The Art Ensemble of Chicago
During the mid-’70s, when Ashley Capps and I were part of a four-member rotation of volunteer jazz DJs at WUOT-FM in Knoxville, he often talked about getting into concert promotion. “But there is absolutely no way I ever thought it would evolve into something like this,” Capps tells the Scene by phone all these years later. “I was thinking about booking a handful of shows a year. No way I envisioned having a huge company, or staging multiple festivals.”
What began as an occasional exercise in booking a couple of jazz concerts blossomed in 1991 into AC Entertainment, a powerful promotion, booking and venue-management entity. Though touring and ticketing giant Live Nation bought AC in 2016, Capps remains as CEO of the company, whose multiple ventures include mainstream music festivals like Bonnaroo and Forecastle. But for fans of jazz and classical music — indeed, all kinds of adventurous music — AC’s crown jewel is Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, which spun off into an independent federally recognized nonprofit organization before the Live Nation sale.
The widely praised event will hold its eighth installment March 21-24 in Knoxville. (The inaugural event was in 2009 and a second followed in 2010, but there was no Big Ears from 2011 to 2013. The recently published Big Ears Knoxville 2014-2018 offers a closer look at the history of the festival — see Jonathan Frey’s review for Chapter 16.) This year’s festival features an exceptionally diverse lineup. It reflects both Capps’ wide variety of personal interests and his desire to make Big Ears a unique concert experience.
“Usually when you go to a jazz or rock or bluegrass festival, that’s what you’re going to get,” he says. “But from the beginning with Big Ears, we tailored it to the music listener with broad tastes. We designed it to showcase all kinds of ambitious, innovative, remarkable performers, composers and artists. Now it’s acquired a global reputation for being the place to hear all sorts of extraordinary performances.”
There are more than 100 acts, performances and film screenings booked for this year’s fest, happening at venues across downtown Knoxville. Those include the venerable Tennessee Theatre and the Bijou Theatre; the Knoxville Museum of Art and the University of Tennessee’s Downtown Gallery; the sanctuaries of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral and the Church Street United Methodist Church; combination bar-and-show spaces like The Pilot Light and Boyd’s Jig and Reel; and dedicated concert venues like The Standard and The Mill & Mine.
There is a host of landmark events, but two are tied to special memories for Capps and the festival’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of jazz-centric, boundary-breaking label ECM Records. One is legendary drummer Jack DeJohnette performing in a trio with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and bassist Matthew Garrison, sons of John Coltrane and Jimmy Garrison, respectively. The other is a 50th-anniversary performance by The Art Ensemble of Chicago, led by Roscoe Mitchell, the only remaining original member of the revered improvisational group. “The very first show I ever did was Jack DeJohnette and Special Edition at the Bijou,” says Capps. “The second was The Art Ensemble of Chicago. But they have never played the festival. Roscoe called me, and we talked about some sort of highlight celebration.”
J. Spaceman of Spiritualized
Other showcase acts range from remarkable musician, scholar and bandleader Rhiannon Giddens to German composer and musician Nils Frahm and genre-busting guitarist Bill Frisell. You can amble from venue to venue to hear an expanding universe of jazz ideas from Tim Berne’s Snakeoil, Sons of Kemet, Evan Parker or Carla Bley; imaginative compositions from Harold Budd, Joan La Barbara and Alvin Lucier; rising stars in forward-thinking music like Yves Tumor and Jlin; as well as revered British rock band Spiritualized and the Appalachian string band Uncle Earl, among many more.
However, Capps is equally proud of the festival’s growing expansion in other arts areas, including the inaugural traveling performance of Nashville Ballet’s Lucy Negro Redux, which the company premiered at TPAC in February. The phenomenal original piece is based on a 2015 poetry collection by masterful Music City author Caroline Randall Williams, in which she imagines the life of the Dark Lady, a mysterious, unidentified woman to whom Shakespeare addressed more than 20 of his sonnets. Williams will join fellow Nashville poets and Third Man Books authors Kendra DeColo and Ciona Rouse for a reading event.
Capps is also thrilled that Big Ears will offer one of the first productions of TRIPTYCH, a multimedia project that explores the legacy of provocative New York photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It will combine collections of his work with compositions from The National’s Bryce Dessner, performed by the inventive vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth and augmented by writings from Essex Hemphill and Patti Smith. But perhaps nothing is a bigger point of personal pride for Capps than the fact the festival is in Knoxville.
“As a native Knoxvillian who once dreamed about bringing great musicians to town and wondered if it could happen, to see how the Big Ears Festival has become a global event is a wonderful thing,” he says. “People come here and they see all these venues, and the fact you can practically walk to all of the shows, they’re largely in the downtown area — and they are really impressed and astonished with everything that’s in place here. It’s truly a year-round venture, and the Big Ears Festival has helped put Knoxville on the music map.”
