Big Ears Festival, Knoxville, Tennessee

How often have you bemoaned the scarcity of improvised music at so-called “jazz” festivals? Big Ears may be the antidote – an American city festival that makes no genre-based mission statement, but proudly programmes a solid half of (broadly defined) jazz acts. The rest? A trippy brew of avant-garde/experimental trailblazers, party-starting Latin and African exports, and hipster-approved folk, roots and indie darlings. “Genre-bleed” and “genre-adjacent curious” were two hot takes served up at the opening critics’ roundtable – while labels may be un-hip, the one uniting theme is sonic surprise, the programmers proudly eschewing anything safe or familiar, with nary a stale standard or swing rhythm in earshot.

The real USP, though, is the location – and length. Big Ears is hosted over four long days in the twee southern town of Knoxville, Tennessee (population: 193,000), with non-stop gigs taking place from noon until night across 16 venues – from galleries, old churches and an Irish pub to mid-sized indie hangs, historic theatres and a huge convention centre, all scattered around the compact city centre and walkable in 15 minutes or less. It’s a willingly incestuous affair, with musicians frequently booked in multiple projects (guitarist Bill Frisell must hold this year’s record, clocking six full gigs as a sideman before finally getting to present his band Four on the closing day), with surprise collabs popping up at “secret” shows typically announced at the nth hour. Such a smorgasbord lends itself to long, meal-less days of restless venue-hopping – and queuing. It’s quite de rigor to race between performances midset, after just a few tunes, even at formal theatre shows.

Which also means it’s easy to spend more time bemoaning what you didn’t see, than digging what you did – mental gymnastics are required to sidestep bouts of fomo, and entering your own interior discovery mode is an essential survival technique. The greatest surprise was hiding in plain sight, with a relatively modest turnout for the cryptically billed Trio Imagination – a new project pairing legendary bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Andrew Cyrillewith Cuban pianist David Virelles – which delivered a thrilling mid-afternoon free jazz freak-out to a half-full church.

There was a mouth-watering array of bona fide legends on clearer view. At the 6,500-capacity Knoxville Civic Auditorium, Charles Lloyd presented his Chapel Trio featuring Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan, as captured on the first of last year’s Trio of Trios LPs. It was a languid, stately affair, enlivened by a perky blues which got the 85-year-old saxophonist blaring and braying, but there was definitely more grit in Lloyd’s blowing at last summer’s Pori Jazz. Also understandably showing signs of age was Marshall Allen, who somehow still leads the Sun Ra Arkestra at age 98, presenting a joyous celebration of his former employer’s vision, tailor-made for the box-ticking festival experience.

At 70, Joe Lovano is entering a rich new creative peak, casting ethereal spells with his bass-less Trio Tapestry, heard here ahead of the project’s third release on ECM Records, Our Daily Bread. The sax titan also appeared (alongside Frisell!) in Tyshawn Sorey’s fiery, out-there trio; the drummer himself was also in town to join bassist Linda Oh in the latest, and greatest, iteration of Vijay Iyer’s trio, which played a peerless non-stop, hour-long suite of Uneasy themes that may have marked the festival’s most intuitively improvisational summit.

The hype surrounding Iyer’s project with vocalist Arooj Aftab and her husband/collaborator Shahzad Ismaily was monumental – with the trio’s Love in Exile dropping a week earlier – but live the music failed to take flight, mired in aimless explorative vamping lacking the compositional focus of the vocalist’s excellent Vulture Prince.

Propped side-stage on a stool, AACM legend Wadada Leo Smith played both conductor and soloist, leading his cello-centric quartet through a cerebral-firing avant-garde assault. For sheer pinch-me virtuosity, no ensemble rocked harder than Christian McBride’s New Jawn, a masterclass in 21^st century post-bop theatrics that never lost sight of music’s central need to entertain. Strafing into fusion territory, Birdman drummer Antonio Sanchez brought his guest vox-heavy Shift (Bad Hombre, vol. II) to high-kicking life with just a tight-ass rhythm section and wife Thana Alexa on shape-shifting vocals.

One legend was unavoidable – maverick composer/saxophonist John Zorn, whose impending 70th birthday was marked with no less than 11 recitals and live appearances. Watching the camouflaged figure bob up and down, directing a double-drummer ensemble through his landmark Cobra with a table-full of cryptically coloured cards, hand signals, and a baseball cap, was a fittingly wacky/explosive close to the whole weekend.

The younger guard inevitably brought more surprises. Chicago’s trendsetting International Anthem imprint was once again well-represented, with one-time ‘beat scientist’ Makaya McCraven presenting last year’s fully composed landmark In These Times augmented with a string quartet, harp and vibes. The harp was played by Brandee Younger, who also intimately presented tracks off her forthcoming Brand New Life – both gigs were aided by the chilled vibes of a certain Joel Ross. In the best of three scheduled shows led by socially conscious spoken word artist Moor Mother, IARC’s Irreversible Entanglements’ frenetic brand of fire jazz sounded – amazingly – even more potent live than on record, while label mainstay Rob Mazurek battled illness to present his Exploding Star Orchestra to an arena-sized audience.

Playing in a strip-backed, electronics-heavy duo, Sons of Kemet alumnus Theon Cross was the sole representative of London’s happening scene. Another rising star, LA saxophonist Sam Gendel’s collaboration with bassist Sam Wilkes might make magical mood music, but watching the pair giggle over their effects pedals and primitive drum loops like a couple of stoned teenagers somewhat broke the spell.

“Newport ain’t got nothing on Big Ears!” Workman declared from the stage, and the 85-year-old Coltrane collaborator should know. The name just might be an undersell – after this four-day sonic summit our over-sated, omnivorous ears were left not just bigger, but electrified – wired, wider, wilder, more open and alive … and exhausted. Tired ears – but absolutely content ones. Festivals might never feel the same again.