already came and went!!?!? Aaaargh!! Needless to say, we got our steps in. We did our best to see what needed to be seen, not to agonize over what had to be missed. The choices are always tough, yet easy; what’s in front of you is all that’s important. Here are some words about what’s now behind us.
THURSDAY
And already lamenting. There’s nothing on the unsanctioned Pilot Light ‘What For?’ lineup that could remotely compare to last year’s Geologist solo hurdy-gurdy performance (although I wish I’d made more of an effort to catch Blunt Mansion again, dammit). So much to look forward to, though, at the actual festival of the Big Ears. Three things right from the starting gun that all seem unmissable; what does one do? Catch the first song of Deerhoof’s set at the good ol’ Mill & Mine, make sure it doesn’t descend into some glorious hourlong noisefest or something, stay for one more and then force yourself to hop over to Ches Smith’s Clone Row at The Standard. Bathe for 20 minutes or so in the delighted virtuosity, then commandeer an e-scooter and jet over to a church where Chris Rosenau and Nick Sandborn are playing stuff from their new album as a trio with Joe Westerlund. You’re still high on a record-setting opening day for your Brewers; it’s a blissful victory party. You’re on top of the world, it’s only an hour into the festival. You’ve chosen correctly so far.
The Rosenau/Sanborn set took me back at times to the early days of Collections of Colonies of Bees, the gentle slopes of acoustic guitars manipulated in unexpected ways, but with the addition of Westerlund’s organic percussion for an extra dimension of propulsion. Shades of early Juana Molina as well, so easy to get lost in. Lost is where you want to be.
There’s always the push-and-pull between the will-be-great and the almost-surely-will-be-great at Big Ears, as in how many times do I actually need to see Mary Halvorson play/knowing each time that nothing else will be better… So you check out new venues, and I’m somewhat relieved that everyone agrees, it smelled like a public transit station at The Greyhound but SML (pictured below) made it tolerable. It was very ‘krautrock’ in the late-‘60s/early-‘70s sense, pre-motorik, seemingly every transition from chaos to groove determined by bassist Anna Butterss, kind of a revelation on the electric as I’d only previously seen them on the upright. We could only take one set in that unmoving wet air, though; atmosphere IS important. SML were so good, I might’ve caught all six sets they played over the weekend if they’d been in a different venue.
On a recommendation from a friend and fellow radio DJ we made our way to the Shrunken Elvis set at another new Big Ears venue, Barley’s, almost a Nashville strip-style tavern with tall ceilings and a small stage. I tend to be resistant to guitar duos and trios because y’know how about some other instruments? Make it a little more interesting nine times outta ten? Big Ears will prove ya wrong in so many ways, and I was way overdue to finally see Rich Ruth, who’s here practically every year but I only end up catching him as part of Lonnie Holley’s makeshift band or something. This was a marvelous chill-but-engaging set of “jams with drum machine” as Ruth put it.
Then it was already time for the main course: Marc Ribot’s Shrek (below). And all this time I thought Ceramic Dog was his best band. To be fair, bassist Sebastian Steinberg was the only original Shrekker besides Ribot to take the stage at the Bijou Theatre Thursday night; you might say the material spoke for itself, or you might say, as Ribot did, “We finally learned how to play it.” For Ears, the ensemble featured drummers Chad Taylor and Ches Smith and they played with rare synchronicity, being two of Earth’s drummers most likely to correctly anticipate Ribot’s whims. Halvorson would be the combo’s second guitarist, and hearing/watching these two maestros’ rapport during the hour of avant-grunge experimentation was almost beyond words. To my ears, “Hoist the Bloody Icon High” was more like an insane improv session with occasional teases of “Hoist the Bloody Icon High”, whereas the title/eponymous tune (edit: I think this was actually a song called “Pulse”, not “Shrek”) was essentially an extended black metal jam, only the two guitarists’ feet were muting their distortion for most of it, resulting in intense pick-drones and occasional amplified ambushes. This was a far cry from the album version; I’d never witnessed anything like this approach before. I don’t think it’s SUPPOSED to be funny necessarily but I couldn’t stop laughing through this whole piece. You’ll find yourself in that state of mind a lot at Big Ears, pure incredulity. The spirit of the project’s lone 1994 record was certainly alive in the new configuration, the first time the material’s been performed since 2008 as far as I can glean; the sextet just took it way beyond the bounds of the compositions, as “expected”. It was the new greatest thing ever.
