Press
From ITS FIRST ITERATION IN 2009, THE FESTIVAL HAS BEEN A LOCUS OF EXPEDITION, DEFINED MORE BY A GO-ANYWHERE ETHOS THAN BY ANY STYLE OR GENRE ALLEGIANCE
NPR MUSIC
Hope is Hard Work
From a Little Spark…
The Joy of Cattywampus
Why Attendance at Big Ears Festival in Downtown Knoxville Skyrocketed in 2022
Big Ears Festival
Listening a Bit Differently at Big Ears Festival 2019
Surprises from Spiritualized, vulnerability from Jlin, a look inside the mind of composer Nils Frahm & more.
Our Six Favorite Performances at the 2019 Big Ears Festival
“There’s no other festival quite like Big Ears … the Knoxville-based event has a propensity for presenting the unexpected while reaching well beyond any preconceived parameters.”
Big Ears Festival: 15 Performances That Soothed, Jolted and Intrigued
“Instead of sales metrics or star power, Big Ears contemplates the perceptual properties of music: shades of dissonance and consonance, the particular qualities of a drone, the ever-changing applications of subtlety and brute force.”
ECM At Big Ears: A Boundless Label Meets A Broadminded Festival
“ECM is observing its 50th anniversary this year and its largest celebration took place at Big Ears, where artists from its roster played some 20 concerts.”
Big Ears Goes Electronic
“The annual Big Ears Festival again featured artists eager to experiment, including a slate of talented electronic artists who pushed the genre in new directions.”
Big Ears’ Generous Cross-Pollination
“With every installment, Big Ears feels more like several festivals under a single banner … But that segregated outlook misses the genius of the festival, which is about cross-pollination. Few festivals in the U.S., let alone the world, program such a broad array of cutting-edge artists across all genres.”
Jazz’s Bleeding Edge? You Can Find It, Briefly, In East Tennessee
“This year’s Big Ears felt right in tune with an emergent, exhilarating frontier. I see this not only as a hopeful turn in the festival’s model of inclusion but also as an indicator of present-day permissions around jazz’s state of the art.”
Big Ears 2018: 10 Best Things We Saw
“Nigerian party jams, a turntable orchestra, a cardboard box played with a bow and more from Knoxville’s annual experimental gathering.”
Don’t Knock Knoxville
Rob Rushin explains the fascinating history of Big Ears founder Ashley Capps’ creative ventures. It’s a gem of a story and an important reminder of the power of art.
Big Ears Festival Embraces Jazz Experimentalism
Jon Ross likens jazz pioneer Carla Bley’s compositions to “chapter books with new themes and ideas emerging on each subsequent page.”
Avant-Garde Tendencies in Tennessee: A Report from the Big Ears Music/Art Festival
Steve Dollar of ARTNEWS affirmed that Big Ears “reconsiders the terms by which experimental music can be presented to an eager, sophisticated audience compelled by seemingly errant tangents of art- and music-making.”
Genre Mixing Down South at the Big Ears Festival
Jim Fusilli described Big Ears as a “silo-destroying festival” with “music liberated from the confines of category and overt commercialism.”
Big Ears 2017: Where Jeff Tweedy is Noise Star, Symphony Plays on Floor
Rolling Stone music critic Chris Weingarten declared the festival “a listening experience unlike any other in America,” boasting “the biggest, boldest lineup in the history of the fest.”
Embrace Everything
“At Big Ears, the sounds are the stars, free of the tyranny of categories,” writes renowned American music critic and longtime contributor to The New Yorker Alex Ross. Citing Ben Ratliff’s Every Song Ever as his timely Big Ears jumping-off point, his review captures the heart and soul of not only this year’s festival, but of the event itself.
Get to Know Big Ears, America’s Most Distinct and Defiant Music Festival
Grayson Haver Currin dives deep not only into Big Ears but into Knoxville itself, “again turned into America’s most carefully, lovingly program experimental music hub, at least for a perfect long weekend.” Currin also ponders the expansive, unexpected appeal of Sunn O))), music ownership and collaboration.
Big Ears Festival Resists Commercial and Genre Constraints
Writer Ben Ratliff, who’s been to every iteration of the festival since 2009, explores the “series of concentric circles” of music at Big Ears, informed by the classical tradition at the center.
