Early on the third day of Big Ears 2022 – the very beginning of my second half - the return iteration of the festival that’s given me the most revelations and the highest percentage of sets that left me shaking my head and saying, “I’m so lucky to be alive,” or, more simply, “Fuck,” the great trumpeter and bandleader Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, said, “We’re at an interesting time. This is the 100th anniversary of this music, if you want to use pejorative terms you can call it jazz, but we call it stretch music. It’s also an opportunity to re-evaluate this relationship,” eyes going over the audience and his bandmates.

That crystallized some inchoate thoughts I’d had about live music as we’ve returned to it. Hearing someone working at the absolute top of his game, leading an astonishing five-piece band on vocals, trumpet, and Adjuah’s bow (an electric harp hybrid of the kamele n-goni and kora), acknowledge that the relationship between an artist and their audience, between an artist and their art, and between all of us as human beings, is always up for re-evaluation struck me square in the chest.

That’s something we should always be open to but not enough of us are. I’ve been going to shows since I was 14. Most weeks I see at least one live music event. Even thinking of it as a relationship that needs tended, that needs cared about, or it turns into something else, was a powerful restatement of a deep understanding that I’d let slide. Worse, the gratitude I felt for it, and the lack of it when we couldn’t congregate for it, was already in danger of getting taken for granted again.

That handful of words from Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, with sunlight pouring through the windows at the Mill and Mine, the northernmost venue of the Big Ears Festival in downtown Knoxville, planted in my brain and reverberated through everything I saw later and everything I’d seen the first two days. Even when I was exhausted, even when my legs and back ached – attending this kind of festival is a muscle that needs exercised – even when there was a set I bailed on after 15 minutes because it and I just didn’t click, I never took a second of it for granted.

Trumpeter, pianist, and bass player — Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah

All that said, the set from Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah and his quintet, when it got heavy, it was the best kind of heavy. Deep grooves on songs like “I Own the Night,” a centerpiece of his brilliant 2020 record Axiom, poured a glowing, sinuous trumpet tone over hard breakbeats from drummer Corey Fonville and swirls of electric piano from Lawrence Fields. The next tune featured a cascade of piano and a powerful breakdown from percussionist Weedie Braimah and the crowd moved and sweated far out of the range of expectations for 2 pm on a Saturday afternoon.

As I look back on the 27 sets I saw – skipping a few I ducked in on but couldn’t get on the level with – the biggest common thread between them was groove. As Jaimie Branch said to me in an interview this outlet was kind enough to publish, “All music is dance music. All music needs to be in the body first.” She and her band played the festival, a couple days after a scorching Wexner Center set that had me telling anyone who’d listen for thirty seconds not to miss it and everyone I talked to after the fact, at bars or in lines for other sets, raved with variations on “That was a party.”

No two sets approached that groove, that bodily sense, in the same way: everyone brought their own experiences, their own histories, their own senses of the future to it. Coming back to the heartbeat, to the sweat, to the movement, isn’t monolithic, and everywhere I turned Big Ears celebrated those flavors and those shadings.

Sons of Kemet, who I’ve been waiting to see for a long time, ripped through alternately pummeling and supple dancefloor monsters, drawing from their fantastic 2021 record Black to The Future and going further back, drummers Tom Skinner and Eddie Wakili-Hick setting up shifting beds of rhythm for tenor saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings to dance over. Hutchings’ horn slid from classic soul shouting to crying to almost toasting to call and response, bouncing off the audience, drawing from Trinidadian rhythms and all the history of the horn, and throwing back and forth with tuba player Theon Cross, sometimes reeling off thick, greasy bass lines and sometimes adding melody or throwing lines back and forth, both horn players facing off like gunslingers.

Their fellow star of the explosive London scene, tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, put one of the most stunning saxophone tones I’ve heard in years front and center, leading a rhythm section of piano, upright bass, and drums, fire-cured and finely tuned from three weeks opening for Khruangbin, through dancefloor monsters like “Before Us: In Demerara & Caura,” enjoying an audience at least a third of whom whooped with excitement when she said, “I’m going to do one off the first EP... anyone have that?” The guts alone to take a festival crowd, late on a Saturday, already overstimulated, and open a song with a minutes-long unaccompanied tenor line was marvelous; the line itself, that was like watching a blowtorch carve calligraphy in crystal, was transcendent; the way she had everyone in that room eating out of her hand was justice.

