Metro Pulse

The roots of the Big Ears Festival go back to 1979, when Ashley Capps booked his first show, a performance by the free-jazz cellist Tristan Honsinger at the Laurel Theater. Capps has made his professional reputation in the years since as the head of AC Entertainment, one of the biggest concert promoters in the Southeast and co-founders of the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tenn. But back then he was a 23-year-old University of Tennessee student and part-time DJ on WUOT 91.9 FM, interested—even obsessed—by contemporary jazz, modern composition, punk and New Wave, and international music. Nobody else was bringing the artists he wanted to see to Knoxville, so he started doing it himself. Full story »

If there’s a consistent thread running through the lineup of artists scheduled for the Big Ears Festival, it’s a spirit of adventure. There’s not much else that connects composer Philip Glass to Cincinnati sonic explorer C. Spencer Yeh, who mixes drone, noise, and electronic composition as the one-man band Burning Star Core. The lineup does reflect, though, the amorphous and uncategorizable nature of post-World War II avant-garde and experimental music, which became even more confounding with the rise of psychedelic rock in the 1960s and the collision of academic theory, performance art, and pop during the punk and post-punk periods of the 1970s and early ’80s. Full story »

Despite that oft-quoted line—“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—music pundits have persisted in trying to pigeonhole, define, or somehow describe the practically indescribable music of Philip Glass. Minimalism is perhaps the most frequent, and unfortunate, term one hears in descriptions of his music, but it is one that Glass himself firmly rejects. Minimalism—whatever that could mean in a musical context—could hardly carry a composer, and a loyal audience, through more than 35 years of operas and theater music, film soundtracks, symphonies, concertos for various instruments, ensemble pieces, and a vast array of music for solo instruments. Glass’s music does draw, though, from the complex use of repetition and iteration that collectively expands and develops, involving the listener in an environment crammed with aural textures. Glass admits he was not the first: Maurice Ravel’s immensely popular Bolero takes a simple theme, repeats it multiple times, and heaps one instrumental texture on top of another with each iteration. Important, too, was Glass’s association with Indian musician Ravi Shankar, who revealed to him how small units of music strung together could create structure out of repeating and changing rhythms. Full story »

Break Antony and the Johnsons down to its component parts—frontman Antony Hegarty, a transgendered singer with a multi-octave range and warbly tone and a history in experimental theater and a backing band that includes cello, piano, two violins, horns, and one of the composers for the children’s television series The Backyardigans—and you’d probably expect high camp. Full story »

Anyone who’s seen Michael Gira live knows his reputation for intense, visceral performances is well-deserved. Eyes closed, brow furrowed, he delivers his lyrics with an inimitable, resonant baritone, through full-throated bellows and quavering crooning. Live or on recordings, there’s never any doubt he’s committed to the material he writes and sings. Full story »

The name may be unfamiliar, but the Austrian sound-sculptor who performs under his surname as Fennesz (his Christian name is Christian) is one of the most imitated, influential electronic artists in the world. It’s not incidental or coincidental that Fennesz will be performing three times during the Big Ears festival, both opening and closing the festival. Full story »

If Phillip Glass is the patron saint of minimalist composition, then surely Dan Deacon is at least the enfant terrible of pop music. The songs on Deacon’s acclaimed 2007 album Spiderman of the Rings are wickedly complex electronic dance pop anthems, often reminiscent of cartoon theme songs from some sinister planet. It’s a classic twist of pure pop tinged with experimental sounds to create something new. And it works. Full story »

Self-proclaimed “America’s $1 Funnyman” Neil Hamburger hearkens back to a simpler time when men were men and jokes weren’t funny. Clad in an ill-fitting tuxedo and oversized glasses and sporting a greasy Giuliani combover and the ever-present frown of a man who sees his audience as a potential firing squad, Hamburger’s performances—be they the poorly-delivered one-liners with which he has regaled unsuspecting pizza joints since the mid-’90s or the personality-driven musical turn of 2008’s Neil Hamburger Sings Country Winners—are either complete mockeries or a tongue-in-cheek homage to his comedic forebears. Full story »

Gather up all of your favorite and familiar trumpet sounds: marches, Satchmo, Haydn, ska maybe, Dixieland, Dizzy, the many moods of Miles Davis, what have you. Now put those away, someplace safe, while you consider the music of trumpeter Jon Hassell. Categories and preconceptions won’t help you here. It’s entirely possible that the things you know and the things you have done that will make this music meaningful to you aren’t related to music at all. Reading Paul Bowles or camping out among the sculptural installations of Juan Muñoz or riding your bicycle with no hands on the way to Hassell’s upcoming performance might easily be the better preludes. Full story »

The Chattanooga-based Shaking Ray Levi Society and the performing duo The Shaking Ray Levis (drummer Bob Stagner and keyboardist/vocal artist Dennis Palmer) have been making a joyful noise just over the hill and occasionally here in Knoxville for going on 25 years. Their music will speak for itself this weekend. Rather than submit you to a bunch of bad analogies and lame comparisons, allow us to share some recent correspondence from Mr. Palmer. Full story »

It’s hard to say whether a great music experimentalist is unusually focused or just easily distracted. For the moment, at least, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt would appear to fall into the latter camp. Full story »

There are only a handful of certainties when pianist Chris Abrahams, drummer Tony Buck, and acoustic bassist Lloyd Swanton, aka The Necks, take to a stage and begin to play. First, they have no idea what’s going to happen. Second, it’s going to happen until it’s done. Third, it’ll be a while. Full story »

A defining metaphor for the Big Ears Festival comes to mind while chatting via phone with New York City-based reedman Ned Rothenberg. Perhaps the Big Ears Festival’s sensorium-blowing diversity, shoehorned as it is into a mere 50 hours, is the iPod generation’s answer to a music festival—a live manifestation of shuffle mode, with classical, jazz, rock, category X, and category Y cheek-to-jowl. Full story »