“Let me tell you the story,” Harry Wilkinson begins. The Maruja frontman/guitarist stands on the stage of the Jackson Terminal, a blanket draped around his shirtless body as they fall into “The Invisible Man.” There’s no warm-up — just burning energy, exhilarating in its theatricality. Wilkinson pats his chest, throws his arms in the air, twirls around. The other members match the moment. Saxophonist Joe Carroll moves around with his instrument, edging to the corners of the stage to blow into people’s faces. Bassist Matt Buonaccorsi turns away and arches his back while filling up the low end, while drummer Jacob Hayes’ beat gradually shifts into a pummel like a boat encountering a rip current.
For the past month, the U.K. quartet have been traveling across North America, but during their final stop at Big Ears Festival on Saturday evening, they teeter on the brink of madness. Straddling the worlds of jazz, punk, and noise, Maruja follow the same intuition and intensity as their forebearers, often comparing their shows to an exorcism. There’s also storytelling. Up close, Wilkinson’s hulking, built like a serious jock who got turned onto Homer and stopped showing up to practice. He carries the rage of a hardcore vocalist but almost sings like a rapper, delivering tales of vengeance and despair that expose an abundant love for language. During “Break The Tension,” he dives into the pit — likely the festival’s only moment of crowd-surfing — dispensing so much passion and conviction that you forget the band are just getting started.
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In a four-day blur filled with jazz, ambient, indie rock, and unclassifiable weirdness, their chaos feels like an outlier — until you consider the festival’s two MOs: motion and immersion. Throughout the weekend, those two spectrums oscillate wildly within the crowds of downtown Knoxville. They dance madly at Helado Negro. They sink into the haunted beauty of Jessica Pratt. They get healed with Alabaster DePlume’s infectious energy and enter a new continuum with Laraaji. Over at International Anthem’s three-day residency at Jig & Reel, immersion is in full effect. In celebration of its 11th year, the Chicago-based label pours chrysanthemum tea — a tribute to its own vibrating flower logo, representing longevity and joy — and presents spontaneous performances from artists on its roster. On Sunday, that meant a meditative improvisation from Carlos Niño, Adam Rudolph, and Ben LaMar Gay — the type of attentive, introspective listening that Big Ears is rooted in. Afterward, they’re met with tremendous applause.
Cora Wagoner
All this to say: It’s easy to find your people. Although I mostly navigated the festival by myself, there was no shortage of meaningful dialogue, always unexpected but thoroughly satisfying. There’s a real gentleness, and ultimately respect, to a gathering this large. Eager to catch another set, individuals wait until a song is over to exit the venues, rarely exist on their phones (or, at the very least, dial the brightness way down), and are prone to gush about the performances while dashing to the next. Before Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, my neighbor tells me about seeing Pink Floyd on their Animals tour, describing the panoramic sound in exquisite detail. While standing at the rail for DARKSIDE, a 20-something offers to AirDrop me videos of Beth Gibbons’ spellbinding act at Knoxville Civic Auditorium upon expressing disappointment in missing it (she, regrettably, overlapped with Tortoise). In line at Jig & Reel, a trio from Chicago supplies recommendations to fill the rest of my Sunday.
Back in 2009, Big Ears was dreamed up by Ashley Capps, a Knoxville-bred concert promoter who also co-founded Bonnaroo, one of the Big 4 in the festival world, and cashed out before the pandemic hit. Capps spent time in NYC as a teenager (their father had an office in the city), absorbing its rich rock, jazz, and classical scenes. It makes sense, then, that he launched a festival that gathers artists just as prismatic in sound, hoping to engineer connection, meaning, and purpose. Though the festival has struggled like any other — including a hiatus from 2011-2013 and COVID-19 limitations from 2020-2021 — it’s gained loads of support in the ensuing years. This past weekend, thousands roamed downtown — selling out every year since returning in 2022. That’s likely because Big Ears is the most eclectic, broadly minded sprawl in the U.S., uniting thousands of kindred spirits bustling across old-school theaters, churches, pubs, museums, and beyond. It’s possible to catch anywhere from 20-40 acts by its end, if you try hard enough (and bring the correct footwear to average 15,000 steps per day).
