Sam Amidon

Sam Amidon was born so deep into the world of American folk music and art that, by the time he was a teenager, he was a member of his own contradance band. Based in Vermont, Amidon’s parents were invested in shape-note singing communities and the influential Bread & Puppet theater company, and he began playing at an age when most kids don’t yet know how to read. But rather quickly, Amidon’s interests began to stretch beyond traditional folk, even as he became an accomplished fiddler and then banjo player. “When I heard it,” he once told The Creative Independent about listening to a free jazz album featuring Albert Ayler and Don Cherry as a teen, “it was like looking at an abstract painting.” The subsequent three decades of Amidon’s music have been attempts to fuse the many worlds he finds fascinating, from folk songs collected from several continents to modern composition to improvisation with some of the headiest players of the past and present.

That was, for instance, Bill Frisell and Shahzad Ismaily collaborating with Amidon on 2014’s entrancing Lily-O, then the great Milford Graves playing with Amidon on the closing epic of 2017’s The Following Mountain. And on last year’s stunning Salt River, he collaborated with ever-adventurous saxophonist Sam Gendel for open-ended interpretations of tunes by Ornette Coleman, Lou Reed, and Yoko Ono, looking at them as new sources in whatever The Great American Songbook actually may be. Amidon’s voice is affable and disarming, with a purity and openness that speaks to his upbringing in the New England folk scene. His attempt to push it beyond that context—to find new settings for a seemingly old sound—is inspiring and rewarding. So many of Amidon’s longtime collaborators will play Big Ears 2026, so who knows what new frames he may find in Knoxville this year.