Brad Mehldau Trio with Larry Grenadier & Marcus Gilmore
Piano trio jazz built on decades of shared language with bassist Grenadier, rhythmically knotty and deeply attentive to song form.
Big Ears 2027 Lineup
Four days, more than twenty rooms and 250-plus performances across downtown Knoxville, from jazz and new music to folk and drone. The 2027 bill is out: Thundercat, Sylvan Esso, Mavis Staples, Courtney Barnett and a Bang on a Can 40th birthday.
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About Big Ears 2027
Big Ears 2027 runs April 1 to 4 in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, and the bill landed on September 14: 190 performances so far, with more still to be added. Thundercat, Sylvan Esso, Courtney Barnett, Weyes Blood, Wednesday, Jeff Tweedy, Jim James, Kevin Morby and Mavis Staples cover the rock and pop end. The jazz side runs just as deep, with the Brad Mehldau Trio, Chucho Valdes, Robert Glasper both solo and in Dinner Party alongside Kamasi Washington, Terrace Martin and 9th Wonder, plus Bob James and Oneohtrix Point Never on the electronic flank.
Three reserved-seat concerts sit outside the pass entirely. Norah Jones, Nathaniel Rateliff, and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings playing the Grateful Dead's Acoustic Reckoning are ticketed separately, on sale this fall, with passholders getting a pre-sale and a better rate.
The reason to read the small print is that Big Ears books an artist for a weekend rather than a night. Bang on a Can marks its 40th anniversary with six concerts, one each for Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Steve Reich, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Julia Wolfe. Bill Frisell plays three sets, one of them a live score to Buster Keaton. Vijay Iyer plays three, in a quartet, in duo with violinist Jennifer Koh, and in a trio with Alam Khan and Nitin Mitta. William Parker turns 75 across five different bands, Melvin Gibbs curates four nights, and Valentina Magaletti turns up three times. Luke Schneider's pedal steel curation and a twelve-hour Ragamala are announced without their casts so far.
Founded in 2009 by Bonnaroo co-founder Ashley Capps and run as a nonprofit since 2016, Big Ears is the festival that books John Zorn for a dozen sets and Robert Plant in the same weekend. Everything sits within a short walk of everything else, with a festival trolley for the rest, across more than twenty venues: the Tennessee Theatre and the Bijou, churches, the Mill & Mine warehouse, museums, galleries and the Regal Riviera for films.
Four-day passes come in three tiers, priced inclusive of fees: general admission from $450 in waves that step up as each sells out, Premier at $875, and VIP Sonic Explorer at $1,475. A film-only pass is $50. Single-day passes are priced from $135 for the Thursday to $225 for the Saturday and follow once the daily lineups are published. Front Gate Tickets is the only authorized seller.
Expect jazz, experimental, classical and world across 190 acts.
Big Ears 2027 lineup: all 190 acts
Search it, filter by day, stage or genre. Save anything straight to your schedule.Browse all 190 acts →
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Chucho Valdés Royal Quartet
The Irakere founder at the piano, folding Afro-Cuban rhythm and bebop into solos of enormous physical force.
Deadpan Melbourne songwriting full of tiny observed details, over guitar that gets a lot noisier live — slacker delivery hiding a genuinely ferocious player.
Daniel Lanois – Solo Electro
The producer of records for U2, Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan, working alone with pedal steel fed through dub delay and distortion.
Daniel Lanois Trio
The producer of Dylan, U2 and Emmylou Harris in his own right, playing pedal steel and guitar through washes of delay.
Dinner Party (Robert Glasper/Terrace Martin/Kamasi Washington/9th Wonder)
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings play Grateful Dead Acoustic Reckoning
Close-harmony duo, two voices and two guitars, taking the Grateful Dead's acoustic songbook at their own unhurried Appalachian angle.
Gustavo Santaolalla: Ronroco
Hannibal Buress
Chicago stand-up with a loose, unhurried delivery, known to wider audiences from Broad City and The Eric Andre Show.
Jeff Tweedy
Wilco's frontman alone with an acoustic guitar, drawing on a catalogue that reaches back to Uncle Tupelo, with dry between-song talk in the gaps.
Jim James
My Morning Jacket's singer away from the band, that reverb-soaked falsetto pointed toward psychedelic soul.
Loose-limbed, Dylan-shaped American songwriting, delivered like he has all the time in the world — road-dog albums that keep quietly stacking up.