What was guaranteed to be great? Medeski, Martin, Metzger & Cline, that’s what. Maybe I could’ve caught the last half hour but I was too beat. Two of those guys just blew my mind completely a couple weeks ago; sometimes you don’t need to mess with the memory. Rrrright.
FRIDAY
Mistimed my uber but still managed to catch the last 20 minutes or so of the first John Zorn installment of this year: Masada (pictured above). As in, THE Tzadik OGs, playing from arguably the most iconic songbook in the vast and venerable Zorn canon. (La-di-da, I play with Joey Baron at noon and Dave Lombardo at midnight…what a bastard!) And here they were, turning a mythical body of work into four old friends standing around talking shit at each other jazz. In the most loving possible sense! You don’t get to see Zorn in such a mode very often, not really needing to conduct, nobody up there his puppy dog; what a blessing that we still have this legendary quartet available for special occasions.
I didn’t have much of a plan for the next 10 hours or so, actually. I had a few vague ideas and headed north, realizing at some point that the Mill had both reliably pleasant restrooms and water fountains. And then tUnE-yArDs (below) sucked me right in. There’s just been nothing they’ve released in studio form that did much for me, but now I get the impression I gave up prematurely. They put out a surprisingly potent sound for a two-person indie-rock act, and the performance was far more interactive and frankly outlandish than I would’ve ever guessed. Merrill Garbus dedicated “How Big Is The Rainbow” to the cause of making the Tennessee legislature’s ongoing attacks on trans rights go away; the crowd participation involved some meditative mass harmonies that took the experience to another level. Then came the centerpiece: tUnE-yArDs’ sometimes-maligned (but we have better things to do now, right?) “Gangsta” segued into a stunningly effective partial cover of “Killing In The Name”. I’m not saying I suddenly became a huge fan, but I definitely needed the catharsis of that shoutalong. Would you believe, back in the ‘90s, we felt those Rage Against The Machine songs pretty deeply. It was one of several moments that could’ve easily provided a necessary comfort or release for a fragile soul in a crowd, and I think Garbus deserves a lot of credit for being that lightning rod with seemingly little or no regard for decorum or preserving an image.
This was my unspoken rule for the day: if you can’t tear yourself away, stay. I could at this point, though, because it was clear that the line between endearing and obnoxious is one Garbus might blur at any moment and I didn’t want to love this any less. And I was hungry.
I’m here to tell you that on this my fifth visit to Knoxville I finally tried The Knoxville at Curious Dog. A messy concoction but each bite was sublime, a perfect flavor balance. I gotta try all the other flavors now; luckily I plan on coming back to town on a yearly basis. Just around the corner was Black Box, the new name for the Old City Performing Arts Center, where percussionist William Winant and harpist Zeena Parkins played an enchanting duo set—even more pristine after Parkins stopped the show to ask that the HVAC system be turned off (it was pretty loud).
Next I had to catch a little BASIC (above) back at Barley’s; it had been years since I saw Chris Forsyth and although I was craving some guitar heroics, this was a more meditative drone-y project, Doug McCombs of Tortoise and Mikel Patrick Avery from Natural Information Society anchoring the zones. Then the dreaded 3:00 hour was upon us, the dire conflicts. Fortunately, Big Ears has a way of killing your hero-worshipping urges; the first year I wouldn’t have DREAMED of skipping a Ribot set of any kind, for instance, but opportunities to see Joe Westerlund (below) work his percussive magic are rarer. Plus we knew Rosenau and Sanborn would be joining in, and Westerlund’s material would be a more dynamic (less suitable for a church?) starting point for the trio to reimagine. The opening solo piece was entrancing; the Chris & Nick portion sounded like something that should be the birth of a new band.
I tore myself away, however, because there was some new Jeff Parker project playing at the Mill & Mine called Expansion Trio (above), with Ben Lumsdaine on drums and gadgetry and Jeremiah Chiu (a busy man this weekend) on modular synths. When I walked in the band was absolutely cookin’; I couldn’t say what any song titles were but there was at least one tasty Parker composition that must be new. The trio generated incredible heat a couple times and navigated subtler jazzy territory with equal aplomb, the very stuff we drive from Milwaukee to Knoxville every year for.
