Issue #94: What Comes After Rage
Musical medicine at the 2025 Big Ears Festival
By Natalie
(I also participated in a podcast talking about my experience at this year’s festival, if you’d like to listen to that! Here it is!)
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” That characteristically potent James Baldwin quote echoed around my first visit to the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, which took over the small East Tennessee city for the 11th time at the end of March. The first musical interpretation I heard of it at the festival was during Meshell Ndegeocello's Friday afternoon set, in which she and her band played through her 2024 tribute to the iconic writer and thinker, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin. The track "Hatred" centers on the repetition of that quote, rendered by the prolific vocalist, bassist and bandleader into a mantra — the secular gospel that the album title promises.
For the uninitiated, Big Ears is a nonprofit festival with unusually eclectic programming (intended for audiences who pride themselves on their "big ears"), spanning all kinds of different genres from classical to jazz to ambient to folk to Americana and basically everything else you can imagine. I prioritized mostly acts within the jazz-verse, as that's what I have the least opportunity to see in Dallas while many Americana etc. acts will come through the city regularly.
Ndegeocello's set, like many I saw at the festival, defied my own expectations for acommercial, improvised-music-centric shows and gatherings: instead of frenetic and cathartic, a fevered showcase of unbelievable virtuosity, it was tender and gentle — a vulnerable invitation to the audience to plumb our own emotional depths. If it was perhaps too rarely funky for this bass-loving listener, the set's meditative, understated quality felt generous in its own right, like Ndegeocello, along with many of her Big Ears peers, was offering us some much needed solace along with both the ideas and inspiration to move forward.
I heard the quote again as the festival was drawing to a close on Sunday, from saxophonist Josh Johnson in the midst of a transcendent solo set where he used different looping pedals and effects to turn his evocative horn lines into an eclectic wall of sound (for all the ways he fluidly manipulated his own melodies, it was still the piece in which he played without those miraculous tech effects — building on a single stunning theme — that was most memorable for me).
He took a moment to graciously thank the audience for coming out to his near closing set, the end of a four-day fest in which I walked 24 miles around Knoxville trying to catch as much music as I could muster, and to express his belief in the importance of spaces (especially in These Times) where people could "be in communion with each other around music and listen attentively." Then, he shared the same Baldwin quote (Johnson also played on Ndegeocello's tribute album, so it was full circle in that way as well).
Addressing the pain beneath hatred felt of a piece with a lot of the feeling of the festival, for me — artists focused not on expressing (completely justified) rage, or hate, or fury but on a more sustainable kind of tenderness and care, a softness that felt all the more arresting for its presence in a context that often rewards a kind of hard-edged machismo. Everything is falling apart, or so it seems now even more than most other times, and rather than scream about it many of the artists I saw seemed to be looking for an even more constructive way through — a mode of opening themselves up in pursuit of a new, better, stronger community that had nothing to do with existing hierarchy and archaic bureaucracy. Music, as Joe Boyd pointed out in his talk with Ann Powers, has a direct, visceral impact that cannot be truly mitigated by the state (even if the state certainly can use music to its own ends) — or even really articulated, most of the time (no matter how hard we may try :) ). I felt that impact at Big Ears, in the always attentive listening and the overwhelming generosity of the performers — a kind of reciprocity in action.
That is not to say there was no fire or dynamism among the performers — Luke Stewart's Silt Trio brought the relentless energy to their loose, groovy set (love a chordless trio, and always will), and the tribute to the late pedal steel player/bandleader Susan Alcorn by her band was bright and edgy, all push and pull and little ease. But there was tenderness there too, in its jubilant closing, in which the audience was instructed to clap along (we were a bit hurried, it must be admitted) because it was what Susan would have wanted according to drummer Ryan Sawyer.
At another memorial set, for the late tabla legend Zakir Hussain, Charles Lloyd and his ensemble kept the mood fittingly somber as the saxophonist mourned his longtime collaborator (like Alcorn, Hussain was slated to play the festival). At one point, with Lloyd at the piano, drummer Eric Harland walked up behind him and gave him a big hug as he played before joining him for a brief prepared piano duet. I've never seen that kind of vulnerable gesture at a show before, and it made the entire performance feel more intimate.
I loved the way Cassandra Jenkins expressed the desire to create for and embrace those who were not present as well as those who were — between songs, she talked about the idea of an everlasting "cosmic guest list" for shows (or anything) that never fills up. "There's always room to invite someone you wish were here," she said. I also loved that Sunny War, in between bold, unflinching protest songs, introduced everyone in her band as her best friend. There was very little trying to seem cool, which is an understandable side effect of standing on any stage; just music for its own sake, and maybe for the sake of making the world a little warmer and more closeknit.
Esperanza Spalding brought an extra dose of humanity and organic feeling via two excellent dancers, who physically reflected the extraordinary improvisations of Spalding's trio — theater at its most casual and intimate. Allison De Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves interspersed their unbelievably skillful old time music with self-deprecating commentary and clear-eyed observations. "We're playing this because we still believe that all prisoners are political prisoners," Hargreaves said before the duo performed Aunt Molly Jackson's "The Prisoner's Call."
My favorite set of the festival was also more about digging in and reaching out than showing off the players' remarkable skill: Immanuel Wilkins' Blues Blood, which featured a chef onstage making…something as the musicians played on. His chef’s table was miked, but more than the sounds of cooking it was the delicious smell of what he was cooking that permeated the theater as the music itself started to heat up — a literal manifestation of the common jazz praise that a band is "cookin'." It made the experience tactile in a completely unexpected way, rendering the music's community-mindedness into actual nourishment. Towards the close of the set, they performed "Everything," with its refrain, sung by the spectacular Ganavya: "Everything done right is a prayer." We too can create in the face of unbelievable darkness, can make the world a little better.