Kronos Quartet and Peni Candra Rini
The long-running string quartet joined by a Javanese composer and sindhen singer, gamelan vocal tradition written out for bowed strings.
Mavis Staples
Gospel and freedom song royalty out of Chicago, and still the most reassuring voice in American music.
Maya Beiser & Evan Ziporyn: Bowie Cello Symphonic
Liberian-born, Chattanooga-raised songwriter making what he calls Afro-Appalachian folk: soft-spoken banjo songs about displacement and hope.
Natalie Merchant with Erik Della Penna
The former 10,000 Maniacs singer pared back to a duo with her longtime guitarist, contralto voice and acoustic accompaniment.
Nathaniel Rateliff
Denver songwriter with two modes: the horn-driven soul revue of the Night Sweats, and quieter solo records carried by his voice alone.
Norah Jones
Pianist and singer whose hushed debut for Blue Note, 'Come Away With Me,' sold into the tens of millions. Country, jazz and blues handled at a whisper.
Oneohtrix Point Never with Freeka Tet
Daniel Lopatin's synthesizer project, running from decayed cassette loops to the score for 'Uncut Gems,' here built out into an audiovisual collaboration.
Penguin Cafe
Arthur Jeffes leading a chamber ensemble that continues his father's Penguin Cafe Orchestra, strings and piano sitting between minimalism and folk dance tunes.
Robert Glasper
Houston pianist who built the Black Radio albums around rotating rap and R&B vocalists, and whose keys turn up on To Pimp a Butterfly.
Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal
Songwriter and guitarist-producer, married collaborators for decades, her narrative writing framed by his arrangements. Two people, one guitar.
Amelia Meath's plainspoken hooks over Nick Sanborn's modular synth pulses: Durham electronic pop that clicks in a club and still sings in a field.
The Big Star Quintet
Six-string bass played like a lead instrument, sung over in a helium falsetto — virtuosity worn so lightly it reads as comedy until you follow the changes.
Trio of Bloom
Asheville's country-gaze storytellers — lap steel, feedback, and busted-truck poetry, narrating the South's weird corners in high fidelity.
Weyes Blood
Natalie Mering's project, a contralto voice set against orchestral pop arrangements that owe as much to 1970s AM radio as to the noise scene she came up in.
Adrian Sherwood
On-U Sound founder who built British dub as a studio art, running Lee Perry, African Head Charge and Tackhead through his mixing desk.
Andy Stott
Manchester producer on Modern Love, working in slowed, dub-heavy techno where the low end is caked in grit and the vocals float in from somewhere else.
Bang On A Can All-Stars: David Lang: mystery sonatas
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Julia Wolfe: Steel Hammer
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Michael Gordon: Field of Vision
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Philip Glass: Glassworks
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Ryuichi Sakamoto: 1996
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Steve Reich: Music For 18 Musicians
Bill Frisell & Eyvind Kang Duet
Two long-standing collaborators, guitar and viola, working in the open space between folk melody and sustained drone.
Bill Frisell Trio featuring Luke Bergman & Tim Angulo
The guitarist's quiet, elastic trio setting, where country tunes, standards and looped ambience blur into each other at low volume.
Black Cherry
Bob James
Keyboardist behind the Taxi theme and a catalogue of fusion records that hip-hop producers have been cutting up since the 1980s.
Chris Potter “Alive With Ghosts Today”
Tenor saxophonist with a torrential harmonic command, schooled in Dave Holland's bands and equally at home on soprano, clarinet and keys.
Cornelius
Keigo Oyamada's solo work after Flipper's Guitar, moving from the dense pop collage of 'Fantasma' toward spare, meticulously placed sound design.
Craig Taborn Trio
Pianist whose touch runs from hushed single notes to churning mechanical patterns, with years in James Carter's and Tim Berne's bands behind him.
David Murray Quartet feat. Francesca Cinelli
Tenor saxophonist and bass clarinettist out of the New York loft scene and a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet, leading a quartet with a vocalist out front.
Dawn of Midi
Brooklyn trio playing acoustic piano, bass and drums in interlocking loops that sound like machine music, with 'Dysnomia' as the blueprint.
Dirty Projectors
Dave Longstreth's band, built on cramped angular guitar figures and stacked vocal counterpoint, with a lineup that has turned over almost entirely across records.
DJ Hannibal Buress
The comedian behind the decks, playing dance sets with the stand-up material left at the door.