While the first year we came to this festival I was determined to see every bit of Zorn I could get my ears on, this year I was more interested in poking around. A leisurely dinner then led to Miles Okazaki Trickster at Regas Square, until we got the secret show alert: Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley at Postmodern Sound Exchange (below), a small seated performance area in Jackson Terminal. Luckily we were nearby and managed to get in after only a brief queueing. Even more luckily, this wasn’t sheer random hellnoise; it did at first seem like a simple historical nerd-out without much chance of transcendence, and then it transcended, the improv seized by purpose and drive in a way that never really happened, for instance, at the hugely-anticipated Moore/John Paul Jones Big Ears collab a couple years ago.
Next we decided to check out Patrick Watson back at the Mill, which turned out to be our favorite new discovery of the weekend. The frontman named his band literally after himself; Patrick Watson the band played folkish indie rock without much stylistic limitation. Wilson himself is a compelling singer, though the addition of Ariel Engle from Broken Social Scene was a major bonus; this wasn’t their first collaboration and it was obvious. The two of them huddled around a single mic with guitarist Simon Angell for one particular tune and the harmonies were simply gorgeous. They were nearing the end of their set when the next secret show alert popped up. Most years these tend to be in the realm of ‘hmm yeah I’m sure that would be cool’; this year they were hitting my sweet spots, and this bonus helping of Halvorson and Ribot (below), well I couldn’t resist. It wasn’t just a series of guitar duets; the two played a wide variety of stuff, Ribot reading from Nelson Mandela’s 1964 Rivonia trial speech during one piece, and he even started blowing on some kind of small horn at one point. “That was really weird!” came a familiar voice from the crowd after this inscrutable piece. “Shahzad…” Marc responded. “My own bandmates show up to heckle me.”
Next it was time to head to the Tennessee Theatre for Dirty Three (above), whom I’d never seen before and will certainly try to again if I get the chance. They stopped by Big Ears on their first U.S. tour in 14 years, and we quickly learned that Warren Ellis’s shtick would be significantly more exaggerated as frontman than as Nick Cave’s slightly-more-hinged sideman. The Jim Morrison quote that announced the band’s entrance gave it away: Ellis was a vulgar mockery of a swaggering drunk rock star (we hoped?) and the band played noisy post-rock in between and during his rants and cavorting. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay long; one unmissable Zorn event was closing out the night at the Bijou, even though it didn’t turn out to be a major draw. Awakening Ground (below) consisted of Zorn on sax, Dave Lombardo on drums, and John Medeski on organ. This was a bit of redemption for Lombardo, whose previous Big Ears appearance was also a trio with Zorn but featured Trevor Dunn as the third, and while that was a cool noisy set in its own right, Medeski has a much wider improvisational palette and can get into deep grooves quickly. He brought out sides of Lombardo that the public rarely gets to see, to Zorn’s obvious delight, somewhat reminiscent of the Bladerunner project from back in 2014 (healing vibes, Bill Laswell!), which is about the best compliment I can give. Oof, noon ‘til 1 a.m. is a long day.
SATURDAY
I’m so glad they did the Cobra early this year rather than ending the fest with it like last time. However, knowing that Lombardo would once again be involved and was almost guaranteed to drown out everyone else onstage, I decided to skip it and ease into the day. I started at the Knoxville Civic Auditorium for Tim Heidecker out of simple curiosity, but after two songs and no sign of Neil Hamburger yet, I was rather unimpressed and bailed for the second-annual Joyous Noise superjam at Pretentious Brewing (below). Last year it was so good they decided to release it, and this year’s iteration picked up right where they’d left off, maybe a little more restless than last year, still very cool. (Unfortunately the Joyful Noise IPA this year was juicy to the point of syrupy; go back to last year’s formula please!)
The dreaded 3:00 hour once again; I had to miss Halvorson, another Zorn project, Saul Williams with Carlos Niño, a Fred Frith quartet, but I did catch the back half of Perfume Genius’s set (although I failed to get a decent photo). He was clearly more despondent onstage than I was used to; the deteriorating state of society may have played a role in this? “No Kings Day” may be a hopeful gesture of solidarity but nothing’s fixed yet. That said, Michael Hadreas and band saved up plenty of high drama for the final few songs, and nobody who was there will be forgetting these powerful versions of “Otherside” or “My Body” any time soon.