Andy Feliu
With an event this sweeping, it’s hard to consider the nucleus; but largely, Michael Rother feels like its center of gravity. Too much can be traced back to the music he laid down in Düsseldorf during the early ’70s, creating a hypnotic pulse alongside drummer Klaus Dinger in Neu! that’s disseminated through generations of bands. That new strain of rhythm closed the gap between rock and dance music — an eternal motion that gives way to peace of mind without ever clambering for the highs of a chorus. The 74-year-old guitarist knows this inherently, addressing the jammed space with a benign request. “One wish from me: If you can, move freely. Dance,” he urges. During the three-song run from Neu!’s 1972 debut album — “Weissensee,” “Hallogallo,” and “Negativland” — the crowd obliges. A man in an Aphex Twin tee moves blissfully. An older gentleman bobs his head. A woman shakes her hips.
Hours before his set, his kosmische successors Beak> take the stage at Mill & Mine. Their recent shows have been distinct, marking the last before co-founder Geoff Barrow retires from the band. It’s hard to imagine the shows without his presence, frequently (albeit lovingly) giving his bandmates hell and cracking jokes between songs. “Have eggs gotten any cheaper?” he asks. It’s only a flash of the band’s unbridled chemistry, which deepens as they slip into some of their greatest songs — “Brean Down,” “Sex Music,” and “Allé Sauvage,” to name a few — and commence a trance that sounds infinite. As time passes, their jams become longer and more unbound, finding transcendence within repetition and leaning into their ability to make people move.
Likewise, Rother’s influence ripples through the expansive improvisations of Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, who play to a filled-out Bijou Theatre on Friday afternoon. It’s fitting, as each of the members possess a CV just as crammed. Parker helped to define the Chicago underground with Tortoise in the ’90s; Jay Bellerose has toured with Robert Plant & Alison Krauss; Anna Butterss shares credits with Phoebe Bridgers and Jenny Lewis; Josh Johnson can be heard on albums as disparate as Harry Styles and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Together, they ride through waves of rhythm, feeling each other out and finding the thread in real time. You can see their smiles and head nods build during “Freakadelic,” clearly enthralled to start unlocking greater possibilities. When they transition into “3 for L” from Parker’s Suite for Max Brown, they are fully in tune, gliding between solos and existing in the present.
Taryn Ferro
Just about every member plays other sets across the festival. On Saturday, Johnson and Butterss return to the stage with SML, a newly formed quintet who also discovered their sound at Highland Park’s ETA, laying down their 2024 debut album, Small Medium Large, during four nights of improvisation in the 100-cap cocktail lounge (now, sadly, shuttered). But their live performance only sounds a little like those songs. It’s trancier, groovier, more reliant on bringing ideas into the space and seeing what comes. Once The Standard reaches capacity, the line stretches down the street.
In a screen-damaged world, moments of transcendence can feel like myth, but it’s never far away at Big Ears. That’s the only damning issue with a festival like this: There’s so much to see, timing conflicts abound, and you never know if a greater high is happening around the corner. On Thursday night, though, DARKSIDE played one of the best sets of the weekend, delivering on the early promise of the festival. Imagine the funky thump of “Echoes” but add warbly electronics and pitch-shifted vocals, then stretch that into an hour-and-a-half-long catharsis. The set begins with a hybrid of “Golden Arrow” and “The Limit” but soon evolves into a lysergic blend of dance music, krautrock, and Grateful Dead-schooled solos. At points, there’s so much fog that you can barely see the members. But cotton candy pinks and lush greens soon descend into dystopian reds when the trio begin “Hell suite, Pt. I” — a standout from their excellent third album, Nothing, released earlier this year.
Andy Feliu
Nicolás Jaar leaves the shadows of his keyboard rig to address a dismal truth: “We’re living in hell.” It’s hard to disagree. Over a million Americans died from a lab-leaked disease that continues to mutate into terrifying new forms. A confounding presidency threatens to spin our very existence out of orbit. Fatigue becomes your whole state of being. Every day gets a little bit harder, and you learn to live with less than the generation before. In this moment, he adopts the charisma of a frontman, coming to the edge of the stage to sing the words. “It’s not too late to stop,” Jaar says. Every time he ends the verse, it’s sharp, expressing the heaviness of the word and the world.
Afterward, they change gears, growing funkier and more telepathic. Rainbow light illuminates the stage as they slip into a lengthy jam, grooves that stretch into the unseen. At once, they somehow embody both the festival’s MOs — a blindingly frenetic escape from our own hell. It’s total joy, fog tumbling out behind them as they kick up cosmic stardust. Then the smoke lifts, and you walk away with part of yourself healed.