Double Bill and Buster: A Night of Film and Music by Bill Frisell, Bill Morrison and Buster Keaton with Luke Bergman & Tim Angulo
Geechee Reclaimation
Heart Trio
William Parker, Cooper-Moore and Hamid Drake, as likely to reach for flutes, frame drums and homemade instruments as bass and kit.
Holy Tongue
Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton and Susumu Mukai running post-punk bass and live percussion through dub mixing-desk logic.
Jakob Bro / Joe Lovano / Midori Takada
Guitar, tenor saxophone and percussion from three improvisers who work mostly in open space, ECM hush alongside Japanese minimalism.
Jeff Parker ETA IVtet
Tortoise guitarist's quartet, grown out of a long Monday residency at a small Highland Park bar. Loops, modal vamps and improvisations that stretch past twenty minutes.
Kali Malone Presents Burning Song
Mayan Space Station
William Parker's trio with guitarist Ava Mendoza and drummer Gerald Cleaver, bass-led free jazz with distortion and blues creeping through it.
Meat Puppets
Kirkwood brothers from Phoenix who ran hardcore through country and desert psychedelia on SST, then reached a wider audience via Nirvana's Unplugged set.
Forty years of deliberately difficult, punishingly slow riffs — and the band Nirvana learned from, still outweirding everyone downstream.
Mexican Institute of Sound
Camilo Lara's sample-heavy project out of Mexico City, splicing cumbia, brass bands and old vinyl into dance tracks with sharp political talk.
Mouse on Mars
Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, three decades of German electronics that keeps live drums and deliberately broken rhythm close at hand.
Raining on the Moon
root WorkGroup ™
Seraphic Light
A mandolin virtuoso since childhood, now writing songs that justify the technique — bluegrass pedigree stretched into something personal.
Sleaford Mods
Nottingham duo trading in Jason Williamson's ranted verses about work, rent and English indignity, set over Andrew Fearn's skeletal loops.
SML
Los Angeles quintet whose music starts as long improvised sessions and gets edited into shape afterward, woodwinds and bass locking to loose electronic pulse.
The Melvin Gibbs Ensemble – Nzambici
Group led by the bassist of Harriet Tubman and Defunkt, whose low end has anchored everything from the Rollins Band to downtown New York jazz.
The Womack Sisters
Los Angeles trio built on close family harmony and retro-leaning soul arrangements, carrying the Womack and Cooke songwriting line forward.
Tomeka Reid “A Tribute to Ellington”
Chicago cellist and composer who moves between free improvisation and written form, here working through the Duke Ellington book.
Ursula Oppens performs The People United Will Never Be Defeated (Rzweski)
Vanishing Twin
London group around Cathy Lucas, drawing on library music and exotica with multilingual vocals over motorik grooves.
Vieux Farka Toure & Roberto Fonseca
Malian guitarist and Cuban pianist in duo, finding the common ground between Sahel blues figures and Havana keyboard rhythm.
Vijay Iyer & Jennifer Koh – Music from Scenes of Living and Dying
The pianist and violinist Jennifer Koh performing Iyer's chamber writing, where notated lines and improvisation pass back and forth.
Vijay Iyer | Alam Khan | Nitin Mitta
Piano, sarod and tabla in conversation, with Hindustani raga form and jazz improvisation sharing the same pulse.
Vijay Iyer Quartet with Adam O’Farrill, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey
The pianist's long-running rhythm partnership with Oh and Sorey, opened out by O'Farrill's trumpet. Rigorous writing played loose.
YPY + Valentina Magaletti
Koshiro Hino's Osaka electronics pitted against the live drumming of Valentina Magaletti, known from Tomaga and Holy Tongue.
Zig Zag Power Trio (Vernon Reid, Melvin Gibbs, Will Calhoun)
@
American duo assembled in 2020 from homemade acoustic recordings, filed under a name that refuses to survive a search engine.
Adam O’Farrill’s ELEPHANT
Amina Claudine Myers
Ana Roxanne
Ava Mendoza & Hamid Drake
Avey Tare
Dave Portner of Animal Collective on his own, pushing tape-warped psychedelia and layered vocal loops further into the murk.
Avishai Cohen – Big Vicious
Beauty Pill
Chad Clark's Washington DC group, building rock records with a producer's ear for room sound and small electronic detail.
Bedouine
Azniv Korkejian, born in Aleppo and raised across Saudi Arabia and the US, writing quiet guitar songs with string arrangements in the Spacebomb house style.
