Ashley Capps talks Big Ears 2018

Big Ears, Knoxville, Tennessee’s annual festival of adventurous music, returns March 22-25, with a lineup featuring performances by a vast array of artists including Diamanda Galas, Tal National, Roscoe Mitchell, and more. Atlanta’s own Algiers and Duet For Theremin and Lap Steel will also be on the scene, playing their singularly nuanced sounds for audiences who are open to deeper listening experiences.

As the festival kicks off its 2018 activities, Big Ears founder and promoter Ashley Capps took a few minutes to talk about how themes of Southern identity, Appalachian music, and the socio-political tone of the times intersect with the music.

Do you remember how you learned about Atlanta’s Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel?

Not exactly, I saw them do a show here in Knoxville a number of years ago. They’ve been fans of the festival and have approached me about playing ever since. I actually have a theremin myself. It’s an instrument I have always been fascinated by, and they were on my radar screen for that reason as well. It’s one of those things, like many bookings for Big Ears, it took it a moment to come together and this year it finally did.

What kind of theremin do you have?

It’s a Moog. I bought one back in the days when we were doing Moogfest in Asheville.

That’s where Scott from Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel got his, too. He said he stopped by the Moog Factory when he was up there to see a show — he couldn’t remember if he was in Asheville to see Einstürzende Neubauten or Dr. John [laughs].

There you have it, if ever there was a Big Ears spirit encapsulated in a single sentence, that’s it! [laughs]

When you look at Big Ears this year, in the big picture, what is the thread that ties all of this music together?

There’s always more than one thread for me. Big Ears, from the beginning, has been about exploring connections. Sometimes the connections are more obvious than others. I see the festival as something of a tapestry that’s woven together from a number of different threads. I approach it pretty organically. I don’t always know when the booking starts where it’s going to lead. I don’t have a preconceived end product, if you will, for the year. The actual booking process is in some ways as much of a journey of exploration as attending the festival itself.

Every year, themes emerge. In many ways these themes have always been present. It’s just about the degree to which they are emphasized and articulated in any given year. Some of those themes are certainly influenced by what’s going on in our culture, and it’s also about the region in which we live. Probably the biggest and most obvious expansion in terms of a theme for the festival has been exploration of indigenous Appalachian music. That’s going to be a significant component this year. It’s been there in some ways since the beginning, the 2010 festival was opened by Sam Amidon singing an Appalachian ballad. We quickly discovered as visitors came to the festival, from all over the world, that many of them had a strong fascination with this region of the country and all of the things that it helped nurture and in some ways represent. I discovered this, through many of the fans and writers who attended, as they were exploring their own tangents about the culture of Knoxville and the region, and how all that fits together. So that’s something that gradually — year after year — we’ve emphasized a little bit more.

Last year, I met a woman who was attending the festival, Anna Roberts-Gevalt who’s part of the duo Anna and Elizabeth. She’s been to Big Ears for a couple of years and is one of these musicians who is unrestricted by traditional boundaries. She’s attuned and knowledgeable about, and loves, contemporary new music of all kinds. At the same time, she has thrown herself into an intense love of and exploration of indigenous Appalachian music, and she’s very interested in the connections between those two things. I remember the first time we met, I think we talked about Henry Flynt, who is not a very celebrated minimalist composer, but one who was from the South and played the violin or fiddle, and sought to weave minimalist traditions into the other traditions. He’s a legendary cult figure in that regard. So, exploring that path is something that’s a tremendous amount of fun.

Also, in many ways, Appalachian culture has this raw vitality to it. Often times, it disregards what might be considered traditional standards of beauty. In that sense it’s very avant-garde. That edginess to Southern culture in general, not just the music but Southern literature, and all aspects of Southern culture, have been a tremendous influence on world popular culture in a positive way. So it fits, for me, in many different ways into the overall concept of the festival.

Beyond that, I was shocked reading an article in the New York Times about the challenges contemporary female new music composers have in getting their work heard. I’m like ‘it’s 2017,’ which it was when I read that article, and this is a world that is supposed to be enlightened; we’re supposed to be at the cutting edge. Emphasizing some of the incredible work that’s being done by female composers and musicians is a no-brainer for me. I have always tried to do that, but we’ve intensified that a little this year.

Traditional new music culture, and even modern independent rock culture, has been the enclave of mostly white people. Again, you’re like, “It’s now 2018, why is that?” What Big Ears has tried to do from the beginning is break down some of these artificial boundaries and open it all up. That’s at the heart of what the festival hopes to accomplish.

