Piano trio jazz built on decades of shared language with bassist Grenadier, rhythmically knotty and deeply attentive to song form.
Jazz
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, world, experimental and classical across 205 acts.
At a glance
- Dates
- –Thursday to Sunday, four days
- Where
- Downtown Knoxville, TN
- Lineup
- 205 acts
- Hours
- Activities start around 5pm on Thursday and music around noon Friday to Sunday. Concerts finish around 1am or later, and by 11pm on Sunday.
- Ages
- All ages. Passes are required for patrons ages 2 and older.
- Passes
- 4-Day General Admission is $550 at Wave 2, after Early Bird and Wave 1 sold out. 4-Day Premier is $875 and 4-Day VIP Sonic Explorer $1,475, inclusive of service fees.
- Website
- Official site
Big Ears 2027 lineup: all 205 acts
Star the acts you want now. When set times drop, your schedule is already built.Browse all 205 acts
Star the acts you want now. When set times drop, your schedule is already built.
The Irakere founder at the piano, folding Afro-Cuban rhythm and bebop into solos of enormous physical force.
World
Deadpan Melbourne songwriting full of tiny observed details, over guitar that gets a lot noisier live, with a slacker delivery hiding a genuinely ferocious player.
Indie-rockSlacker-rock
The producer of records for U2, Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan, working alone with pedal steel fed through dub delay and distortion.
AmbientElectronic
The producer of Dylan, U2 and Emmylou Harris in his own right, playing pedal steel and guitar through washes of delay.
Roots rock
Dinner Party (Robert Glasper/Terrace Martin/Kamasi Washington/9th Wonder)
Soul
Close-harmony duo, two voices and two guitars, taking the Grateful Dead's acoustic songbook at their own unhurried Appalachian angle.
Americana
Gustavo Santaolalla: Ronroco
ClassicalWorld
Chicago stand-up with a loose, unhurried delivery, known to wider audiences from Broad City and The Eric Andre Show.
Comedy
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.
Folk
My Morning Jacket's singer away from the band, that reverb-soaked falsetto pointed toward psychedelic soul.
Indie
Loose-limbed, Dylan-shaped American songwriting, delivered like he has all the time in the world, with road-dog albums that keep quietly stacking up.
Indie folkSinger-songwriter
The long-running string quartet joined by a Javanese composer and sindhen singer, gamelan vocal tradition written out for bowed strings.
Classical
Gospel and freedom song royalty out of Chicago, and still the most reassuring voice in American music.
SoulGospel
Maya Beiser & Evan Ziporyn: Bowie Cello Symphonic
Classical
Liberian-born, Chattanooga-raised songwriter making what he calls Afro-Appalachian folk: soft-spoken banjo songs about displacement and hope.
Indie folkFolk
The former 10,000 Maniacs singer pared back to a duo with her longtime guitarist, contralto voice and acoustic accompaniment.
Folk-rock
Denver songwriter with two modes: the horn-driven soul revue of the Night Sweats, and quieter solo records carried by his voice alone.
Americana
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.
FolkJazzPop
Daniel Lopatin's synthesizer project, running from decayed cassette loops to the score for 'Uncut Gems,' here built out into an audiovisual collaboration.
Electronic
Arthur Jeffes leading a chamber ensemble that continues his father's Penguin Cafe Orchestra, strings and piano sitting between minimalism and folk dance tunes.
Alternative
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.
JazzNeo-soul
Songwriter and guitarist-producer, married collaborators for decades, her narrative writing framed by his arrangements. Two people, one guitar.
Americana
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.
Synth-popElectronicIndie pop
The Big Star Quintet
Power pop
Philadelphia's live hip-hop institution since the late '80s: Black Thought's marathon verses over Questlove's drums, a band that has never needed a backing track.
Hip-hopJazzNeo-soul
Six-string bass played like a lead instrument, sung over in a helium falsetto, with virtuosity worn so lightly it reads as comedy until you follow the changes.
Jazz-fusionFunkAlt-R&B
Guitarist Nels Cline, pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Marcus Gilmore working through electric improvisation, with Taborn's keyboards and electronics pushing against Cline's guitar.
Jazz
Asheville's country-gaze storytellers with lap steel, feedback, and busted-truck poetry, narrating the South's weird corners in high fidelity.