Bronwyn
Carla dal Forno
Chicago alt-country charmers — loose, warm, and unhurried, twang-flecked songs with a next-door intimacy, porch-light music in city clothes.
Charlotte Mundy
Che Apalache
String band formed in Buenos Aires around American fiddler Joe Troop, welding Appalachian bluegrass picking to Latin American folk forms and singing in both Spanish and English.
Chicha Libre
Brooklyn band playing Peruvian chicha, the psychedelic cumbia of 1970s Amazonian Peru, on surf guitar and electric organ.
Nicaraguan-American songwriter whose four-track tape songs drift like intercepted signals — intimate, hiss-wrapped folk experiments with an instant cult following.
Dave Harrington, Jay Bellerose & Billy Mohler
Dave Harrington’s Pranksters South
Diles Que No Me Maten
Discovery Zone
JJ Weihl's solo project, made in Berlin: synth-pop in soft focus, sung through a character who never quite breaks the spell.
Efrim Manuel Menuck
Efrim Manuel Menuck and Tashi Dorji Present BLOOM AND RUIN
El Khat
Yemeni music rebuilt on instruments made from scrap metal and junk, played loud and deliberately unsteady.
Ettore Buzzini
Fabiano do Nascimento
Finom
Chicago duo Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, formerly Ohmme, braiding two voices into close harmony over guitars tuned to odd angles.
goat (JP)
HELADO TROPICAL
Helen
Hemphill Stringtet with Ursula Oppens
Horse Lords
HYUKOH
Ida
Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell's band, singing quietly enough that the room has to lean in. Slowcore with folk bones.
Ingrid Laubrock Grammy Season + DoYeon Kim
James Brandon Lewis Quartet
James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg
Jasper Llewellyn
JD Pinkus Triptych
Jeremiah Chiu
Jessica Pavone String Ensemble
New York violist and composer's group, writing for strings in long sustained tones tuned to beat against each other until the overtones start moving.
Jim White Trio
Joan Shelley
Dean Blunt's favorite guitarist — smudged, dreamlike folk sketches that hover somewhere between demo and dream.
John Carroll Kirby
Los Angeles pianist and producer whose own records drift into new age and soft tropical keyboard textures, with session credits including Solange.
Josh Johnson ANIMATIVE
Los Angeles alto saxophonist who runs the horn through pedals and loopers until one player sounds like a small ensemble.
Judith Berkson Trio
Kahil El’Zabar & David Murray
Kaki King
Guitarist known for two-handed tapping and percussive attack on the body of the instrument, later staging shows with video projected onto the guitar itself.
Kalia Vandever & Dave Harrington
Kalia Vandever Quartet
Karen y Los Remedios
Karly Hartzman
KatzPascale
Ken Vandermark / Paal Nilssen-Love
Ken Vandermark meets Field Kitchen/Field Kitchen meets Ken Vandermark
L’Rain
Taja Cheek's project, assembling loops, field recordings and tape collage into soul songs that dissolve halfway through and reassemble somewhere else.
Leenalchi
Seoul band setting pansori singers over two basses and a drummer, so a 200-year-old Korean epic comes out as taut, deadpan dance-punk.
Lia Kohl
Chicago cellist building ambient pieces from bowed cello, radio static and small found objects, with stray broadcast voices wandering in.
Liam Kazar
Chicago songwriter who played in Jeff Tweedy's band before stepping out front, writing loose rock songs with a soul singer's phrasing.
Linda May Han Oh
Bassist and composer raised in Perth, a longtime anchor of Pat Metheny's quartet who writes knotty, singing lines for her own groups.
Lovano / Makhathini / Morgan / Cyrille
Free-leaning jazz meeting of saxophonist Joe Lovano, South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini and drummer Andrew Cyrille, whose playing reaches back to Cecil Taylor's 1960s bands.
Lucy Railton
Magic Tuber Stringband
MANAS
Manu Delago & Max ZT
Marina Herlop
Guitar soli as landscape painting — blues, minimalism, and open air, the American primitive tradition carried gently forward.
Matt Wilson’s Good Trouble
Matthew Shipp solo
Maya Beiser
Midori Takada
Min Xiao-Fen & Julian Kytasty
Moor Mother
Camae Ayewa's project, laying poetry over noise, free jazz and blown-out beats. Also one voice in the collective Irreversible Entanglements.
