Decisions

 

After 24 excruciating hours of decision making and "if/then" logic, I think I have come up with a tentative schedule for my first night of Big Ears 2023. Without further ado, here are my Thursday choices:

7:00 - 8:00 pm - Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes

8:00 - 10:00 pm - Phill Niblock

11:00 pm - 12:00 am - Rich Ruth

Seeing Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes means passing on Lonnie Holley, King Britt, and Allison Russell.  There are always tradeoffs.  I can justify missing Lonnie Holley as he's based here in Atlanta and I've seen him many times before (including once at an earlier Big Ears) and I'll have many chances to see him in the future. Hell, he's probably even playing additional sets at this year's Big Ears if I'm overcome with remorse about missing him. 

King Britt is a hip-hop producer best known as the live DJ for the band Digable Planets, but his output is extremely diverse and it's hard to predict just what he will be presenting at Big Ears this year. According to the festival website, he'll be joined onstage with the cellist Seth Parker Woods and the bassoonist Joy Guidry, who doubles on electronics, as the latest version of his musical project Moksha Black. This particular incarnation of Moksha Black hasn't released any music yet, so it's difficult to say what they will sound like. It will almost assuredly be interesting, but given the choice between taking a chance on King Britt and the opportunity to hear the two Sams, that particular decision was easy.

I enjoyed Allison Russell's 2021 album, Outside Child, but her set is at the Bijou Theater, a marvelous venue but on the southern side of the festival area, and the other sets that I want to see on Thursday are almost a mile away on the northern side of the area. That's a long walk, mostly uphill, for an old man, and besides, I'd prefer to see the Sams anyway. To be sure, though, if not for the temptation of the other sets, a night at the Bijou seeing Allison Russell, followed by the Joe Lavino Trio followed by the Vijay Iyer Trio, would be a perfectly pleasurable experience. But choices must be made and I've come to my final decisions (at least for now).

I only became aware of Sam Gendel's work last year, and I've been looking forward to seeing him perform.  His set with Sam Wilkes is one of the reasons I'm going to Big Ears this year and one of my justifications for shelling out the big buck on a ticket.  Where else am I going to get to see Sam Gendel? But then, just this week, I saw that on April 2, Atlanta's Terminal West will be presenting Pino Palladino & Blake Mills, "featuring Sam Gendel." I could catch Gendel at Terminal West and leave my options open at Big Ears, but April 2 is a Sunday, the final day of the festival. I'm not bugging out early on Sunday to make my Thursday scheduling easier.

The avant-garde composer Phill Niblock has two hours set aside for his Big Ears performance, the longest, I think, of any performer there this year. Niblock specializes in long-form drone pieces of monumental proportions, played at surprisingly loud volumes ("If neighbors a mile away aren't complaining, it's not loud enough"), often accompanied by his own film and video projections. His Big Ears set looks like an epic, once-in-a-lifetime event, and I don't want to miss it, but I do have one reservation.  Many performers I've seen at Big Ears - Harold Budd, Alvin Lucier, Jaimie Branch, Mimi Parker of Low - have all died within a year of seeing them at the festival, and Niblock is 89 years old.  Rationally, I know his life expectancy has nothing to do with whether or not I attend his set, but I also know that eventually, someday, he will pass (impermanence is swift) and when that happens, I will blame it on myself as part of my "Big Ears curse." But what can I do? On a long enough time scale, every performer I've ever seen on any stage will eventually die, many well after me. It just seems sometimes like my seeing them at Big Ears accelerates the process.      

Niblock's set starts at 8:00, the same time that the Sam Gendel/Saw Wilkes set ends. Assuming that the two Sams play the full 60 minutes of their set, that means I might miss the first few minutes of Niblock's performance.  But that's okay - he has 120 minutes to work with, and his drone sounds are often so static and unchanging that I probably won't miss hearing anything in the first five minutes of his show that I won't hear in the next 115 minutes. 

 

Catching Niblock will mean that I'll miss the Joe Lovano set at the Bijou Theater I already mentioned, as well as the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet (9:00 - 10:00 pm).  Orcutt's set will be a bracing performance of loud, confrontational guitar noise (right up my alley) but it's at The Standard.  I don't like The Standard because of their admission policy.  I paid the big bucks for a VIP pass to Big Ears and The Standard, like the other venues, admits VIP pass holders first. Early admission is what you pay for with the premium price.  But The Standard puts the VIP patrons into a "holding area" away from the stage before the performance begins, and then lets the General Admission crowd enter directly to the stage area.  The result is that although the VIP crowd gets to come indoors first, they wind up in the back of the venue, away from the stage. You want early admission so you can be near the stage, not to escape the weather and other outdoor elements of the Tennessee night. It's frustrating, and makes me feel ripped off. Unfortunately, many of the best jazz performers are often scheduled for The Standard.

The Thursday-night headliners come on after Niblock's set.  Some don't interest me (e.g., Los Lobos, Liturgy), and some I like (The Mountain Goats) but aren't the kind of unique "Big Ears" bands I came to see.  I would like to have seen the Exploding Star Orchestra, but they're playing quite a distance from Niblock's performance. Kali Malone will be playing a drone set on the pipe organ of St. John's Cathedral, but after two hours of Phill Niblock, I think I'll have heard enough drone for the first night of the festival.

The process of elimination leads me, then, to select Rich Ruth for my headliner performance, but that's who I really would have preferred anyway.  Like the two Sams, Ruth's set was one of the draws for me to this year's festival, and - bonus points! - it's at the same venue as Phill Niblock, so no long walk required. The 60 minutes between sets might even provide a chance to get a bite to eat. I'm really curious to hear how Ruth sounds live, as I find his records, especially his most recent, I Surviived, It's Over, quite fascinating.  Like Sam Gendel, Rich Ruth is another artist I only discovered within the past year, and I'm pleased to see that he's reached headliner status, at least for this quirky festival.

This particular schedule - Sam Gendel/Phill Niblock/Rich Ruth - was not easy to arrive at, and I could easily come up with another slate just as satisfying, like a night at The Bijou.  Or Allison Russell/Bill Frisell Trio/Exploding Star Orchestra.   But my mind's made up, at least for now, but the hard part's still ahead - three more full days of Big Ears, not just the opening night's acts.