Country-gaze
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.
Indie
Karnatik vocalist who toured with Ravi Shankar as a teenager and leads an ensemble pairing South Indian classical song with jazz, joined by violin, mridangam and ghatam.
World
On-U Sound founder who built British dub as a studio art, running Lee Perry, African Head Charge and Tackhead through his mixing desk.
Dub
Sarod player and son of Ali Akbar Khan, carrying the Maihar gharana's ragas forward, with tabla from Anubrata Chatterjee of the Farrukhabad lineage.
World
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.
Electronic
Sitarist of the Imdadkhani gharana playing in the gayaki style, which shapes the sitar line on the human voice, accompanied on tabla by Nitin Mitta.
World
Bang On A Can All-Stars: David Lang: mystery sonatas
Classical
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Julia Wolfe: Steel Hammer
Classical
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Michael Gordon: Field of Vision
Classical
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Philip Glass: Glassworks
Classical
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Ryuichi Sakamoto: 1996
Classical
Bang On A Can All-Stars: Steve Reich: Music For 18 Musicians
Classical
Two long-standing collaborators, guitar and viola, working in the open space between folk melody and sustained drone.
Jazz
The guitarist's quiet, elastic trio setting, where country tunes, standards and looped ambience blur into each other at low volume.
Jazz
Black Cherry
Jazz
Keyboardist behind the Taxi theme and a catalogue of fusion records that hip-hop producers have been cutting up since the 1980s.
Jazz
The two songwriters at the heart of Deerhunter, Cox of Atlas Sound and Pundt of Lotus Plaza, working together outside the full band.
IndieExperimental
Tenor saxophonist with a torrential harmonic command, schooled in Dave Holland's bands and equally at home on soprano, clarinet and keys.
Jazz
Keigo Oyamada's solo work after Flipper's Guitar, moving from the dense pop collage of 'Fantasma' toward spare, meticulously placed sound design.
Indie
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.
Jazz
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.
Jazz
Brooklyn trio playing acoustic piano, bass and drums in interlocking loops that sound like machine music, with 'Dysnomia' as the blueprint.
Electronic
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.
Indie
The comedian behind the decks, playing dance sets with the stand-up material left at the door.
Dance
Double Bill and Buster: A Night of Film and Music by Bill Frisell, Bill Morrison and Buster Keaton with Luke Bergman & Tim Angulo
Jazz
Geechee Reclaimation
AmericanaGullah geechee
William Parker, Cooper-Moore and Hamid Drake, as likely to reach for flutes, frame drums and homemade instruments as bass and kit.
Jazz
Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton and Susumu Mukai running post-punk bass and live percussion through dub mixing-desk logic.
DubExperimentalPercussionPost-punk
Guitar, tenor saxophone and percussion from three improvisers who work mostly in open space, ECM hush alongside Japanese minimalism.
Jazz
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.
Jazz
Kali Malone Presents Burning Song
ExperimentalClassical
William Parker's trio with guitarist Ava Mendoza and drummer Gerald Cleaver, bass-led free jazz with distortion and blues creeping through it.
Jazz
Kirkwood brothers from Phoenix who ran hardcore through country and desert psychedelia on SST, then reached a wider audience via Nirvana's Unplugged set.
Indie
Forty years of deliberately difficult, punishingly slow riffs, and the band Nirvana learned from, still outweirding everyone downstream.
Sludge metalNoise rock
Camilo Lara's sample-heavy project out of Mexico City, splicing cumbia, brass bands and old vinyl into dance tracks with sharp political talk.
World
Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, three decades of German electronics that keeps live drums and deliberately broken rhythm close at hand.
DubElectronic
Rachna Bodas with Nitin Mitta, Praneet Marathe
Hindustani vocalist of the Gwalior gharana and a student of the late Veena Sahasrabuddhe, with tabla from Nitin Mitta and harmonium from Praneet Marathe.
World
Raining on the Moon
Jazz
root WorkGroup ™
Funk
Seraphic Light
Jazz
A mandolin virtuoso since childhood, now writing songs that justify the technique, with a bluegrass pedigree stretched into something personal.
BluegrassNewgrass
Nottingham duo trading in Jason Williamson's ranted verses about work, rent and English indignity, set over Andrew Fearn's skeletal loops.
Post-punk
Los Angeles quintet whose music starts as long improvised sessions and gets edited into shape afterward, woodwinds and bass locking to loose electronic pulse.
Improvisation
Sruti Sarathy with Athrey Nadhan, Samyuktha Sreeram
Bay Area Carnatic violinist, singer and composer whose own writing moves between raga, improvisation and poetry, accompanied on mridangam and ghatam.
World
Sarangi player and singer taught by his grandfather Sabri Khan, also one third of the folk trio Yorkston/Thorne/Khan, in a classical duo with Anubrata Chatterjee on tabla.
World
Talvadya Percussion Ensemble: Samyuktha Sreeram, Anubrata Chatterjee, Athrey Nadhan with Suhail Yusuf Khan
South and North Indian drums in one ensemble, ghatam, mridangam and tabla trading rhythmic cycles, joined by Suhail Yusuf Khan on sarangi.
WorldPercussion
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.
Jazz
Los Angeles trio built on close family harmony and retro-leaning soul arrangements, carrying the Womack and Cooke songwriting line forward.
GospelSoul
Chicago cellist and composer who moves between free improvisation and written form, here working through the Duke Ellington book.
Jazz
Ursula Oppens performs The People United Will Never Be Defeated (Rzweski)
Classical
London group around Cathy Lucas, drawing on library music and exotica with multilingual vocals over motorik grooves.
AlternativePercussionPsych
Malian guitarist and Cuban pianist in duo, finding the common ground between Sahel blues figures and Havana keyboard rhythm.
World
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.
Classical
Piano, sarod and tabla in conversation, with Hindustani raga form and jazz improvisation sharing the same pulse.
World
The pianist's long-running rhythm partnership with Oh and Sorey, opened out by O'Farrill's trumpet. Rigorous writing played loose.
Jazz
Koshiro Hino's Osaka electronics pitted against the live drumming of Valentina Magaletti, known from Tomaga and Holy Tongue.
ElectronicPercussion
Zig Zag Power Trio (Vernon Reid, Melvin Gibbs, Will Calhoun)
Jazz
@
American duo assembled in 2020 from homemade acoustic recordings, filed under a name that refuses to survive a search engine.
Indie folk
Adam O’Farrill’s ELEPHANT
Jazz
Pianist, organist and singer from the Chicago AACM circle, folding gospel, blues and church organ into free improvisation. Her catalogue includes a tribute to Bessie Smith.
Jazz
Los Angeles musician building slow, reverb-soaked ambient pop from her own layered voice, with drones and half-sung melodies that drift rather than resolve.
Ambient
Ava Mendoza & Hamid Drake
Jazz
Dave Portner of Animal Collective on his own, pushing tape-warped psychedelia and layered vocal loops further into the murk.
Alternative
Avishai Cohen – Big Vicious
Jazz
Chad Clark's Washington DC group, building rock records with a producer's ear for room sound and small electronic detail.
Indie
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.
Folk
Virginia fiddler and singer-songwriter in bluegrass and Americana, formerly of Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, with the 2024 album 'I Built a World.'
BluegrassAmericana
Melbourne-born songwriter making hushed, murky post-punk with dubby bass lines and deadpan vocals, much of it released on her own Kallista Records label.
Electronic
Chicago alt-country charmers who are loose, warm, and unhurried, with twang-flecked songs and a next-door intimacy, porch-light music in city clothes.
Country-indie
American soprano devoted to new and experimental vocal music, bringing a classically trained voice to contemporary scores.
Experimental
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.
World
Brooklyn band playing Peruvian chicha, the psychedelic cumbia of 1970s Amazonian Peru, on surf guitar and electric organ.
World
Nicaraguan-American songwriter whose four-track tape songs drift like intercepted signals, intimate, hiss-wrapped folk experiments with an instant cult following.
Experimental folkLo-fiTape music
Darkside guitarist meets the drummer heard across many T Bone Burnett productions and a bassist-producer with jazz records of his own, in open-ended trio playing.
Jazz
Dave Harrington’s Pranksters South
ExperimentalJazzImprovisation
Diles Que No Me Maten
Mexico City band pushing noise rock toward free improvisation, with long pieces that lurch between locked motorik pulse and outright squall.
Experimental
JJ Weihl's solo project, made in Berlin: synth-pop in soft focus, sung through a character who never quite breaks the spell.
Pop
Montreal guitarist and voice behind Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion, whose solo work sets a cracked, pleading voice against drones and distorted electronics.
Experimental
Efrim Manuel Menuck and Tashi Dorji Present BLOOM AND RUIN
Experimental
Yemeni music rebuilt on instruments made from scrap metal and junk, played loud and deliberately unsteady.
YemeniExperimental
Ettore Buzzini
Bluegrass
Brazilian-born, Los Angeles-based guitarist working the seven-string and ten-string guitar through choro and samba, often slowing into hushed, near-ambient instrumentals.
World
Chicago duo Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, formerly Ohmme, braiding two voices into close harmony over guitars tuned to odd angles.
Indie
goat (JP)
Experimental
HELADO TROPICAL
IndieWorld
Portland trio fronted by Grouper's Liz Harris, burying sweet, hooky pop melodies under thick layers of fuzz and tape hiss.
ExperimentalShoegaze
Hemphill Stringtet with Ursula Oppens
Classical
Baltimore quartet building hypnotic, interlocking polyrhythms from guitars refretted for just intonation, with saxophone and krautrock repetition pushing the grooves toward trance.
ExperimentalShoegaze
Seoul band fronted by Oh Hyuk, moving from scruffy, lovelorn guitar songs toward looser psychedelic sprawl, including a full album made with Taiwan's Sunset Rollercoaster.
IndieWorld
Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell's band, singing quietly enough that the room has to lean in. Slowcore with folk bones.
Indie
Ingrid Laubrock Grammy Season + DoYeon Kim
Jazz
Tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis's working band, playing big-toned, gospel-rooted jazz built on his Molecular Systematic Music concept, drawn from the structure of DNA.
Jazz
James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg
Folk
Jasper Llewellyn
Alternative
Project led by Butthole Surfers bassist JD Pinkus, who has spent his solo years dragging the banjo into heavy, warped psychedelia.
Psych
Modular synthesist on International Anthem, layering pulsing analog patterns and field recordings, including duo work with violist Marta Sophia Honer.
Electronic
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.
Classical
Jim White Trio
Jazz
Kentucky songwriter making hushed, unhurried folk songs, often framed by Nathan Salsburg's fingerpicked guitar, with her voice sitting close and plain.
Folk
Dean Blunt's favorite guitarist, whose smudged, dreamlike folk sketches hover somewhere between demo and dream.
Ambient folk
Los Angeles pianist and producer whose own records drift into new age and soft tropical keyboard textures, with session credits including Solange.
Electronic
Los Angeles alto saxophonist who runs the horn through pedals and loopers until one player sounds like a small ensemble.
Jazz
New York singer and pianist drawing on cantorial singing, art song and jazz, arranged into spare, unusual settings with her trio.
Experimental
Duo pairing a Chicago percussionist steeped in the AACM tradition with a tenor saxophonist of enormous range. Spiritual groove and searching horn lines meet head to head.
Jazz
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.
Acoustic
Kalia Vandever & Dave Harrington
Jazz
Small group led by a New York trombonist and composer whose writing favours patience and warm, unhurried melody over showpiece blowing.
Jazz
Karen y Los Remedios
Mexico City project of Ana Karen G Barajas, whose spectral cumbia bends toward norteño, psychedelia, trip hop and dream-pop on the dancefloor.
World
Karly Hartzman
AlternativeFolk
KatzPascale
ExperimentalIndie
Long-running duo of Chicago reedist Ken Vandermark and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, pitting tenor sax and clarinet against relentless, high-energy free-jazz drumming.
Jazz
Ken Vandermark meets Field Kitchen/Field Kitchen meets Ken Vandermark
Jazz
Taja Cheek's project, assembling loops, field recordings and tape collage into soul songs that dissolve halfway through and reassemble somewhere else.
ExperimentalSoul
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.
AlternativeDance
Chicago cellist building ambient pieces from bowed cello, radio static and small found objects, with stray broadcast voices wandering in.
Ambient
Chicago songwriter who played in Jeff Tweedy's band before stepping out front, writing loose rock songs with a soul singer's phrasing.
Alternative
Bassist and composer raised in Perth, a longtime anchor of Pat Metheny's quartet who writes knotty, singing lines for her own groups.
Jazz
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.
Jazz
Lucy Railton
Experimental
Magic Tuber Stringband
North Carolina string band stretching old-time fiddle and guitar tunes into drifting, psychedelic improvisation.
ExperimentalFreak folk
MANAS
ExperimentalImprovisation
Manu Delago & Max ZT
World
Barcelona composer and classically trained pianist who turns her own voice into a processed, polyrhythmic instrument. Piano études dissolved into intricate digital vocal choirs.
Experimental
Guitar soli as landscape painting, with blues, minimalism, and open air, the American primitive tradition carried gently forward.
American primitive
Drummer Matt Wilson's band, carrying the playful, swing-rooted approach that runs through his work, where humor and open improvisation sit comfortably together.
Jazz
New York free-jazz pianist, long a pillar of David S. Ware's quartet, alone at the keyboard with dense clusters and restless, spiralling improvisation.
Jazz
Cellist and founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, building multitracked, amplified cello pieces that run from new commissioned works to reworked rock classics.
Classical
Percussionist and composer whose 1983 album Through the Looking Glass, built from marimba, gongs and slow repetition, found a vast new audience on reissue. Minimalism played by hand.
JazzPercussion
Min Xiao-Fen & Julian Kytasty
World
Camae Ayewa's project, laying poetry over noise, free jazz and blown-out beats. Also one voice in the collective Irreversible Entanglements.
Alternative
Phil Elverum's work after The Microphones, recorded around Anacortes, Washington: acoustic guitar, tape hiss and lyrics that state things plainly.
Experimental
Cameron Picton's project after black midi, carrying that band's restless arrangements into more songwriterly, expansive indie.
Indie
Violist working almost entirely in new music, premiering pieces written for her and interviewing the composers who wrote them.
Classical
South African pianist who treats improvisation as ritual, pulling Zulu spiritual practice into the modal end of jazz.
JazzWorld
Nicole Mitchell and Joe Westerlund
Free jazzImprovisation
Steven Hall's long-running project, pulling dub, disco, Balearic house and balladic pop out of the Downtown New York of the 70s and 80s.
Art-pop
NOMON
ExperimentalPercussion
Solo project of Lankum's Ian Lynch, stretching Irish traditional song into long, eerie drones built around the uilleann pipes.
AmbientDrone
Rio de Janeiro band led by Lê Almeida, playing lo-fi noise rock loose enough to fall into long improvised stretches.
Rock
Brooklyn artist once known as Memo Boy, making surreal, quietly emotional experimental pop that turned vocal on his album Peanut.
Experimental popAmbient
Pachy Garcia's one-man dub operation, Puerto Rican roots reggae rebuilt in Los Angeles with spring reverb, tape delay and analog gear.
DubWorld
San Francisco composer and performer who loops and processes her trained bel canto voice live, shaping the sound with gesture-sensing controllers worn on the body.
ElectronicExperimental
Parker Ramsey & Miranda Cuckson
Classical
Holy Modal Rounders co-founder fronting a volunteer band of what it calls paleo hillbilly swamp rock: old-time fiddle songs and American standards played with anarchic glee.
FolkFreak folk
Petra Haden turning King Crimson into stacked vocal arrangements, the same voice-only layering she used to rebuild The Who Sell Out from scratch.
ChoralProg
Charleston quintet drawing on the Gullah music of the South Carolina Lowcountry, spirituals and children's game songs given jazz arrangements.
BluesFolkGospelJazz
Songwriter who came up through Philadelphia's DIY scene and now lives in North Carolina, writing patient folk rock that builds toward a sideways guitar lead or a raw line you catch late.
IndieFolk-rock
Ryan Clackner Quartet (Osby, Scott, Sorey)
Jazz
Ryan Clackner’s Existential Dread
JazzMetal
Illinois guitarist whose fingerpicked, British-folk-rooted songs stretch into loose, jazz-inflected improvisation. Primrose Green made his name, and he once covered Dave Matthews Band's shelved Lillywhite Sessions in full.
Alternative
Lindsay Olsen's home-recorded project for Brainfeeder, keyboards and stacked vocals assembled into loose sci-fi song cycles.
Electronic
Sara Serpa – Close Up
Jazz
London multi-instrumentalist who led Sons of Kemet and played in The Comet Is Coming, now setting the saxophone aside for slow, meditative work on flutes.
JazzSpiritual jazz
Shardik
ExperimentalRockFree jazz
Brooklyn-based singer writing in Hindustani and Urdu, folding South Asian vocal tradition into spare, art-song arrangements.
WorldExperimental pop
Sheila K. Adams + Nest of Singing Birds
FolkVocal
Emily Moales' lo-fi indie pop and folk project out of Philadelphia, homemade records full of Arthurian legend and medieval lore.
Indie popIndie folk
Koto and shamisen player who sings as she plays, moving Japanese classical technique into jazz phrasing and improvisation.
Jazz
Buchla synthesizer specialist whose sound design once ran through TV commercials, now playing live modular improvisations spread across quadraphonic speakers.
Electronic
Pianist Sylvie Courvoisier's working trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen, setting knotty composed themes against open, percussive improvisation.
Contemporary classicalImprovisation
The Hands Free
New York acoustic quartet drawn from the city's new-music scene, playing collectively written chamber pieces with the easy pulse of folk tunes.
ClassicalExperimental
Kate Stables' band, built around her banjo and a knack for odd phrase lengths that sound perfectly natural until you count them.
FolkFolk-rock
São Paulo songwriter and leader of O Terno, whose solo records stack his own voice into choirs over strings and fingerpicked guitar.
World
Composer who writes for 1-bit electronics, building circuitry that plays single-channel tones alongside acoustic instruments.
Classical
Composer and guitarist known from Battles, working solo in layered electronics and orchestral writing since 'Central Market.' Loops built into something symphonic.
Electronic
Meg Remy's project, which travelled from tape-hiss experiments to full-band disco and torch song. Pop structures with the wiring left exposed.
Soul
Tennessee songwriter with a voice like no one else's, moving between banjo-led Appalachian folk, gospel and blues.
Soul
VariegOrchestra
ExperimentalImprovisationJazz
Portland duo led by Spencer Doran, building synthetic ambient music from MIDI-era timbres and the Japanese environmental records he has spent years compiling.
AmbientElectronic
Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart
Indie
Free-jazz meeting of bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake, a rhythm partnership built over decades, with Shabaka's woodwinds and flutes threaded through their deep, rolling pulse.
Jazz
Teenage mandolin prodigy mentored by the genre's living legends, playing instrumentals with a veteran's restraint.
Bluegrass
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.
Jazz
Yeah NO
Jazz
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.
World
Saxophonist from Kingsport, Tennessee whose free jazz drew on noise and devotional hymns, since turned to acoustic guitar and songwriting on the Matador album Eyes Full.
Free jazzFolk
The headliners
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.
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, with a 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.
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.
Kevin Morby · Loose-limbed, Dylan-shaped American songwriting, delivered like he has all the time in the world, with 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.
Mavis Staples · Gospel and freedom song royalty out of Chicago, and still the most reassuring voice in American music.
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.
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.
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.
The Roots · Philadelphia's live hip-hop institution since the late '80s: Black Thought's marathon verses over Questlove's drums, a band that has never needed a backing track.
Thundercat · Six-string bass played like a lead instrument, sung over in a helium falsetto, with virtuosity worn so lightly it reads as comedy until you follow the changes.
Trio of Bloom · Guitarist Nels Cline, pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Marcus Gilmore working through electric improvisation, with Taborn's keyboards and electronics pushing against Cline's guitar. Nels Cline, Craig Taborn and Marcus Gilmore, three players who rarely share a stage.
WEDNESDAY · Asheville's country-gaze storytellers with 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.
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.Star Moles · Emily Moales's Philadelphia project, indie songs made slowly and mostly alone.
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.
What time does Big Ears 2027 start and end?
Activities start around 5pm on Thursday and music around noon Friday to Sunday. Concerts finish around 1am or later, and by 11pm on Sunday.
When is Big Ears 2028?
Not announced yet. This page carries Big Ears 2027 and will carry the 2028 edition as soon as the festival announces it.
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