Sometimes that groove came from a more quintessential rock and roll place. I was overjoyed to finally see the volcanic power trio Harriet Tubman. Bassist Melvin Gibbs, still best known to people my age for his keystone role in the best version of Rollins Band but with a resume enlivening every classic player of the New York downtown scene including Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Defunkt, and Roland Shannon Jackson, leaned into a deep, symbiotic connection with drummer JT Lewis (everyone from Teddy Pendegrass and Vanessa Williams to Lou Reed and Marianne Faithful), stretching with Brandon Ross’s (Meshell Ndegeocello, Henry Threadgill) acid-trail leads, blurring time and space and making heads bob for miles. The camaraderie and good humor leavened the intensity of their music and supplied a way in, but never blunted its power.

Drummer Dan Weiss led his band Starebaby projected a similar joy and looseness with each other on stage around arrangements that drifted into doom metal waters and also the most intricate of chamber music. The core relationship seemed like Weiss and keyboardist Craig Taborn (at the very highest level of working jazz pianists but also an avowed metalhead), and a perfect band built around them featuring Trevor Dunn from Mr. Bungle on bass, Ben Monder (David Bowie’s Blackstar) on guitar, and Matt Mitchell (Tim Berne, Dave Douglas) on other keys. Thick, knotty intertwining keyboard abstractions, colored by sparks of guitar distortion landed solidly with a perfectly timed crash of the drums, often punctuated by wide grins from Taborn and Weiss, a sense of “Oh, you went there? All right, here’s this.”

That sense of the body and the groove also insinuated itself into sets in less obvious ways. The minute I heard Marc Ribot’s guitar on Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs, the way he took what I loved in Chuck Berry or Steve Cropper or Hubert Sumlin (whose name I don’t think I knew yet, just “the guy on those Howlin’ Wolf records”) and both stripped it down and took it out hit me in the same way as the first time I heard Thelonious Monk. The first time I heard Andrew Cyrille, when I bought Cecil Taylor’s Blue Note recording from the ‘60s Unit Structures, knocked me sideways in the same way: I couldn’t make any sense of the music at all at first, but there was something in there I needed – but I loved those drums immediately. Watching those two voices come together for a fully improvised set and I think their first meeting, refracted the whole history of American music from the ‘60s onward, through the empathy and the voracious appetites of two of our most singular voices. Tiny cells of broken melody rolled like mercury and formed new, glowing shapes. In the next minute, snarling R&B skidded over a powerful, stuttered kick drum; the next, a classic train beat but thrown off just slightly to refresh our conception of what that train beat means under some classic (but also roughed up) country blues.

Tift Merritt performed a few times with her partner Eric Heywood in the Old City staple Boyd’s Jig and Reel and I was lucky enough to catch one of those sets, right before I walked up the street to see Sons of Kemet. I’ve been a big fan of her songwriting for many years – I remember ordering The Two Dollar Pistols With Tift Merritt from Miles of Music back when niche online music stores existed, and I think Traveling Alone is as great a record as anyone’s made in any genre in the last decade - and Heywood literally reshaped how I thought about the pedal steel guitar with his work on Son Volt’s Trace when I was a teenager. So, seeing the two of them together in a room that barely held 75 people was a treat, but I still didn’t expect to be as moved as I was. That first song, the two of them close together, both on acoustics, tearing into “All The Reasons We Don’t Have to Fight” from See You On The Moon, when she sang, “I love you more than who is right and wrong – I want to stay and I made this song of all the reasons we don’t have to fight,” I started crying and I’m not sure I stopped for several songs after. Over and over again, on songs like “Traveling Alone,” “Small Talk Relations,” and “Good-Hearted Man” – as she moved to piano and Heywood moved to pedal steel – crystalizing the power of music and what keeps people making art, how we can use it to build a better world but also reveling in the relationships we have.

Those relationships, the value of community, vibrated through the streets of Knoxville all weekend. Jaimie Branch and band played behind Alabaster DePlume (I was at another set but heard amazing word). Violist Nadia Sirota played in three sets and hosted interviews, acting as the same kind of glue she has in previous years and as she does in the exciting New York chamber music scene. Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell played about four times each, in different configurations.

