THROUGH THE LENS: The Biggest Moments from Big Ears 2024

During a talk with NPR’s Ann Powers, Kristen Hersh said that when a performance goes especially well with a receptive audience it’s “extrapolating creativity into the fingerprints of others.” That pretty much sums up the Big Ears Festival, which wrapped up Sunday in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I have sung the praises of this most unique, and most necessary, festival before. It’s an experience where the artist and audience become one. As I have looked around the venues, I do not see folks nodding off, looking at their phones, or chatting with neighbors. I see everyone in a trance-like pose. Each year after the fest is over, during the long drive home, I have a greater sense of life’s possibilities. It seems even the winding roads cutting through the mountains look and feel different. 

Once again I was joined by the most congenial Kelly Shipe. Here are our takeaways.

Big Ears: A Nourishing Adventure, by Amos Perrine

Aoife O’Donovan

Just three days after the release of her new album, All My Friends, O’Donovan performed its songs inspired by Carrie Chapman Catt, an activist for the women’s suffrage movement, accompanied by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. As ND’s Managing Editor Hilary Saunders wrote in her story, “the album serves as a tribute to the U.S. Constitution’s 19th Amendment, which a century ago outlawed voter discrimination based on gender, thereby granting women the right to vote.”

It was not a preachy performance or one that merely recited history. Rather, it was a combination of a celebration of women’s rights and a spirited acknowledgement of all the work that remains to be done. The orchestra, which uplifted O’Donovan’s song cycle, was joined by a chorus of young women — fitting, as they must take up the mantle of what their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers have started. As O’Donovan said from the stage, “the struggle continues.”

Silkroad Ensemble: American Railroad

In 2022, Rhiannon Giddens became the artistic director for the Silkroad Ensemble, which was founded in 1999 by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma as a cross-cultural ensemble and more recently has received support from No Depression publisher The FreshGrass Foundation. Beginning with a call-and-response chant/dialogue between Pura Fé at one end of the stage and Giddens at the other, the Ensemble performed American Railroad, a tapestry of songs highlighting untold stories and amplifying unheard voices of those who built this country’s railroads.

The performance was both a history lesson and a sharing of the rich traditions of immigrant and Indigenous communities, thus painting a more accurate picture of the global diasporic origin of the American Empire. As many have said, in order to understand yourself and the world today, you must know history. We all came away from this performance with a greater sense of both.

Laurie Anderson & Sexmob: Let X = X 

I have seen Anderson perform a wide variety of pieces ever since we we were neighbors when I first lived in New York some 45 years ago, and this was my most-anticipated performance of the fest. This show encapsulated Anderson’s lifetime of work in “experimental stuff,” as she put it from the stage. (She was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy in January.)

With absolutely marvelous support from Sexmob, Anderson reworked songs from her many albums and set pieces over the years. From the opening Yoko Ono-like audience primal scream that was the loudest, most intense 30 seconds of my life to the tai chi encore, it was more than a marvelous retrospective of a life as a performance artist, it was life itself.

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway

Tuttle and her band brought their great joyful bluegrass sound to a fully packed Mill & Mine venue. While she began her set with the acknowledgment that she was scheduled to play the festival in the COVID-cancelled year 2020, the audience got the best of the bargain. As good as she’s been ever since I first saw her in an East Nashville backyard eight years ago, she has taken her music into the stratosphere since then. That notion was epitomized by her and the band’s extended take on “White Rabbit,” on which they demonstrated that they can do psychedelic just as ferociously as Jefferson Airplane did in 1967. And still be called a bluegrass band. 

Big Ears, Big Feelings, by Kelly Shipe

Big Ears is not just a music festival. It is a beautiful roadside stop on a spiritual journey. The event surpasses the proverbial billboard promises of a not-to-be-missed attraction. It delivers in never-expected ways, with soul-opening performances, conversations, and exhibits.

With just her guitar, Kristen Hersh entranced me with her haunting vocals amid stained glass windows and a forgotten pipe organ. I was drawn into “Your Ghost” as I felt the spirits of the old sanctuary swirl above in the rafters.

First-generation Haitian-American Leyla McCalla invoked those same spirits with a performance that set me on a path of introspection and joy. Simultaneously expressing vibrancy, joy, and pain through her musicianship, McCalla is a master craftsperson. Be it on electric guitar, cello, or banjo, her free-spirited expression and divine voice lifted my own soul to the rafters. Her musical recitation of “Boukman’s Prayer” gave a glimpse into the textured and passionate nature of Haiti and the revolutionary spirit of its people.

Cedric Burnside had time standing still during his set  Alone, stage left, in warm light, with only his guitar, he held me, all of us, in a beam of blues perfection.

Then there was JJJJJerome Ellis. In the reverent space of St. John’s Church, I was struck, almost uncomfortably so, by his unabashed vulnerability.  With his plush toy hippo, Hildegarde, a gift from his love, Luísa, by his side, he took us on a passage of sound, silence, and words. I was entranced. I feel like Ellis lives on a plane just above most of us, and I was grateful that he granted us access, if only for an hour.

My heart almost burst observing an onstage conversation with Jon Batiste. We all know his genius, but his expression of kindness and drive for all to endeavor in creative exploration was top-level inspirational. Marcus J. Moore led the discussion and made us feel like we were sitting down with the pair in a favorite Brooklyn coffee shop.

What more can I say?  After the 2024 Big Ears, I have big feelings. Feelings that will travel with me as I continue my journey.

Click on any photo below to view the gallery as a full-size slideshow.