Setting (above) would be the third Westerlund project playing Big Ears, a drone/ambient/electronica project with Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors) and Nathan Bowles (Spiral Joy Band, etc.) that once again had the Jig & Reel bopping. In truth, the temperature rose to the point that we couldn’t stay for the whole set! We grabbed coffees and made our way to the Bijou to catch most of the stunning Laurie Anderson/John Zorn duo set (below), featuring mostly electric violin/sax improv but also some electronic flourishes and spoken word from Anderson. It was during this set that I realized what an array of NYC royalty was represented at Big Ears this year, and here were arguably the all-time king and queen of the city’s experimental music scene, together on one stage, not for the first time but it’s certainly never gonna happen in Wisconsin. What a gift to music fans everywhere, and obviously for the two maestros as well, all smiles in between the music.
This was beginning to feel like a relatively low-key Saturday, though, matters not initially helped by Shabaka (below) back at the Mill; his set was frequently entrancing but it hewed so close to new-age territory for much of the hour that we took the opportunity to rest our feet in the astroturfed chill-out area outside, where speakers and video screens gave a reasonable presentation of what was happening inside. Naturally, when he would pick up the sax, things tended to get more intense than the flute-led portions, and he and drummer Austin Williamson mustered plenty of intensity to close out the set.
Then it was back to Jackson Terminal for a violin trio of Anderson, Eyvind Kang and Martha Mooke (above), where I could’ve stayed indefinitely except for another secret show announcement: Alan Sparhawk and Shahzad Ismaily at the Jig & Reel! While I was looking forward to seeing Sparhawk with Trampled By Turtles, I was infinitely more excited at the possibility of seeing him do some real shredding. So we lined up for that set, which ended up starting late. The first person to walk onstage wasn’t Sparhawk or Ismaily, though; it was Haley Fohr (below)! She sat down at the back of the stage and began intoning a single note. For ages. I suspect what we actually experienced was the Fohr/Sparhawk project “Wordless Music” with the bonus of Ismaily adding to the drone; there would be no shredding after all, but it was a hypnotic, ultimately somewhat harrowing journey despite its achingly slow development.
I wish I’d stayed longer but I really wanted to catch a bit of Flying Lotus; unfortunately a very long, slow train prevented me from doing so, as after ten minutes of waiting the thing just halted, blocking the road, and going back around over the bridge at the other end of Jackson would’ve taken too long at that point. Or so I thought. It turned out that the second Masada (above) performance, the final Zorn event, I would’ve had no need to arrive early for. No matter; at age 63, trumpeter Dave Douglas is the youngest member by seven years, and there’s no telling when or if this quartet will reconvene, so I needed to take in a full set and just revel in this music that spawned so much of my very favorite music. It was less raucous but just as tight as Friday’s set, and amazingly we had the stamina to check out a bit of Dave Harrington’s Pranksters South (below) back at the Standard. This was probably the closest to jamband territory Big Ears got this year; the massive band featured Nels Cline, Yuka Honda, Kenny Wolleson, and many others, a very satisfying set of guitar-heavy improv from what I heard. I could’ve sworn I heard some teasing of Jaimie Branch’s “nuevo roquero estéreo” from trumpeter Steven Bernstein, but admittedly almost any time I’m in the Standard I wind up thinking of the only time I saw Branch, how thrilling it was, how I could hardly wait ‘til my next chance, which never came. The “Fly Or Die” shirts were out every day at Big Ears, so even if my ears were playing tricks, they were good tricks.
SUNDAY
The last day of any four-day festival, you traditionally take it easy, and as usual this Sunday didn’t boast a lot of major highlights. I missed the beginning of Brian Marsella’s Imaginarium (above); did he happen to mention why Cyro Baptista wasn’t there? ‘Cause it just isn’t the same without him, so that was a bit disappointing. Another of my top priorities was Gary Lucas (below); he mentioned before he started his set that Captain Beefheart used to remark upon his own “big ears”, yet despite playing an array of tunes by his many past collaborators, he did not play a single Beefheart tune during the Gods And Monsters set. You can hear the unmistakable Beefheart influence in the way he plucks his guitar, though, and he most certainly followed the Captain’s tenth commandment of guitar playing to a T. It was a great set all around, the trio preparing for its next tour of Japan later this spring. “We’re short-order chefs of amusement”, Lucas declared.
Yes, I braved the Greyhound one more time, enduring the smells as well as a minute or two of “Lou Reed Drones” before bailing. The installation featured a bunch of Lou’s guitars in a circle, leaning outward against amps, overseen by Lou’s guitar tech Stewart Hurwood. You can probably guess what it sounded like, a perfect venue for the earsplittingness. Hey, maybe they can de-smellify it for next year, get some HVAC in there. Also caught a good bit of Tom Skinner’s set (below), not enough to come close to telling you who all the players were though. It was sounding great, but we decided food before Laurie was more important.
