Lovano / Makhathini / Morgan / Cyrille

Every spring since 2009, several hundred of the world’s most creative musicians have flooded the streets of Knoxville during Big Ears. Their presence is an invitation to arrange encounters between unlikely collaborators, to build ad hoc bands that have never happened before and may never happen again. This transcontinental and transgenerational quartet is one such special occasion, an engagement unique to Big Ears 2027. When South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini and California-born bassist Thomas Morgan arrive in Tennessee in early April, they will be 44 and 45, respectively. They will join two masterful elders onstage for this special show: saxophonist Joe Lovano, 74, and Andrew Cyrille, 87. The connections between these players who have never recorded or all worked together are testaments to jazz’s beautiful and byzantine lineage.

Growing up in South Africa, Makhathini was a serious piano scholar who felt like he needed to find a link between his instrumental studies and the spiritual traditions in his life. John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme lit the way. “I had always been looking for a kind of playing that could mirror or evoke how my people danced, sang, and spoke,” he once wrote. Cyrille, meanwhile, learned Coltrane pieces from the late Rashied Ali, Coltrane’s final drummer. In recent years, Cyrille has often recorded with the guitarist Bill Frisell, who himself entered another vaunted jazz lineage in the late ’80s when he joined Lovano in Paul Motian’s trio. And Frisell pushed the mighty bassist Morgan (who also, it should be noted, plays with Lovano) onto larger stages by recruiting him into his own band a decade ago. All four of these players have singular tones and open approaches to collaboration, qualities that bind them for this one-off improvisation, where these threads of the past connect in the present.