March 24-27, 2022
Selected highlights from the festival, multiple venues
Knoxville, TN
Jon Ross | 1 APR 2022
In a small performance space tucked away from the college bars of Old City Knoxville, Kris Davis bent into the body of a piano, fingers plucking at strings, then knocking and rubbing piano guts to see what sounds emerged. She quickly resurfaced to sharply hit a chord on the keyboard, only to plunge back in with both hands.
These weren’t strange sounds, per se, and anyone who had been to the four-day Big Ears Festival – held this year, for the first time since before the pandemic, on the last weekend in March – was accustomed to such experimentation. But coming from Trefoil, a new trio formed by the searching but grounded-in-tradition trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, the approach may have elicited a little shock. With Davis on piano and drummer Gerald Cleaver, Akinmusire tested the notion, right out of the gate, that Big Ears audiences generally seem to be up for anything.
On trumpet, Akinmusire pushed out points of sound, rapid-fire dots, and smears that at times seemed unrelated to the roiling cacophony on the piano and drums. The music organically evolved, though sometimes painstakingly slowly and quietly, into a cohesive and thoroughly rewarding aural mass. At times, Akinmusire sat on a short phrase, letting it grow a bit and branch out before always coming back to the original notes. A drone-like presentation, the phrase became a chant, a foundation of the music around him—a shift in tone for Cleaver and Davis to follow. The group created world-spanning songs, new aural atmospheres rooted as much in silence and space as noise.
This musical-voyager vibe was with Akinmusire when he last performed at the festival in 2019 with Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl band, and it stayed with him this year as he performed in groupings with the drummer Andrew Cyrille and with his own quartet. But Trefoil was something new and special.
Trefoil seems to be about expanding the notion of sound but also extending the instrument as well. Neither is a new concept, but it’s refreshing to see such experimentation. To begin one expansive tune – the trio’s two sets on the opening Thursday night of the festival consisted of basically two long pieces each – Akinmusire removed his trumpet mouthpiece and swirled it inside the instrument’s bell, a rattling, tink-tink oscillation. In a search to create new sounds, Cleaver at times handled his drums with the determination of an arena rock god set on destroying his kit. Davis was in and out of the guts of the piano constantly. This searching, exploratory notion of music, not being content with the sounds instruments made by themselves, resonated in other performances across the festival.
Jazz has never been a good term to encompass all that is possible in improvised music. The word is also loaded with negative associations. At the 2021 Atlanta Jazz Festival last spring, tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp explained to the audience his concerns with using “jazz” to describe what he called “contemporary African American music,” saying: “It doesn’t mean that blacks are the only people who can create and play this music; it means that we should get credit for creating the music.” That is, of course, an old concern, but perhaps it is gaining more traction in the current environment.
Later that weekend at Big Ears, performances by Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah articulated a similar goal. Scott told the crowd at his show that jazz is a pejorative term; that’s why he calls what he does “stretch music.” Coining a new term is all about the trumpeter’s reevaluation of the music – both what his band plays and how musicians interact with audiences. There’s a jubilant Afrocentrism to his music, a thrilling agency that almost felt subversive in Tennessee, during songs like “I Own the Night” from 2019’s “Ancestral Recall.” In Damon Locks’ gorgeous, shimmering celebrations, his band emphasized plainly the need to embrace culture and heritage through musical expression.
On the festival’s last day, octogenarian tenor saxophonist Odean Pope, drummer Kresten Osgood and alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins continued to evolve the music. Full of collective improvisation, sharp edges, and gruff attacks, this was music that pulsed with determination. A group dialogue, the musicians wrapped themselves up in long conversations, searching for some new way to convey feelings of frustration, joy, and contentment.
Meredith Monk (credit: Cora)
Throughout the long weekend, full of too many bands to possibly see, musicians conveyed their utter thrill to be performing again after what, for some, was a hiatus that had just ended. Some were seeing old friends for the first time in a while. Big Ears brought these musical compatriots together in unique combinations (Meredith Monk performing new arrangements of old songs in a tiny church with the drummer John Hollenbeck was alone worth the drive from Atlanta), but the sheer excess of culture and fresh perspectives in a condensed space is what makes the festival truly special. ■
External links:
- Big Ears Festival: bigearsfestival.org
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