I’ve witnessed and even discovered a lot of non-white, non-male music at Big Ears in the past, be it Rhiannon Giddens from the Carolina Chocolate Drops, or Tanya Tagaq, Anna Meredith. I saw Meredith Monk there, Mary Halvorson, Laraaji, Anthony Braxton. I’ve always admired the diversity in the lineup.

I’m glad to hear you say that. Others haven’t been so generous in the past. I always kind of scratch my head about it. I don’t program anything because of that. I have never booked an artist only because they are black or female. We are looking to book great artists period. But it’s not hard, because most of the most exciting music that is being made these days is being made by these artists. It’s not like you have to stretch. Our number one focus is on great music.

I’ve noticed that Big Ears often underscores the art of the individual or focuses in on the personality of the performer.

The personalities are definitely strong and in many cases, if not most cases, they also tend to be performers who embody a broad, omnivorous cultural knowledge so that their work leads you down these different paths that the festival itself looks to explore. You might have someone like Nels Cline who plays in Wilco, he plays with Jenny Scheinman, he plays with Rova … He can basically play with anyone and make extremely strong artistic contributions to all of those settings. That’s one of the things that inspired the festival to begin with. There is increasingly this generation of musicians that grew up with so many different types of music at their fingertips to be inspired by, and to learn from and to incorporate into their own artistic creations. That’s part of the influence for the festival too. I remember the first time I heard DJ Shadow sampling Meredith Monk, back in the mid 1990s. That sort of things started happening a lot as recording culture, especially with access to so many different kinds of music through digital means, opened up a whole new world. You can be at a concert and you can hear the influence of Steve Reich, Radiohead, or the National. And people are loving it, but they don’t necessarily know those connections, so it’s fun with the festival to make those connections a little more clear in the booking. Yes, there are individuals who embody that perspective. That’s who they are as artists.

This is not pop music, but there are so many entries for that deeper level of engagement that sets Big Ears apart.

Thank you for saying so. I hope that there is also a place for pop music at Big Ears, at various points. There has been in the past. We are not intentionally not shining a light on that, but a lot of that music is so readily available elsewhere. Unless we can put it in a meaningful context, we don’t really need to do that.

Even the pop music you have at Big Ears is not disposable music, you can engage with it on some pretty deep levels.

Oh absolutely.

Do you remember the very first show you ever booked as a promoter?

Yeah, I do. It’s interesting. I had arranged for some rock bands to play in Knoxville in an early part of their career. One of them was R.E.M., who the first time they came to town they played for 12 people, me and five of my friends and six people that we didn’t know. That was right when “Radio Free Europe” came out, and they played a little club down on the Cumberland Avenue strip at U.T. That’s just one show I helped hook up, but the first concerts I actually promoted were jazz and improvised music. The earliest concerts were a cellist named Tristan Honsinger, saxophone player Evan Parker, who is now coming to Big Ears, Leo Smith who played Big Ears a couple of years ago, and it quickly expanded from there. But these are just concerts I presented out of interest and passion for the music, and that started in 1979. I love promoting the music that I love, but I also enjoy the social experience of a concert. A festival is very much about those social interactions that happen between musicians and artists as well as the actual performances on stage.

What a great time to see Evan Parker!

Oh yeah, and I used to come see him in Atlanta, at least two of three times in the early 1980s. I remember it must’ve been ’99 or 2000, he played the First Existentialist Congregation. There was a whole scene going on in Atlanta at the time. I came down and saw Henry Threadgill, Steve Lacy, there was a lot of exciting stuff going on.

Do you think the engagement with this kind of music has changed over the years?

It has definitely changed in a number of ways. This was also one of the impulses behind creating the festival. As a promoter, I want people to come to the shows. I don’t want to waste an artist’s time and bring them to play in front of a particularly small audience if I can avoid it. Not that there’s anything wrong with a small audience, those can be amazing experiences. One of the ideas behind Big Ears is how can we bring people together so artists can get more exposure to a larger audience. And that’s one of the reasons we have the ticketing structure the way it is. We want people to have the opportunity to see what they know they want to see, but also take the opportunity to explore and check out some things that they may not know about. I’m probably more proud of that than anything else about Big Ears. My ultimate example of this was when Anthony Braxton played two years ago. He played at a 750-seat theater and it was absolutely filled to capacity on a Friday afternoon with about 100 people in line trying to get in. That was amazing. That was the moment when I thought that this idea actually had some substance to it.

Big Ears takes place March 22-25 in Knoxville, Tennessee.