Heavy Weather: A storm of sounds at Big Ears

Field notes from the 2023 Big Ears Festival, the best sort of sensory overload.

Cécile McLorin Salvant with Marvin Sewell at the Bijou Theater, April 1, 2023. (Photo: Nate Chinen)

Not ten minutes into Rafiq Bhatia’s Big Ears set at The Standard last Saturday night, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Fishing it out and expecting to see a text, I was startled: TORNADO WARNING, read an alert. SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. That the alert was for the Philadelphia area, where I live — rather than Knoxville, where I was — hardly disarmed the unsettling mood. Maybe the thrumming and darkly aqueous sounds Bhatia was making, bent over a sampler and some pedals, fed that feeling. Maybe it was the knowledge that tornadoes had already ripped through Middle Tennessee, leveling homes and claiming lives. I’d spent all day traversing an area of downtown Knoxville, getting pushed around by gusts of wind — so the ominous, whooshing murmurs in Bhatia’s electronic soundscape felt acutely pressurized. “Terrific vibe-setting,” I jotted in my notebook, and left it at that.

The 2023 Big Ears Festival was imbued with this momentous yet hard-to-pin-down sensation, an elusive hint of danger to balance out the musical bliss. At almost every turn, I felt the immense privilege and precarity of Being There. And among the two dozen or so performances I saw over four days — in search of quality, not quantity — there often ran an undercurrent of vulnerability. This isn’t in any way a complaint.

I was a part of the programming at Big Ears, with four panels, one for each day. (The first, a Critics’ Roundtable with Ann Powers, was the subject of my last Gig.) So consider this a disclaimer: what follows is less a “review” than a set of field notes from someone with a vested interest in the event’s success.