2025 Big Ears Preview

The season for obsessively checking and double-checking performance times, mapping venue locations, evaluating walking distances, and weighing multiple musical scenarios has returned. That’s right, it’s time to for the 2025 Big Ears Festival!

Building off of Recliner Notes’ coverage of 2024 Big Ears and simply having another year of festival experience has made my prep for 2025 Big Ears perhaps a bit less fanatical than in previous years. However, making things slightly more difficult is that the lineup is especially fantastic this year. Additionally, this year, I will be covering all four days of the festival, Thursday through Sunday!

Before sharing what I consider to be the highlights of this year’s lineup, it’s time for a few reminders on how to navigate the extraordinary offerings of the event as a devoted fan of music and someone who is decidedly not young anymore. I write these tips in the second person, in honor of the beloved, yet crusty, longtime and now-retired NBA announcer Hubie Brown, who loved to talk about teams in the second-person plural:

“You’re the Sacramento Kings. You’ve only made the playoffs twice in 20 years. You’re constantly in the lottery of the NBA draft. You just traded your best player, De’Aaron Fox. You have to be asking yourselves what kind of NBA franchise you want to be…”

The Hubie Brown Tips for 2025 Big Ears Festival

• Decide on your essential artists – Agreeing on your “tentpole” acts is the first step and then you can build your 2025 Big Ears structure around those those performance times. Also, it’s important to remember that if you only saw your tentpole performers, it would be a rewarding Big Ears. Everything else beyond the tentpoles is gravy.
• Give yourself options – Mark as many of the possible acts that you might have an interest in seeing. You can decide in the moment which performance you will actually attend but know what the alternatives are. 
• Pace yourself – The festival lasts four days, so you need to consider conserving energy for not only the drive home, but also when dancing is a necessity.
• Note the walking distance between venues – It doesn’t involve too much walking to stay within the Bijou/Tennessee venue corridor and still have a very good Big Ears experience. You might mean you see less acts, but the quality of the experience is better.
• Observe which venues have seats – This tip is linked to the mantra of “pace yourself.” Sometimes you just need to sit in a chair and listen to music.
• Ignore FOMO – There’s no such thing as “fear of missing out” at Big Ears. Everything is excellent. The performance that is happening in front of you is worthy of consideration. Don’t ruin it by wondering what else you could be seeing instead.  

In selecting this year’s tentpoles, I couldn’t ignore the artists that I have either interviewed or written about, whether for Recliner Notes or for other publications. For example, last year I was fortunate enough to interview Jeff Parker twice. One of those features focused on his band, the ETA Quartet, which no longer plays at its original venue. Parker specifically cited 2025 Big Ears as one of the few places that they will be playing together in the immediate future. An immediate tentpole choice! Most of the band members for the ETA Quartet also play in an entirely different band called SML and they are also playing 2025 Big Ears: a second tentpole! Parker is also a member of the seminal Chicago instrumental band Tortoise, who I covered when they performed in Asheville a year and a half ago. I never want to miss a performance by Tortoise, so they make the tentpole list too.

The incredible singer-songwriter Rosali took the music world by storm last year because of her beautiful and insurgent album Bite Down and subsequent tour. She also records fiery and exploratory solo-electric guitar albums under the name Edsel Axle. When I interviewed her as Edsel Axle in 2023, she said that she was uncertain about performing live as Edsel Axle because:

“It’s improvisational and I enter into a trance-like state, it’s hard to achieve that when nervous. I feel like it’s the next phase for me though, so someday. But it would be different from the record. I wouldn’t attempt to play these songs as they are recorded anyhow. It’s about their singularity, a cloud floating by.”

It’s exciting that she’s reached the point to begin the live phase of this project, so let’s make 2025 the year of Edsel Axle!

Lastly, I wrote about Yo La Tengo twice recently, once on their “guitar sculptures” as well as an exploration of their multi-year collaboration with the band Other Dimensions in Music. Yo La Tengo is playing 2025 Big Ears twice: once by themselves as well as with the free jazz group Sun Ra Arkestra. Both are instant tentpoles! However, the festival organizers somehow scheduled the latter performance at nearly the same time as the ETA Quartet show. Curses! I’ll figure out how to navigate that quandary in the moment, using the tips above as guidance.

Geoff Dyer is one of my writing heroes. Many of his books are beloved touchstones that I return to again and again and from which I have learned to think about music and art. I also can’t seem to stop quoting him. Dyer is a devoted listener of jazz and exploratory music. He will appear at 2025 Big Ears in conversation with former Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins. (It would have been hilarious if the organizers had thought to pair Dyer with former NBA announcer Hubie Brown!) Of course, I want to see Dyer onstage, but I hope for the opportunity to bump into him while taking in the festival and compare notes. 

Lastly, my approach to covering last year’s festival meant that I missed a fair amount of programming. For 2025 Big Ears, I will instead publish one large review — all signs point towards a truly sizable post — after all four days of the festival are over. Now onto my sections for tentpoles and possibilities. Enjoy the festival, everyone!