Mount Eerie
Phil Elverum's work after The Microphones, recorded around Anacortes, Washington: acoustic guitar, tape hiss and lyrics that state things plainly.
My New Band Believe
Nadia Sirota
Violist working almost entirely in new music, premiering pieces written for her and interviewing the composers who wrote them.
Nduduzo Makhathini Trio
South African pianist who treats improvisation as ritual, pulling Zulu spiritual practice into the modal end of jazz.
Nicole Mitchell and Joe Westerlund
Nirosta Steel
NOMON
One Leg One Eye
Rio de Janeiro band led by Lê Almeida, playing lo-fi noise rock loose enough to fall into long improvised stretches.
Brooklyn artist once known as Memo Boy — surreal, quietly emotional experimental pop that turned vocal on his album Peanut.
Pachyman
Pachy Garcia's one-man dub operation, Puerto Rican roots reggae rebuilt in Los Angeles with spring reverb, tape delay and analog gear.
Pamela Z
Parker Ramsey & Miranda Cuckson
Petra Haden Sings King Crimson
Ranky Tanky
Charleston quintet drawing on the Gullah music of the South Carolina Lowcountry, spirituals and children's game songs given jazz arrangements.
Ryan Clackner Quartet (Osby, Scott, Sorey)
Ryan Clackner’s Existential Dread
Ryley Walker
Salami Rose Joe Louis
Lindsay Olsen's home-recorded project for Brainfeeder, keyboards and stacked vocals assembled into loose sci-fi song cycles.
Sara Serpa – Close Up
Shardik
Sheila K. Adams + Nest of Singing Birds
Star Moles
Sumie Kaneko
Koto and shamisen player who sings as she plays, moving Japanese classical technique into jazz phrasing and improvisation.
Suzanne Ciani
Sylvie Courvoisier Trio
The Hands Free
This Is The Kit
Kate Stables' band, built around her banjo and a knack for odd phrase lengths that sound perfectly natural until you count them.
Tim Bernardes
São Paulo songwriter and leader of O Terno, whose solo records stack his own voice into choirs over strings and fingerpicked guitar.
Tristan Perich
Composer who writes for 1-bit electronics, building circuitry that plays single-channel tones alongside acoustic instruments.
Tyondai Braxton
Composer and guitarist known from Battles, working solo in layered electronics and orchestral writing since 'Central Market.' Loops built into something symphonic.
U.S. Girls
Meg Remy's project, which travelled from tape-hiss experiments to full-band disco and torch song. Pop structures with the wiring left exposed.
Valerie June
Tennessee songwriter with a voice like no one else's, moving between banjo-led Appalachian folk, gospel and blues.
VariegOrchestra
Visible Cloaks
Portland duo led by Spencer Doran, building synthetic ambient music from MIDI-era timbres and the Japanese environmental records he has spent years compiling.
Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart
Teenage mandolin prodigy mentored by the genre's living legends — instrumentals played with a veteran's restraint.
Yasuaki Shimizu
Japanese saxophonist and composer who led the band Mariah before recording Bach's cello suites on tenor sax, with a sideline in supple, odd-angled pop production.
Yeah NO
Yilian Cañizares
Cuban violinist and singer based in Switzerland, running classical training through Afro-Cuban rhythm and singing in Spanish and Yoruba over her own fiddle lines.
The headliners
- Chucho Valdés Royal Quartet — The Irakere founder at the piano, folding Afro-Cuban rhythm and bebop into solos of enormous physical force.
Courtney Barnett — Deadpan Melbourne songwriting full of tiny observed details, over guitar that gets a lot noisier live — slacker delivery hiding a genuinely ferocious player.
- Daniel Lanois Trio — The producer of Dylan, U2 and Emmylou Harris in his own right, playing pedal steel and guitar through washes of delay.
- Gillian Welch & David Rawlings play Grateful Dead Acoustic Reckoning — Close-harmony duo, two voices and two guitars, taking the Grateful Dead's acoustic songbook at their own unhurried Appalachian angle. The duo take on the Dead's acoustic songbook. Reserved seats, ticketed apart from any festival pass.
Kevin Morby — Loose-limbed, Dylan-shaped American songwriting, delivered like he has all the time in the world — road-dog albums that keep quietly stacking up.
- Kronos Quartet and Peni Candra Rini — The long-running string quartet joined by a Javanese composer and sindhen singer, gamelan vocal tradition written out for bowed strings. The string quartet with the Javanese singer and composer, whose work draws on sindhenan vocal tradition.
