Unpacking Big Ears: Pitchfork Day

 

The annual Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee is a celebration of jazz, electronic, experimental, indie, and other niche genres on the fringes of popular taste but on my first day, three of the four artists I experienced could just as well have been playing at the Pitchfork Festival. That's not a knock against the performers, it's just an ironic realization of the overlap in the Venn diagram between the avant-garde and the mainstream.  

The first evening of the festival started out for me with a set by indie-rock royalty Yo La Tengo. They opened their set with Ohm from their 2013 album Fade, followed by Sinatra Drive Breakdown from 2023's This Stupid World. During the set, they reached deep into their extensive back catalog, performing False Alarm, Tom Courteney, and The Balled of Red Buckets from 1995's Electr-o-pura, Moby Octopad and Autumn Sweater from I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One (1997), and closed the set with a rousing version of I Heard You Looking from 1993's Painful. 

Since they were at Big Ears, they were joined onstage by fellow festival performers William Tyler on guitar and percussionist John McEntire of the band Tortoise. I heard rumors that Ira and Georgia were in the audience the following evening watching the set by Swamp Dogg. Earlier that following day (Day 2 of Big Ears), they played a set with the Sun Ra Arkestra at the Knoxville Civic Auditorium. 

Yo La Tengo are no strangers to the Arkestra. The Arkestra have been guest performers during Yo La Tengo's annual Eight Days of Hanukah celebrations and YLT covered Sun Ra's Nuclear War way back in 2002. The two performed Nuclear War together at Big Ears on Friday and it still sounds just as transgressive as it did when I first heard the song during a Sun Ra show sometime around 1985 in Atlanta's Moonshadow Saloon. 

In addition to the Moonshadow show, I've had the good fortune of seeing Sun Ra multiple times during the 1970s and '80s, including an extended late-70s residency in Boston that included a large light-show installation. I've run into him in the NYC subway system and once when leaving a Boston movie theater after a showing of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I have fond memories of those shows and partly to keep the memories alive, I had not seen the Arkestra since his passing in 1993 until this show, despite my fondness for replacement bandleader Marshall Allen (the centenarian Allen understandably did not travel to Tennessee for the Big Ears show). 

The new Arkestra, especially with Yo La Tengo on board, is certainly a different experience than those protean sets from the 70s, although it was nice to see that they still featured a dancer and to hear standards like Rocket No. 9, The Second Stop Is Jupiter, and I'm Gonna Unmask the Batman (which I don't think I'd ever heard them perform live before), in addition to Nuclear War. As per cosmic tradition, they ended the set with Space Is the Place while parading off the stage.

But back on Thursday night, the one act that I saw that definitely didn't fit the Pitchfork profile was a trio led by bassoonist Joy Guidry. I posted a full set on WDW by Guidry back in 2023, and was truly blown away by their 2024 album, Amen, much of which was performed during in the 2023 video. Their set at Big Ears this year was titled Amen, and they opened the set with Psalm 138:7, the opening track of Amen. But one of the outstanding features of Amen is the soulful gospel singing of Jillian Grace on songs like Angels and Max Roach's Members Don't Get Weary. However, Grace, nor much of the other personnel on Amen, did not perform with Guidry at Big Ears, even though some, like trombonist Kalia Vandever, were otherwise playing at the festival. The trio on stage with Guidry included a violinist/keyboardist and one other, and together they played a moody and atmospheric set of ambient spiritual jazz. It was a good set, but to be honest I was disappointed as I went in expecting to hear the Amen album. To be sure, some of the quieter passages from Amen, such as I Will Always Miss You, were played but the set was hardly what had been promoted on the festival website.

Joy Guidry's set was performed at The Point, a converted church without your usual stage lighting, and performed in the near dark. The darkness did not lend itself to photography, so I had to reconstruct the set using AI generators, which gave me a reasonable facsimile of Guidry on bassoon, but added the spotlights and a fuller ensemble, neither of which were present at Big Ears.   

Afterwards, it was back to Pitchfork-land. Although not officially a part of the Big Ears festival, Knoxville's tiny experimental venue and bar, The Pilot Line, was offering its own series over the weekend, including a solo performance by Animal Collective's Geologist. 

It's rare to be able to see a musician the caliber of  Brian Weitz in such a tiny venue with such a small audience - maybe 100 people, even less near the stage (which was larger than the floor space for the crowd). Also as surprising was that he played the entire set using a hand-wound hurdy gurdy with added electronic effects. The tunes played were variously spacy, Eastern-sounding, and folky, as well as always surprising. As a huge AC fan, I was shocked (shocked, I tell you!) that I was able to walk right in to the set with no cover charge or line extending around the block. A few years ago, I saw Jessica Moss of Silver Mount Zion perform at The Pilot Light, also without a line or cover charge, but Animal Collective has an exponentially larger following than the Godspeed spin-off project. 

My final set of the Pitchfork night was Darkside at The Mill and Mine. Darkside is the project of Chilean electronic musician Nicolás Jaar along with American guitarist Dave Harrington and drummer Tlacael Esparza. Much of their music is classified as electronic dance music, and while they did feature some big, thumping four-on-the-floor dance beats, their set was much more varied and textured than your typical EDM, dipping into psychedelia, electronica, and even spacy ambience (although briefly, before the dance-hall fans zoned out). As I recall, they opened the set with SLAU from their new LP Nothing, and played most if not all of the songs from that album in their set, including the popular single, Graucha Max. The set was notable for the changing music as well as the extensive use of stage smoke and dramatic backlighting to cast the performers in silhouette.

For most of the rest of the Big Ears weekend, I saw various modern jazz ensembles, noise artists, and avant-garde performers. But on Thursday I saw my popular Pitchfork bands and I offer no apologies for an evening with Yo La Tengo, Geologist, and Darkside.