It’s the end of September so, of course, it’s time to announce spring music festival lineups, right? It’s never too early for those of us who wait all year for the music we love and for some that we just don’t know, yet, that we will love. Big Ears is coming back, March 21 – 24 of 2019 for it’s eighth run and by now we know to expect precisely what we don’t expect.
You’ve heard the accolades: The New York Times said “a music festival with a rare vision” and Rolling Stone said “a listening experience unlike any other in America.” For those of us who have attended, we know this isn’t hyperbole. It really does seem to stretch those in attendance to hear what they haven’t heard, to understand what they didn’t understand and to make connections they never considered. Those things have certainly been true for me.
Tickets are now on sale at www.bigearsfestival.org with organizers promising, “special programs, central themes, and world premieres with powerful sets from some of music’s most compelling new voices. With more than 100 concerts, workshops, installations, and interactive experiences.”
For me to be excited about a music festival generally requires a mix of artists whose work I’ve loved and artists who are new to me, but “fit” with my general tastes. Big Ears is none of that. Of the extensive list of musicians included in the initial announcement, there are only a very few with whom I am even remotely familiar. What I know is that some of these artists will change the way I hear music. They will expand my understanding and some of them will become new favorites. That’s what this festival does.
Here are some highlights according to organizers:
- Big Ears 2019 leads with a network of vital musicians and legendary innovators working across multiple genres, from rock ’n’ roll and free jazz to classical composition and dance music. Spiritualized and Mercury Rev supply their ecclesiastic psychedelic rock, while Nils Frahm, Jlin, Carl Stone, and The Comet is Coming all offer unique visions of what it means to make electronic music right now.
- In a rare performance, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, who have reimagined the boundaries of improvised music since the late ’60s, celebrate their 50th anniversary recording under that name. They lead an immense field of jazz legends that includes the likes of Jack DeJohnette, Carla Bley, Bill Frisell, The Alex Schlippenbach Trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lytton, and Wadada Leo Smith. They’re joined by members of jazz’s rightfully acclaimed new school: Mary Halvorson, with her band Code Girl; Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn in a rare piano duo; and one of this year’s great breakout acts, London’s Sons of Kemet.
- Parallel pioneers of extended vocal techniques, Joan La Barbara and Meredith Monk, perform, plus groundbreaking outsider visual artist and improvisational singer Lonnie Holley. Rhiannon Giddens returns with two new projects after delivering the keynote address at Big Ears 2018, and Kayhan Kalhor, the revered master of the Iranian fiddle known as the kamancheh, performs solo and with the polyglot string quartet Brooklyn Rider.
- Knoxville native Yves Tumor has released one of the best albums of 2018 with the mutated soul of Safe in the Hands of Love. Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia builds worlds of radiant noise and rhythm on his ANTI- debut Breaking English, while young Scottish cellist Peter Gregson is readying his audacious Deutsche Grammophon introduction, a modern reinterpretation of Bach’s Cello Suites. Electronic composer Kara-Lis Coverdale, breathless instrumental trio The Messthetics, Nashville ambient experts Coupler, South African guitar phenom Derek Gripper: the fresh talent pool at Big Ears 2019 is as compelling as it has ever been.
- Big Ears 2019 presents one of the first productions of TRIPTYCH, a multimedia project that explores the legacy of provocative New York photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. Combining large-scale projections of his work with new music by The National’s Bryce Dessner and interpretations of Monteverdi’s madrigals by stunning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, TRIPTYCH includes the writings of Essex Hemphill and Mapplethorpe’s longtime mutual muse, Patti Smith. Under the direction of the brilliant Daniel Fish, TRIPTYCH arrives in Knoxville almost exactly 30 years after Mapplethorpe’s untimely death.
- The Nashville Ballet presents the first performance of Lucy Negro Redux outside of its hometown premiere, a program based around the hypothetical life of Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady,” for whom he penned many of his most famous sonnets. Composed by Grammy-winning singer-songwriter and Big Ears veteran Rhiannon Giddens and based on the 2015 book Lucy, Negro Redux by Nashville’s Caroline Randall Williams, who will narrate the work, Lucy is a reflection on love and equality in a world where those states of being are not always easy to find.
- Fifty years after Manfred Eicher launched ECM Records, Big Ears will offer a timely focus on the ever-vital record label, with a series of performances highlighting the label’s pioneering past and rich present, exploring both its jazz and classical pedigrees. The programs include concerts by free jazz titans The Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Carla Bley Trio with Steve Swallow and Andy Sheppard, drummer Jack DeJohnette with Ravi Coltrane and Matt Garrison, trumpet master Wadada Leo Smith (performing his early masterpiece Divine Love), Tim Berne’s Snakeoil, Ralph Towner, the Bill Frisell/Thomas Morgan duo. Meredith Monk, and violist Kim Kashkashian and pianist Robert Levin. Representatives of the label’s new vanguard include a collaboration between Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, Nik Bärtsch’s RONIN, trumpeters Avishai Cohen and Mathias Eick and their bands, plus the trio of emerging Israeli piano star Shai Maestro.