Mon Rovîa — Liberian-born, Chattanooga-raised songwriter making what he calls Afro-Appalachian folk: soft-spoken banjo songs about displacement and hope.
- Natalie Merchant with Erik Della Penna — The former 10,000 Maniacs singer pared back to a duo with her longtime guitarist, contralto voice and acoustic accompaniment.
- Robert Glasper — Houston pianist who built the Black Radio albums around rotating rap and R&B vocalists, and whose keys turn up on To Pimp a Butterfly.
- Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal — Songwriter and guitarist-producer, married collaborators for decades, her narrative writing framed by his arrangements. Two people, one guitar.
Sylvan Esso — Amelia Meath's plainspoken hooks over Nick Sanborn's modular synth pulses: Durham electronic pop that clicks in a club and still sings in a field.
Thundercat — Six-string bass played like a lead instrument, sung over in a helium falsetto — virtuosity worn so lightly it reads as comedy until you follow the changes.
WEDNESDAY — Asheville's country-gaze storytellers — lap steel, feedback, and busted-truck poetry, narrating the South's weird corners in high fidelity.
Up-and-comers to catch early
Wyatt Ellis — East Tennessee mandolinist, 17, playing close to home. Single-mic bluegrass with a real band behind him.
Case Oats — Casey Gomez Walker's country band on Merge, writing character songs with somewhere to go.
- Karly Hartzman — Wednesday's singer on her own, on a bill where her band plays too.
- Bronwyn — Fiddler Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, a Grammy winner out of Molly Tuttle's Golden Highway, leading her own set.
- Leenalchi — Korean seven-piece built on pansori storytelling, two bassists and no guitar.
- Jasper Llewellyn — A founder of caroline, solo: chamber instruments and post-rock patience.
Other acts worth planning around
- The Big Star Quintet — The Alex Chilton tribute that Chris Stamey started planning the week Chilton died in 2010.
- Maya Beiser & Evan Ziporyn: Bowie Cello Symphonic — Bowie rebuilt for cello and ensemble by two players from the downtown new-music world.
- Petra Haden Sings King Crimson — Every part sung, no instruments. She did the same to The Who Sell Out in 2005.
Big Ears 2027 lineup FAQ
When is Big Ears 2027?
April 1 to 4, 2027 (Thursday through Sunday), across downtown Knoxville, Tennessee.
Who is playing Big Ears 2027?
190 performances are announced so far, with more to come. Thundercat, Sylvan Esso, Courtney Barnett, Weyes Blood, Mavis Staples, Jeff Tweedy, Jim James, Kevin Morby, Natalie Merchant, Rosanne Cash and Wednesday lead the rock and pop side; the Brad Mehldau Trio, Chucho Valdes, Robert Glasper, Dinner Party and Bob James lead the jazz side. Use the act finder on this page to check the full bill against the artists you already listen to.
Which Big Ears concerts are not included with a pass?
Three reserved-seat concerts are ticketed separately: Norah Jones, Nathaniel Rateliff, and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings playing the Grateful Dead's Acoustic Reckoning. They go on sale in the fall, with a passholder pre-sale first and VIP and Premier passholders getting priority.
When do Big Ears 2027 passes go on sale?
Donors at $100 and up could buy from September 14, previous purchasers from September 15, and everyone from Wednesday, September 16 at 9am ET, through Front Gate Tickets. Early Bird general admission is $450 and the price steps up as each wave sells out.
What kind of music does Big Ears book?
Jazz, new and classical music, experimental and electronic music, folk, drone, minimalism and the adventurous end of rock and pop, on the same weekend. Recent headliners have included David Byrne, Robert Plant, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Flying Lotus and Pat Metheny.
Where are the venues?
More than twenty rooms downtown, sized from about 100 to 2,500: the Tennessee Theatre, the Bijou Theatre and the Knoxville Civic Auditorium among the largest, plus churches, the Mill & Mine warehouse space, museums, galleries, clubs and the Regal Riviera for films. All are walkable, with a festival trolley running between them.
Are the Big Ears 2027 set times out?
Not yet. Daily lineups and set times follow later, and single-day passes go on sale with them. Save the acts you want on this page and the schedule fills in here once the festival publishes it.
Is Big Ears all ages?
Yes. Passes are required for anyone aged two and up.
Going to Big Ears 2027? Get tickets ↗
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