We said we were going to have to spend some time unpacking last weekend's Big Ears Festival, and what better way to begin than to recognize five new (to us) acts that we hadn't heard before last weekend? Part of the fun of any festival, especially one as esoteric as Big Ears, is discovering new music, and we spent no small amount of time talking to other festival-goers on the street and at the venues, giving and receiving tips about performers worth seeing, and making and taking recommendations about upcoming sets. So here are five acts that weren't on our initial schedule, but based on word of mouth, we went and caught anyway.
We didn't get to Knoxville until about 5:30 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, the first day of the festival, and by the time we arrived, the Norwegian singer Susanna had already performed earlier in the day - much earlier, 12:00 noon to be exact. Thursday night, some people at the beautiful Tennessee Theater before Michelle N'degeocello's set were raving about Susanna's earlier set to us, and one guy admitted it literally brought him to tears. The next day, another person told us Susanna's Friday-night set was one of his must-see shows, so we changed our plans and rearranged our schedule to see her Friday-night collaboration with Cheyenne Mize and folk-music legend Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Giovanna Pessi, who's on harp in this track, was also at Friday's set. Here's a taste of what we heard.
After a day or so at the festival, we started to recognize a lot of the same faces in the audience at different shows, and one particular group that we saw at several different sets that we liked (e.g., Godspeed, Roscoe Mitchell, and Arto Lindsey, among others) told us on Saturday that they were off to see minimalist composer Jon Gibson next, and since we'd come to trust their taste in music and loved minimalism anyway, we joined them at Gibson's set at St. Mark's Cathedral. Here's a perhaps over-explained video of a younger Gibson playing music very similar to what we heard when we got to St. John's.
Everybody, everywhere at the festival was raving about jazz drummer Milford Graves and there was even a documentary film shown about him and his life. To be quite honest, now that we've heard him and read about him on line, we're actually kind of surprised we hadn't heard of him before - he's played with a lot of the free jazz artists we've admired over the years. Saturday afternoon, we were part of the capacity crowd at Knoxville's Bijou Theater, where Graves performed a set of duets with jazz pianist Jason Moran.
A name like "Nief-Norf" kind of sticks in the mind, and although we remember hearing the name before, we've never heard the musicians or had any idea what exactly it was that they did. We still don't have a full answer to the latter question, but we saw them perform a live score on Friday for a documentary film about Mexican fireworks manufacturers (of all things). It wasn't a set recommended to us by others, but we were passing by their venue at a rare moment when we had a little time on our hands, so we stopped in. That night, Nief-Norf was a much, much larger ensemble than appears in this performance, making us suspect they're more of a educational and performance collective than a solitary, individual band.
Like Nief-Norf, we had also heard of Norway's The Thing, but we'd never actually heard The Thing until this weekend. In fact, we still haven't - The Thing's performance time conflicted with the Susanna set (I said we had to rearrange some things to see Susanna), but we did manage to catch Thing drummer Paal Nilssen-Love's collaboration with guitarist Arto Lindsey, and Thing saxophonist Mats Gustafsson's set with electronic musician Four Tet was not only a highlight of the festival, but was one of the best sets we've ever heard in our lifetime. Here's the full Thing band with a 2015 cover of a 1990 song by English psych-rockers Loop.
More about the festival will follow this post, I'm sure. Until then, enjoy the silence, amigos.
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