Big Ears Festival

Four days in Knoxville blurred the line between concert and communion as Big Ears Festival revealed how music can be heartbeat, memory, and mirror all at once.

I arrived in Tennessee in late March, the Southern Winter doing its best to push away Spring, while Big Ears Festival tried to unfurl fresh new growth. The Appalachian town had suddenly exploded with middle aged white men in obscure band shirts, students darting between theaters, and bustling conversations about performances spilling from sidewalk restaurants that lined the main drag. Sounds of all kinds flooded the street — experimental jazz dissolving into folk, chamber strings colliding with electronics, rock and noise — echoes that felt like liturgies. Big Ears had transformed downtown Knoxville into something that felt expansive, almost breathing: a collection of clubs, churches, and theaters, all stitched together by the cohesive pulse of music. Each venue keenly matched to the music like chambers of a body, each built to hold a different kind of sound. I tried my best to map the unrelenting, sensational lineup, but with nearly 200 acts over 4 days, Big Ears resists being mapped. It is a body in motion.

I stood in line outside Critic’s Pick, waiting as the room hit capacity and the door shifted to a one-in, one-out rhythm. A stylish man across from me asked the guard a question, his presence quiet and magnetic, tuned to a frequency beyond the ordinary. It was one of those mutual connections where you brush past a fire but the spark you dislodge doesn’t reach the dry grass on the ground. I only learned who he was later, when I saw him again on stage in a set both sharp and free, occupying a true flow state, rapped lines cutting like conversations overheard at the edge of a dream. Kokayi breathed new life into a lineage of jazz singers as he spoke of listening to his record collection, saying, “...my way to pray. I would listen to these records and they would take me away.” In the crowd, before his set began, he caught my eye and said something like, “Hey Slim, you made it.” I couldn’t quite hear the exact phrase, but the words didn’t matter. It was the recognition, the human pulse carried from one chance encounter into another. Proof that the festival wasn’t just about performances, but about the threads that tie us together: the accidental collisions, the constellations of strangers noticing each other and perhaps being seen, truly witnessed, if only for a moment, in the vulnerable state that music allows our hearts to temporarily occupy. 

Inside the biggest venue, Civic Auditorium, Beth Gibbons opened her voice like a first breath into a newborn lung. There was nothing ornate in the performance. She stood stationary behind her microphone stand, holding on to it like it was the only thing keeping her upright under the weight of so much vulnerability. She was a conduit, conveying this message to the audience with a fragile yet formidable honesty that made the cavernous space feel human-sized. Her songs reminded me that the body begins in fragility, and that fragility itself is holy. From that hush came a sudden blaze — the delicate notes colliding into a big bang, like the body’s first heartbeat reverberating into life.

From there, the organism sparked alive, cells rapidly dividing in a fury of new growth in all directions. Darkside lit up Mill & Mine with experimentation and power, guitars and electronics flashing against a wall of smoke, three figures illuminated from behind in silhouette. Sound and light pulsing like electricity across nerves: jolted awake, wired, restless. The next afternoon, in the glass rooms of the Knoxville Museum of Art, June McDoom seemed to inhabit an entirely different anatomy. She radiated presence like a goddess tending to plants, her voice slow and deliberate as though she were caring for each of us one by one, watering us in the strange midday light of this glass greenhouse. Shifting from voltage to nurture, the vessel proved its complexity. The body jolted awake now needed to be cradled with care.

DakhaBrakha pulled the whole form to its feet. Their Ukrainian folk rhythms were political as much as musical, a call not just to listen but to rise, to stand, to remember that a body is not viable if it cannot withstand the forces that will inevitably stand in the way of growth. At Jackson Terminal, Mabe Fratti played barefoot, furious, her cello scraping against air as though she could channel electricity straight up through the floorboards of the old railway station. She was raw contact, nerve endings exposed, her intensity nearly unbearable in its honesty. Emel, too, carried a fire through the same space, her voice splitting the rafters with its glow. Together, they were complementary impulses — one ignition, one flame — forcing the heart to beat.

Some spaces swelled beyond reason. Water Damage gathered more guitars on one stage than I had ever seen, sound multiplying until it felt like blood rushing, circulation coursing through arteries. The overwhelming quantity of sound and activity wasn't just chaotic, it actually energized the experience. It was too much and exactly enough, proof that even overwhelm can be a form of vitality.

Then there was Maruja. Hard and unrelenting: the alto sax screamed, guitars clawed, drums struck like fists. The lead singer told the audience to fuck off for not reciprocating the energy he was so generously offering. Yet underneath the ferocity was love: love as refusal, love as the only answer left standing. Their lyric hammered it home: ‘It’s empowering to think that all the hateful people out there / If they were only shown more love, they wouldn’t be so spiteful / Love is my God, I don’t care what you say / All the hate in our hearts, it takes us further away.’ They were the artery driving blood back to the heart, pounding, insistent — not gentle, not easy, but carrying the same blood Meshell Ndegeocello would later distill into something eternal.

Meshell Ndegeocello doesn’t so much play bass as she is bass, human and instrument indistinguishable, vibration flowing through her as naturally as blood. Her set, drawn from her recent album inspired in part by the poetry of James Baldwin, returned again and again to love. Not as sentiment, but as necessity. Not as comfort, but as the only force capable of keeping us alive. Her bass pulsed like the throb of a star, Baldwin’s words radiating outward, bringing something so vast and distant right into the lap of our comprehension. Her presence was motherly, godly, otherworldly: a soul infinite enough to hold us all. She had tapped the invisible force we all yearn to be in connection with, whether we can consciously acknowledge it or not, and she had the strength to serve as a conduit of connection for the entire audience to be held in that moment. Holy water welled in my eyes, drawn up from some hidden eternal spring. Liturgy became reality as we all connected, gathered in worship, not of her, but of the love she lay bare.

All the performances, mentioned here or not, orbited this central truth: we are all connected in a way that is beyond our primitive sensory organs’ ability to comprehend. The connective recognition of Kokayi, the fragility of Beth Gibbons, the voltage of Darkside, the nurture of June McDoom, the urgency of DakhaBrakha, the fury of Mabe Fratti, the overflow of Water Damage, the defiant love of Maruja, the central, cosmic, radiant soul of Meshell — each valve, nerve, and artery; each pulse, movement, and swell of tears — all keeping the body of Big Ears alive. The festival itself serving as a microcosm for the creation of the body, the body serving as a metaphor for the creation of the universe.

The festivities ended as they began, with choices and crossings and sound spilling out into the cool Tennessee nights. Meshelle’s set lingered, the afterimage of a star’s light in my eyes, reminding me that beneath all the noise, beneath the shifting genres and crowded schedules, there is a deeper rhythm. A collective heartbeat to remind us that love is the only eternal.