Laurie Anderson & Sexmob (below) had taken the slot previously scheduled for AVTT/PTTN, the new project featuring Mike Patton fronting the Avett Brothers. They released their album last year to worldwide puzzlement and quietly canceled this opening date of their tour a month ago, presumably due to low ticket sales. It was one of three marquee separately-ticketed events at this year’s Ears (the other two being David Byrne and Robert Plant); I had bought a ticket for AVTT/PTTN and let’s just say I wasn’t SUPER crushed when they canceled (especially if that meant bonus Laurie). While I’d harbored a tiny hope that Patton might pop in, since he now had nothing else to rehearse for this weekend, the best chance of that would’ve been Cobra and no dice. Again on that whole “hero worship” topic, Patton has never made it easy; he’s the least-reliable rock star this side of Morrissey and seems to struggle mightily with the idea of not living up to some imaginary performance standard while spreading himself so thin he can’t possibly devote sufficient time to any project to make it as great as it could be.
As such, I should probably abandon hope of some day seeing Moonchild at Big Ears. They’d never dare to announce it for fear that Patton would end up not showing, and although Joey Baron certainly didn’t show his age at these Masada sets, time’s running out. Patton seems much more interested in calling up relatively mainstream artists who praise him in interviews and offering his services than he is in hanging with his avant-garde hipster buddies. I hope the AVTT/PTTN tour is a success against all odds, and I hope the Tomahawk tour actually happens, and I even hope there could be more Mr. Bungle activity around the corner. It just kinda sucks that Patton has abandoned all his more experimental, forward-thinking projects to keep touring on nostalgia.
Sorry for the tangent! This was also the first year I’ve gone to the fest that Trevor Dunn didn’t perform, so I’m just hoping there’s not some kind of fracture in their relationship with Zorn or something. And honestly, Big Ears could’ve USED some Moonchild this year. All things considered it was the mellowest year yet in my experience, and that’s not a knock on Anderson’s primetime set with Sexmob; it was certainly more sonorous than noisy but it was the most overtly politically-charged set I saw all weekend. Anderson invoked the words of beloved artists including Gertrude Stein, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Bob Dylan and others in tackling the current preposterous state of the world. These were controversial characters, by no means beholden to the perfect politics demanded by so many on the left today, which wasn’t an explicit part of Anderson’s message tonight but certainly an underlying current. She played songs from all across her discography and busted out a futuristic musical suit of armor that responded sonically to various movements and gestures, a delightful bit. There’s no other artist alive who can fill us with so much hope and joy while reminding us how horrible everything is. If you’re not careful, she’ll get you to actually delve into the source of your anger, a serenely terrifying prospect isn’t it?
Easily the highlight of my Sunday, it was hard to tear myself away from Anderson’s set, but Sparhawk with Trampled By Turtles (below) was well underway. Here was another crushingly depressing/impossibly uplifting performance, all the feels as Sparhawk sang about the worst agony imaginable and insisted that we all turn towards the light. He even burst into dance at one point, remarking afterwards that it had been a long time. He introduced most of us to a new song he’d only performed a couple times before: “No More Darkness”, a tune as simple as its plea. He also asked everyone in the crowd, on the count of three, to whisper their favorite thing that completely surprised them over the course of the weekend, appealing to the one aspect we all know Big Ears has over all the other festivals. It’s all about the potential for discovery, what rabbitholes will you disappear down, driving home the next day, in the coming weeks and years.
From what I understand this was a pretty mellow version of Turtles, normally a more raucous roots/grass/old-time-music experience, but for this iteration it was Sparhawk in the spotlight the whole time. No shredding, but he played that electric guitar. And he gelled with this band in a way that, let’s be honest, Patton couldn’t POSSIBLY gel with the Avett Brothers. These guys are all Duluth guys; they’ve been hobnobbing for decades. You have to wonder if PTTN/AVTT feared they’d look like phonies, Trampled by Sparhawk. It was kind of a cruel booking in hindsight and I truly hope I’m wrong and PTTN/AVTT is a moving, rewarding experience; I doubt it could move me the way this Big Ears closing set did, though. It wasn’t one of the more mindblowing years of the fest that I’ve attended but it filled up my heart as much as anything could.