Singer-songwriter Joe Henry, who has made some of the most consistently great singer-songwriter records (and produced for giants like Allen Toussaint, Bonnie Raitt, and Solomon Burke) added Marc Ribot and Jason Moran to his longtime rhythm section of David Piltch and Jay Bellerose and his son Levon Henry on tenor sax, blowing me away in the last set I saw the first night of the festival. The next morning, I was in a seat at 10 am with coffee for one of my music writing idols Ann Powers interviewing Henry and Moran; it was a conversation that moved me to tears and made me want to make something. Hearing these two towering artists talk about Thelonious Monk as a guiding light and one of the signature artists of the 20th century, but also not being precious about music, that it dies if we don’t engage with it, if younger artists put it on a shelf and deem it untouchable.

I watched Marcus J. Moore (who wrote the fantastic Kendrick Lamar book The Butterfly Effect) interview three supernovas of the new Chicago scene, Ben LaMar Gay, Damon Locks, and Angel bat Dawid, all doing their own sets and playing with one another, and other artists like Lonnie Holley. Angel bat Dawid, who I interviewed a few years ago for Jazzcolumbus in one of my favorite interviews ever, said the main thing a young artist needs is community, and she’s a stellar example of not only appreciating that support but giving it to other people, paying it forward – and she broke my heart when she talked about the way she’s been treated on her return to the road. If such an acclaimed artist is still getting condescended to, what the hell is happening to people without her track record?

As someone who went through college reading and (badly) writing poetry, and despite some fallow periods, has never been far from poetry for long, there was a magical symmetry in the beginning and the ending of my Big Ears weekend. I started with the great poet Nikki Finney, conjuring an entire history and a world she grew up in full of people who came to life before our eyes – with asides like, “Do you all know what a deuce and a quarter is? My father must have had 11 of those Buicks...” - in sharp, empathetic duet with cellist Tomeka Reid who I’ve seen many times over the years (Chicago was the first big city I visited and the first jazz scene I loved) but never heard sound better.

And I ended with a pulsing, raging solo electronics and voice set from Saul Williams. I was too young for Williams’ era of the Nuyorican Poets Café scene, but I saw him in Marc Levin’s fictionalized movie about the power of poetry, Slam, at the Drexel when I was 18, and within that same year caught Paul Devlin’s documentary about the National Poetry Slam, Slam Nation, he starred in, and heard his track on Eargasms – Crucialpoetics Vol. 1. By the time of his first solo album, the Rick Rubin-produced Amethyst Rock Star, I was a rabid fan, and that fandom’s stayed strong through his work with Trent Reznor, Blackalicious, and Mike Ladd, among so many others, and I’d seen him read before, but I’d never seen his music live. That set brought together so many threads – deep grooves, riddled with sub-bass and powerful, committed vocals, engaging and speaking to us all as a community but not letting us off the hook for our complacency: in lieu of an encore, Williams gave a stirring speech reminding us that the industrial age grew directly out of the colonial age and if you open up a laptop, like the one he was using to generate the music, you’d see connections labeled “Master” and “Slave.” He ended with the words “So the question remains,” letting them hover in the air as he walked off and the lights came up.

For all I loved about Big Ears, this style of festival in multiple venues of a certain geographic location (my preferred style by far, I’m too old to stand in the sun for 10 solid hours of a day anymore) always has a “Choose Your Own Adventure” aspect. Someone could have not overlapped with me once in those four days and had as good a time as I did. In a different mood, I could have easily filled my days with chamber music (the very cream of the crop was represented here – Ellen Reid and Nadia Sirota, James McVinnie and Bang on a Can, Ensemble dal Niente and So Percussion and Kronos Quartet) and been more than satisfied, because I’ve done that track before and I know the level of care founder Ashley Capps and his team put into the entire experience. My good friend Fred from Columbus was there for the festival, and I only saw him twice; he hit every single John Zorn set.

Two of my favorite lines from an earlier Big Ears, when the critic Ben Ratliff and the drummer, publisher, and writer Damon Krukowski spoke, popped back into my head this year. Ratliff’s “Whatever choice you make is the right one. Wherever you are, if you commit, you’re in the right place,” and Krukowski’s “The thing I hear all the time is ‘overwhelmed,’ and I’ve come to question it. It’s a good, immediate thing to say. But maybe you do have time, but the coordinates have changed, and you can be grateful.”

Big Ears reminded me to be grateful and gave me a lot of reasons to be grateful. The music, the bartenders I’d run into at other places or who would steer me to the best restaurants and afterhours hangs, and especially the people: the artists and staff who made this happen, my partner Anne and the friends we saw, and spontaneous conversations and shared dances with people united by a love for music and a trust that we’re in the right place for a while, at least.

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