I'm On The Fence

 

I'm sorry, but when your headliners are Amadou & Mariam, I have to think twice about buying a pass to your festival.

The lineup for next year's Big Ears Festival - much anticipated in this household - was announced today and it was a bit, well, underwhelming.  I like Amadou & Mariam, I like Malian music in general, but I'm not sure it's enough to get me to buy an $800 four-day VIP pass for the festival.

I'm probably being a little unfair to the alphabetical order of the announcement, but most of the top tier performers leave me as underwhelmed as A-is-for-Amadou.  Devendra Banhart, Andrew Bird, The Mountain Goats, and Iron & Wine would have been great in 2015, but aren't as enticing these seven years later, and aren't the reason to go to a festival like Big Ears.  And Los Lobos and Rickie Lee Jones?  Don't get me started.

The John Zorn 70th Birthday Celebration looks amazing, but I already spent a day listening to Zorn at last year's festival. And if it's scheduled like last year, it will all be performed in one day, leaving three other festival days Zorn-less.

On the positive side, there are several excellent performers listed above, especially the William Parker sets.  I've long wanted to see Charles Lloyd, and The Bad Plus, Xylouris White, Christian McBride, and Vijay Iyer are all solid performers.  Bill Frisell has become something of a Big Ears fixture, which is cool, but I've now seen him several times in a variety of contexts.  I've also seen Marc Ribot at Big Ears twice before as well as Makaya McCraven, and I've seen Bela Fleck and Mary Halvorson each once before. And yes, I did notice James "Blood" Ulmer in there, as well as the great David Murray squeezed in with the band Tarbaby.

So I'm not saying that I'm not going, but I am thinking twice. There's also covid considerations to take into account.  Will there be a new variant to worry about next March? Or something worse? Will the festival become a polio super-spreader? Is that something we have to worry about now?

$800 is a lot of money for a festival pass, plus the cost of four night's lodging, food, gas, etc., etc. Unlike years past, this lineup isn't a sure-thing, slam-dunk decision.  What you're seeing here is me thinking twice.