Big Ears Festival: Yo-Yo Ma's 'Our Common Nature; Ashley Capps, a man of integral awareness

In writing about the first nine iterations of the Big Ears Festival, reviewers have had to invent entirely new colors to paint their descriptions of the new musics they encounter.

They’ve said the Big Ears experience is “electrifying,” “subtly luminous,” “unclassifiable,” and “quietly earth-shattering.” They call it “alternative, vibrant, and welcoming,” “a premier festival unlike any other,” presenting “improv-activated, beyond-the-known-horizon music.”

And they have loved Knoxville, honoring it as “America’s most carefully, lovingly programmed experimental music hub,” “a fertile nurturer of American culture,” and “the most open-minded music gathering in the country,” with “an event wholly capable of making a quiet Southern town feel like the momentary epicenter of experimental art.”

So why is it that so few in Oak Ridge seem to have noticed Big Ears?

Eighty years ago, no one in Knoxville knew that events in Oak Ridge were about to change the world. Now the tables have turned, and the Big Ears Festival is the bomb, the good kind, like a blinding light in the middle of the night seen only by those brave enough to look, with a ground-rattling sound that makes you quote the Bhagavad-Gita.

OK, maybe an Oppenheimer reference is a little over the top, but you get my drift.

Oak Ridgers don’t drive to Knoxville to enjoy the incredible bounty of the city’s arts scene. I attribute that to three Oak Ridge tendencies. No. 1: If it’s not dressed in orange and white, it’s not on their radar. No. 2: You have to be aware that it’s out there and you have to be hungry for it, which most Oak Ridgers aren’t, sad to say. And No. 3: If they do know about Big Ears, Oak Ridgers seem to think it’s meant for people who come from out of town, not for locals.

If you’ve never heard of Los Lobos, how would you know what an incredible opportunity it is that they’ll be at Big Ears? I love this booking, by the way. Putting Los Lobos in the mix at Big Ears reminds me of seeing Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Montreux Jazz Festival. It elevates them both, artist and venue.

If you’ve never experienced the tortured beauty of the way Bill Frisell distills magic from the otherwise silent strings of his guitar, no wonder you’re not counting down the weeks (8, 7, 6 ...) until he is in Knoxville again. And this time his jazz trio is performing a symphonic work with the Knox Symphony Orchestra (KSO), a piece Frisell wrote during the depths of the pandemic and debuted this past September with the Brussels Philharmonic.

If the name TRIO 3 rings no bells, you’ll have no idea that its new incarnation, Trio Imagination, is three of the finest jazz masters on Earth, and you could easily bump into them walking through Market Square during Big Ears without recognizing them at all.

Let me put it another way. Say you’re from another galaxy, and you travel across the universe to investigate the beautiful blue marble orbiting a steady yellow dwarf star in the Milky Way. If your ship breaks through the clouds and you find yourself hovering above 80,000 people in a former soybean field now called "Bonnaroo,” you would probably fly away faster than George Jetson.

But if you found yourself hovering over downtown Knoxville on Big Ears weekend, you’d moor your spaceship at World’s Fair Park, make your way over to Gay Street and blend right in, knowing that somewhere in the music all around you lie the answers to questions you may never learn the language to ask. And it won’t matter one bit, because you’ll be enveloped in friendly bliss.

Seventy-two percent of the lucky music lovers who buy Festival passes to Big Ears are from somewhere other than East Tennessee. No, not Jupiter or Mars. They’re from Brooklyn, Berlin, Chicago, Karachi, Taos, Tokyo, London, New Orleans, Copenhagen, Cartagena, Miami, Milano, Buenos Aires, Boston, Havana, Los Angeles, Lagos, San Juan ... so they’re flying in, using Uber and Lyft and KAT, staying in hotels, eating at restaurants, and buying anything they can fit into their carry-ons to take home.

The purpose of this article (and subsequent articles through the end of March) is to introduce you to some of the artists who will be performing at the Big Ears Festival.

I’ve made the point previously that the natural forces that give rise to Big Ears are not found in other cities, even those known for their cultural resources and assets. So a second purpose here is to look at what performers actually do when they come here, and to work backwards from that to see what it is about this bend in the river that makes it such a powerful magnet.

The answer to that is going to shock you.

Maybe Knoxville just naturally gets Epictetus who, sometime in the 2nd Century BC, said, “If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.”

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Big Ears

British producer, musician, and innovator Brian Eno, who might be seen as an invisible electron in the atomic structure of Big Ears (even though he has never participated physically) once observed a phenomenon that explains a curious aspect of Big Ears’ DNA. He said, “The Velvet Underground only sold 10,000 copies of their first album ... but everyone who bought one started a band.” One single brilliant pebble dropped in a still pond makes a thousand brilliant ripples.

The brilliant pebble of the Big Ears Festival is Ashley Capps.

Here’s his resume. He’s a Knoxville native who has shown the world what music means to this city. From Ella Guru’s to AC Entertainment, Bonnaroo, saving the Tennessee Theater, Sundown in the City, saving The Bijou, and now the Big Ears Festival, with side gigs in Asheville, Chattanooga, Nashville, and Louisville, Ashley is still the little kid playing “Flying Purple People Eater” at max volume on his 45 rpm record player 60 years ago.

You can witness the aura of his childhood immersion in music if you happen to see Ashley at one of the concerts he has produced. At Big Ears 2022, I sat near him at half a dozen concerts, and every time, as soon as the music started, he was transported to a place only he can occupy, but you can go on the trip too. Just watch how his head moves. Watch his concentration as it melts into innocent childlike wonder.

If anyone ever asks you what’s magical about music, just have them watch Ashley Capps when Julian Lage starts playing his guitar. At The Bijou, for a raucous explosion by John Zorn’s New Masada Quartet, when the music erupted, watching Ashley was like seeing a 9-year-old kid at the circus when 15 clowns pour out of a VW bug. He was beside himself with gleeful wonder.

Three nights ago, I went to a Big Ears announcement party at the Mill + Mine in Knoxville. There were 100 to 200 people there. The city mayor, the county mayor, arts patrons, Festival staff, journalists, and a couple of performers. But the star was Ashley, who had a big surprise to reveal.

Oak Ridge's own Edgar Meyer, and more

On top of the incredible cornucopia of the Big Ears offerings for March 30 through April 2, the Festival is making its first huge step to becoming a year-round phenomenon of special events. On Friday, May 26, at the World’s Fair Park amphitheater, Big Ears will present Yo-Yo Ma and Oak Ridge’s own Edgar Meyer, plus Rhiannon Giddens, Chris Thile, and other major surprises to be announced, in an unprecedented homage to the singular beauty of the geography, history, culture and arts of the Great Smoky Mountains. From the First Nations music and poetry of the Cherokee to the string band foundations of Bluegrass and Appalachian gospel, “Our Common Nature” is going to make history. It’s going to reveal history, celebrate history, and be history.

This magical gathering will actually span three days and nights, May 25-27. The Friday performance is the main event, but there will be concerts at The Bijou as well, plus story-telling, dance, poetry readings, and puppeteers.

This event grew out of a meeting of minds at a retreat on the North Carolina side of the mountains last year, initiated by Yo-Yo Ma and Cassius Cash, superintendent of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, plus officials of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, Knoxville movers and shakers, and Capps.

And if you want to be there, you’d better get to ourcommonnature.org as fast as you can to get tickets.

John Job is a longtime Oak Ridger and frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Big Ears Festival: Yo-Yo Ma's 'Our Common Nature; Ashley Capps