Latest News from Big Ears
Each year, we count on the enthusiasm and expertise of a corps of dedicated volunteers. Learn more about how to get involved!
Broadcast your love of music and support Big Ears at the same time! Our online store features a variety of designs from recent Festival years.
Big Ears is deeply connected to the city of Knoxville. Each year, just as we delight in sharing new listening experiences with audiences, introducing visitors to our town is a point of immense pride. Learn all about this great city and explore resources we’ve gathered to help you plan your next trip!
Your partnership makes it possible for us to sustain, year after year, the extraordinary—and all-too-rare—range of work that sets Big Ears apart from other festivals. We can only do what we do because of you.
Big Ears shares the joy and transformative power of extraordinary music and art with tens of thousands of people annually thanks in large part to corporate, foundation, and government investment.
About Big ears
Big Ears collaborates with artists, audiences, and communities to create joyful, meaningful, and transcendent cultural experiences that defy boundaries, fuel curiosity, ignite the spirit, and nourish the soul.
About UsWhat they’re Saying
Our PressBig Ears showcases the wondrously broad creativity currently at play in global-American-international music that’s not designed to be commercial, but which is nevertheless quietly infiltrating popular culture.
Unlike most big-deal music festivals, where you can map out your concert schedule with high confidence that you’ll savor every second, the sprawl of Big Ears’ lineup invites you to stop pre-Googling bands and just surrender.
Big Ears is not just a music festival. It is a beautiful roadside stop on a spiritual journey.
Big Ears touches the sublime.
If you love adventurous music, if you love finding new music you have never heard before and being completely blown away by it, if you can get to Knoxville for the Big Ears Festival, do it.
Big Ears…could well be the most exciting, exhaustive jazz festival that doesn’t call itself that.
America’s and perhaps the world’s most diverse, eclectic, and explorative festival comprising music, poetry, literature, film, and art.
Contained within a walkable radius of historic downtown Knoxville…[Big Ears] creates its own atmospheric climate, along with a center of gravity.
Instead of sales metrics or star power, Big Ears contemplates the perceptual properties of music …
At the silo-destroying Big Ears Festival, music liberated from the confines of category and overt commercialism.
The Big Ears Festival, which unfolds each spring in Knoxville, Tennessee, might be the most open-minded music gathering in the country.
There’s no other festival quite like Big Ears.
One of the most quietly earth-shattering, subtly luminous festivals the world over.
It’s no exaggeration to describe the Big Ears Festival as one of the most unique and eclectic musical gatherings one may ever be fortunate enough to encounter.
