Preview: Big Ears 2023

The schedule for the 2023 Big Ears Festival was released today. Damn, I'm gonna have to make some painful choices between competing set times.

The problem is an embarrassment of riches. There are so many interesting sets, so many terrific artists that are hard to hear elsewhere, that it's simply impossible to see everything that interests me. Simply put, they've done too good a job of curating a line-up of cutting-edge musicians.

A similar problem happened back in the Twenty Teens with a different type of music at Portland's Music Fest NorthWest. That indie- and alternative-rock festival got so big that it reached four days in length (Thursday through Sunday) at venues scattered across the City of Portland. Since it took some amount of time to travel from venue to venue, you could only take in so many sets a night. I managed to catch most of what interested me the most, but I could have scheduled a completely different lineup made up of bands that I had missed, and it's even possible that I could have made a third unique lineup.

I would say that if there were 100 acts scheduled, at best you might be able to catch 20 of them, 25 if you were ambitious. Eventually, MFNW got so large and bloated that ticket buyers started to complain, claiming "false advertising" since they couldn't catch most of the advertised acts. That and the mere logistics of managing a festival that size led to its collapse - I think the last MFNW was in 2013 (some day-long, single-stage events sponsored by an energy-drink company used the name "MFNW," but they weren't at all the same thing). 

I count 184 separate performances in this year's Big Ears. Some of the sets are by different lineups or arrangements of the same artists - John Zorn alone has some 10 performances. If you're a Zorn fan like me and wanted to catch all 10 of those performances, it would mean you couldn't see or hear anything else that Saturday and Sunday - you'd miss out on 83 other performances, ranging from the bluegrass of banjo maestro Bela Fleck to the outer worlds sounds of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Personally, I'm going to catch most, but not all, of the Zorn sets, and take in a few other things. One artist I regrettably will miss is Washington's Mourning [A] BLKstar, although you never know, new, surprise sets are still being announced, and once I'm actually at the Festival, I tend to throw my pre-plannedschedule out the window.  So you nver know.