concert reviews: February 2009 Archives

The weekend was pretty loaded with B'more-related talent, so it's no surprise that the city's City Paper (edited by former MP music editor Lee Gardner) sent a reporter to report it. Here's that report.

Knoxville, Tenn.--which probably connotes Bonnaroo and Dollywood to many people--seems like a hell of a place to assemble a crew including names such as Philip Glass, Christian Fennesz, Antony Hegarty, and Matmos. Knoxville is a sleepy, small city surrounded by low mountains and defunct marble mines. Its downtown, home to the festival's half dozen or so venues, is about the size of Mount Vernon with a small "Old City" nightlife-centric adjunct a few blocks square in size. Festivalgoers, the younger of which all tend to look like record store clerks, are easy to spot in the city's central pedestrian plaza, and strolling local families frequently look perplexed.

Pitchfork reviews Big Ears.

Such conviviality proved to be one of Big Ears' central assets last weekend. The first-year festival gathered two dozen fringe music performers in the surprisingly (to most festival attendees, at least) vibrant downtown of Knoxville, a city of nearly 200,000 situated near the Great Smoky Mountains. The international cast of performers--from Baltimore's Dan Deacon and Matmos to Australia's the Necks and Austria's Christian Fennesz-- shared hotels, restaurants, and coffee shops with one another and with the festival's several hundred ticketholders. For music scenes (noise, experimental, avant-classical) generally castigated for their aloof and esoteric natures, the sense of kinship and community at Big Ears came as an inspiration and relief. Artists shared advice. Fans shared gratitude. Collaborations abounded. Surprises happened.

It's safe to say Knoxville's never seen anything like Big Ears. It felt like a rousing success--some moments of genuine musical transcendence, some surprises, a small but fairly bustling little community of festival-goers all over downtown. Some of the late-night sets were delayed, but that--and the Square Room vs. Matmos drama--was about it for glitches.

Not much of the music yesterday grabbed my attention--Pauline Oliveros' performance was curious and comforting, but not engaging, and Michael Gira's suicide folk didn't fit the generally celebratory mood of the night--but I greatly enjoyed being out. The brains and muscle behind the festival--Ashley Capps, Jason Boardman, and Chris Molinski--were beaming at the closing party at Pilot Light, and they should have been. It was a great weekend.

UPDATE: Oh, and Christian Fennesz is still in town. Just saw him having breakfast at Cafe 4.

Accordion music is being processed at KMA right now.

It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

For the record, Dan Deacon's been wearing the same sweatshirt for three days.

My biggest scheduling challenge is coming up this afternoon--trying to fit at least some viewing of the Daytona 500 in amid Negativland, the finale set at the Bijou, and Ned Rothenberg and the guys from The Necks at KMA.

Wow. The first 40 minutes of The Necks' show--one I'd been anticipating greatly--was nice. A little bass, then a little piano, then some shimmering light percussion. And so on. And on. And on some more. Nice; really nice. Then, all of a sudden, drummer Tony Buck goes mad on the high hat and stays at it way longer than any reasonable expectation. And then the bass drum, and then BAM! drums explode. Become the lead instrument, in fact. And it keeps going and going and going. For real--Bonham/Buddy Rich-quality drumming there. A remarkable way to close the night. (For me, anyway. Have fun at Dan Deacon, the rest of you. I'm going to Taco Bell and resting up for tomorrow.)

I was really looking forward to dipping into the Philip Glass Q&A and coming back to report the Stupidest Question. Turns out I'm the sucker: The questions were uniformly intelligent, considered, familiar with Glass and his work, and Glass himself answered each one at length in a conversational, familiar tone.

Ran over to see San Agustin, and while it as a welcome relief to actually see and hear a drum kit, overall I was less than impressed. Nice set, great tone, but a little short on dynamics. Glass was out having dinner at Cafe 4--woulda stuck around myself, but the wait was an hour.

Next: Antony and the Johnsons, local metal/noise (and probably metal noise), Matmos, The Necks, Dan Deacon. Subsequent reports may suffer from the influence of alcohol.

Philip Glass showed why he's the centerpiece of the weekend with a program of striking musical intelligence. After a short solo intro, Wendy Sutter performed Songs and Poems for Cello, a dark, sonorous, rich, dolorous piece with surprising warmth and emotion. Sutter's a disciplined player with a streak of passion underneath the surface, perfect for the piece. (Glass wrote it specifically for her.)

Then Glass played six etudes from an unfinished collection. The setting was positively cinematic--the dark back curtain lit deep purple and blue, Glass alone at the piano in profile. The pieces were filled with big melodies, memorable enough to be pop songs, punctuated by sharp splinters of glistening high-end notes. The final piece was heavy and rhythmic--it could have been the soundtrack to the climax of a particularly dark psychological thriller. The beat was so strong I tapped my foot through most of it. The highlight so far, and it's hard to imagine it being eclipsed.

Solo jazz clarinetist/saxophonist Ned Rothenberg provided, for me, the first really blissed-out ecstatic moment of Big Ears so far during his short set at the Square Room this afternoon. The third of the three compositions he played, this one on alto sax, started with a lyrical theme, kind of romantic and conventional, but over the next 10 minutes or so he alternated among that motif, heavy riffing, and fiery, flamboyant, virtuosic soloing. Badass. Small but appreciative crowd, nice room. An unexpected highlight for me.

Before the show, standing in line for coffee at the adjacent Cafe 4: my first celebrity sighting of the weekend. Christian Fennesz came in. Tall and brooding guy, imposing enough that I didn't introduce myself.

My colleague Travis Gray will be twittering Big Ears.