- Ambient pioneer Harold Budd presents a career overview featuring new arrangements of many of his classics, as well as multiple world premieres of new works, with the support of his son Terrence, the ACME String Quartet, Knoxville-based experimental collaborative Nief-Norf, and composer Tim Story. Alvin Lucier — another legendary composer, known for his musical inquiries into the very nature of sound — delivers his work across multiple days, including performances of his seminal I Am Sitting in a Room and Bird and Person Dyning. The Ever Present Orchestra, featuring Stephen O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi, plays more of Lucier’s work, as does Joan La Barbara, the inventor of multiple extended techniques for voice. In her own concert, dubbed Voice is the Original Instrument, La Barbara will present an overview of her own astonishing compositions. Speaking of innovative singers, Theo Bleckmann performs two unique programs: Hello Earth! The Music of Kate Bush and Berlin: Songs of Love and War, Peace and Exile.
- Essential British guitarist and singer-songwriter Richard Thompson delivers his Killed in Action, a string-supported song cycle about the human horrors of World War I, just four months after the hundredth anniversary of the great conflict’s end. Just weeks after the world premiere of The Way Forth, a folk opera about the hardships of centuries of women in Kentucky, leading composer and pianist Rachel Grimes offers the second performance with a unique chamber ensemble. The International Contemporary Ensemble presents three concerts, including works by four vital living women composers. They play pieces by Iceland’s Anna Thorvaldsdottir, whose music they have recorded for an album due in November; a work developed in collaboration with the daring experimental violinist Carla Kihlstedt, At Night We Walk in Circles and Are Consumed by Fire; plus music from Ellen Reid, a Tennessee native; and Ashley Fure, part of an acclaimed recent premiere by the New York Philharmonic.
Big Ears 2019 Initial Lineup:
- ACME
- Alvin Lucier
- Avishai Cohen Quartet
- Bill Frisell & Thomas Morgan
- Bill Frisell and the Mesmerists featuring Tony Scheer, Kenny Wollesen and the films of Bill Morrison
- Brooklyn Rider
- Carl Stone
- Carla Bley TRIOS with Andy Sheppard and Steve Swallow
- Carla Kihlstedt
- Clarice Jensen + Jonathan Turner: For this from that will be filled
- Coupler
- DeJohnette Coltrane Garrison
- Derek Gripper
- Evan Parker / Matt Wright Trance Map+
- Ever Present Orchestra featuring Stephen O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi
- Harold Budd
- International Contemporary Ensemble performing the work of Carla Kihlstedt, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ellen Reid, Ashley Fure
- Irreversible Entanglements
- Jerusalem In My Heart
- Jlin
- Joan La Barbara:Voice is the Original Instrument
- Joep Beving
- Kara-Lis Coverdale
- Kayhan Kalhor
- Kim Kashkashian
- Lonnie Holley
- Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl
- Mathias Eick Quintet
- Matt Wilson’s Honey & Salt
- Mercury Rev
- Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble Cellular Songs
- Nashville Ballet: Lucy Negro Redux
- Conceived, directed, and choreographed by Paul Vasterling
- with music composed and performed by Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi
- and poetry by Caroline Randall Williams
- nief-norf
- Nik Bärtsch’s RONIN
- Nils Frahm
- Peter Gregson
- Rachel Grimes: The Way Forth
- Rafiq Bhatia: Breaking English
- Ralph Towner
- Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi
- Richard Thompson: Killed in Action
- Roomful of Teeth
- Schlippenbach Trio
- Shai Maestro Trio
- Sons of Kemet
- Spiritualized
- Sun of Goldfinger (David Torn, Tim Berne, Ches Smith)
- The Art Ensemble of Chicago
- The Comet is Coming
- The Messthetics
- Theo Bleckmann: Berlin – Songs of Love and War, Peace and Exile – and – Hello Earth! The Music of Kate Bush
- Thumbscrew
- Tim Berne’s Snakeoil
- TRIPTYCH
- On the Work of Robert Mapplethorpe
- Featuring Roomful of Teeth. Composed by Bryce Dessner. Libretto by Korde Arrington Tuttle feat. the work of Patti Smith & Essex Hemphill. Directed by Daniel Fish
- Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn
- Wadada Leo Smith’s Nda, Performing “Divine Love” With Bobby Naughton and Dwight Andrews
- Wadada Leo Smith Solo: Reflections and Meditations on Monk
- Yves Tumor
- & many more to come!
Tickets for Big Ears Festival 2019 are on sale now at bigearsfestival.org. Enhanced ticket packages include new perks for the VIP Sonic Explorer ticket, such as access to exclusive kick-off and after-party events and more. Here are a couple of videos to pique your interest: