Last weekend, I traveled to Knoxville for the thirteenth Big Ears festival. Founded by Ashley Capps, who also started a little festival you might have heard of called Bonnaroo, Big Ears collects a wide variety of music from all over the globe. The shows are spread out over 23 venues in and around Downtown Knoxville, so needless to say, you can’t see everything, or even close to everything.
I was there with my wife Laura Jean Hocking who edited and produced Newport & The Great Folk Dream. The new documentary by director Robert Gordon and producer Joe Lauro about the Newport Folk Festival’s seminal years of 1963-1966 had two successful screenings and a mind-blowing panel with producer and impresario Joe Boyd during the festival. We stayed on to catch as many acts as we could, and were awarded with a feast of incredible music. Unfortunately, we did not get to see the headliner David Byrne perform, but it should tell you something about the intimate nature of the festival that the Talking Head waved to me from his bike as he pedaled around Downtown.
The big non-musical highlight of the weekend was Chattanooga artist Wayne White’s career-spanning retrospective Revenge of the Knoxville Girl, which opened at the Knoxville Museum of Art. White first gained fame as a puppeteer and art director for Pee Wee’s Playhouse in the 1980s, and as a music video director who worked with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Smashing Pumpkins. His show at Big Ears included a selection of his word paintings, giant puppets, and a mural he called “the Guernica of comedic hillbilly paintings.”
We didn’t see anything that was bad or stupid or felt like a waste of time. Here are the seven best acts out of the 13 or so I saw at Big Ears 2026.
1. Flying Lotus
Los Angeles electronic musician Steven Ellison spent the last few years making sci fi movies and scoring anime. His return to performance late Saturday night was a visceral ADHD tour of the possibilities of sample-based music which left a packed house slack-jawed.
2. Laurie Anderson
I saw the pioneering New York performance artist twice during the festival. The first time, she was delivering the keynote speech in the beautiful Tennessee Theater, which was actually a lecture on politics, history, and art with occasional pauses for music. The second time was at the Bijou Theater where she duetted with avant garde saxophonist John Zorn for 40 minutes of sometimes soaring, sometimes punishing improvisation.
3. The Ghost Train Orchestra Plays Moondog
Moondog was a street musician in New York City who was known as The Viking of Sixth Avenue for 30 years. His often abstract rhythmic compositions were hugely influential to musicians from Phillip Glass to Charlie Parker to Igor Stravinsky. The twelve-piece Ghost Train Orchestra arranged and performed two sets of Moondog’s harrowingly complex compositions to perfection, bringing the capacity crowd at the Tennessee Theater to its feet.
4. Tunde Adebimpe
The TV On The Radio frontman introduced his Thursday evening set by talking about his struggles with depression after the pandemic and the death of a close friend. Then he played songs from Thee Black Boltz, the 2025 album he recorded for Sub Pop, which he used to process those feelings. “Ate The Moon” alone was worth the price of admission.
5. Perfume Genius
I know a lot of folks who obsess over Michael Alden Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, but I am not one of them — or at least I wasn’t one until I saw him hold 1,000 people in the palm of his hand for an hour. Sometimes, you have to see an artist play live to really get it.
6. Patrice Brennan Septet
Brennen is a master of the vibraphone who speaks in soaring tone poems layered in horns and dense latin-fusion percussion. We wandered into this performance randomly, and were blown away by Brennen’s charisma and confidence. Can you play vibes aggressively? Apparently, yes you can.
7. Kramer and Pan American
Former Butthole Surfers bassist and producer Kramer is an underground legend. His foray into ambient drone with Pan American was the perfect comedown music after a hectic day of running from venue to venue.