Tentpoles
Yo La Tengo – Thursday, 6:30 pm, Mill & Mine

Tortoise – Thursday, 9 pm, Mill & Mine

Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – Friday, 2:45 pm, Bijou Theatre

Sun Ra Arkestra & Yo La Tengo – Friday, 3:30 pm, Knoxville Civic Auditorium

[Ahmed] – Friday, 9:45 pm, Regas Square or Saturday, 10 pm, Regas Square

Billy Collins & Geoff Dyer – Saturday, 11 am, St. John’s Cathedral

Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith – Saturday, 2:30 pm, Bijou Theatre

SML – Saturday, 7:30 pm, The Standard

Waxahatchee – Saturday, 9:30 pm, Knoxville Civic Auditorium

Water Damage – Saturday, 12:30 am, The Standard

Edsel Axle – Sunday, 4:15 pm or 6:15 pm, Boyd’s Jig and Reel

Possibilities
Marissa Nadler – Thursday, 6 pm, The Point

Rich Ruth – Thursday, 6:15 pm, The Standard

The Mockingbird by R.B. Morris & William Wright – Thursday, 7 pm, St. John’s Cathedral

SUSS – Thursday, 8:15 pm, Regas Square

Alan Sparhawk – Thursday, 8:30 pm, Jackson Terminal

Ambrose Akinmusire – Thursday, 8:45 pm, First Presbyterian Chapel

William Tyler – Thursday, 10:30 pm, The Standard

Carlos Niño & Friends – Thursday, 10:45 pm, Jackson Terminal

Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood – Friday, noon, Bijou Theatre

Philip Glass Ensemble Music in Twelve Parts (Parts 1-6) – Friday, noon, Tennessee Theatre

The Nels Cline Singers – Friday, 1 pm, Knoxville Civic Auditorium

Swamp Dogg – Friday, 1:30 pm, Mill & Mine

Cassandra Jenkins – Friday, 2 pm, The Point

more eaze – Friday, 2:45 pm, The Standard

Meshell Ndegeocello – Friday, 3:15 pm, Tennessee Theatre

Alabaster DePlume – Friday, 4 pm, Mill & Mine

Wadada Leo Smith & RedKoral Quartet – Friday, 5:30 pm, St. John’s Cathedral

Jessica Pratt – Friday, 5:45 pm, Tennessee Theatre

esperanza spalding – Friday, 6:30 pm, Knoxville Civic Auditorium

eucademix (Yuka Honda) – Friday, 6:30 pm, Knoxville Museum of Art

Squanderers (David Grubbs, Wendy Eisenberg, Bonner Kramer) – Friday, 7:15 pm, Regas Square

Bill Frisell “In My Dreams” – Friday, 8:15 pm, Tennessee Theatre

ANOHNI and the Johnsons – Friday, 9 pm, Knoxville Civic Auditorium

Ambrose Akinmusire: Honey from a Winter Stone – Friday, 10:15 pm, Bijou Theatre

Antipop Consortium – Friday, 11 pm, Jackson Terminal

Les Claypool’s Bastard Jazz – Friday, 11:30 pm, Mill & Mine

Eiko Ishibashi – Saturday, 11 am, Bijou Theatre

David Grubbs – Saturday, noon, The Point

Philip Glass Ensemble – Music in Twelve Parts (Parts 7-12) – Saturday, noon, Tennessee Theatre 

Chuck Johnson – Saturday, 12:30 pm, Church Street United Methodist

Wadada Leo Smith’s Revolutionary Fire-Love – Saturday, 1:30 pm, Bijou Theatre

Luke Stewart Silt Trio – Saturday, 2:30 pm, Regas Square

William Basinski – Saturday, 5:30 pm, Church Street United Methodist

Sun Ra Arkestra – Saturday, 6 pm, Tennessee Theatre

Helado Negro – Saturday, 8:15 pm, Jackson Terminal

Wendy Eisenberg – Saturday, 8:15 pm, Boyd’s Jig and Reel

Lonnie Holley – Sunday, 1 pm, Mill & Mine

Tindersticks – Sunday, 1 pm, Tennessee Theatre

Marisa Anderson – Sunday, 2:30 pm, The Point

Mary Lattimore – Sunday, 2:45 pm, Bijou Theatre

Susan Alcorn Tribute – Sunday, 2:45 pm, The Standard

Fieldwork (Vijay Iyer / Steve Lehman / Tyshawn Sorey) – Sunday, 5:15 pm, Bijou Theatre

Amaro Freitas – Sunday, 7 pm, St. John’s Cathedral

Josh Johnson – Sunday, 7 pm, Regas Square

Nels Cline: Consentrik Quartet – Sunday, 7:30 pm, The Point

Explosions In The Sky – Sunday, 9 pm, Mill & Mine