Big Ears Festival

(Knoxville, TN) Big Ears Festival — Knoxville’s shapeshifting, multi-dimensional, genre-defying celebration of music and arts — returns March 27 through 30, 2025, to downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, with another iconic gathering of many of the world’s most influential and visionary musical creators. Today, the festival announces its initial 2025 lineup (with more artists to be added in the coming months). Passes for the 2025 festival will be available to the general public Thursday, September 12, at 9 a.m. Eastern.

From the return of the deeply soulful and impossible-to-pigeonhole ANOHNI & the Johnsons — who helped launch Big Ears in 2009 — to multi-Grammy winning composer and bassist Esperanza Spalding, Lankum’s hauntingly beautiful brand of Irish folk, Tindersticks’ and múm’s atmospheric and ethereal indie rock; a multi-generational lineup of jazz innovators like Steve Coleman, Immanuel Wilkins, Kris Davis, Ambrose Akinmusire, and Sylvie Courvoisier; and distinctive singer-songwriters like Waxahatchee, Jessica Pratt, Rufus Wainwright, Michael Hurley, and Cassandra Jenkins; plus Indian music royalty Zakir Hussain and Anoushka Shankar are just a few of the highlights scheduled for Big Ears 2025.

Two of the most compelling and influential composers and instrumentalists operating in the nexus of jazz and classical music, 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey and the visionary 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Wadada Leo Smith, will each present multiple programs during the festival weekend.

Big Ears will also present the North American premiere of Jonny Greenwood’s 133 Years of Reverb, an eight-hour piece for pipe organ performed by James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy; Kate Soper’s “twenty-first century masterpiece” (The New Yorker) Ipsa Dixit, will have you rethinking what opera can be; and the Philip Glass Ensemble will revisit the composer’s 1974 masterpiece, Music in Twelve Parts, across two festival days.

New Age electronic music pioneer Steve Roach will make his Big Ears debut, while Bob Holmes and SUSS will curate a weekend-long, multi-artist exploration of ambient and Americana musical soundscapes.

Producer/DJ/electro-wizard King Britt returns for a second installment of his Blacktronika series, including avant-hip-hoppers Antipop Consortium, legendary Indian vocalist Asha Puthli, the super trio Free Form Funky Freqs, with Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Vernon Reid, and Calvin Weston, along with a surprise all-star band and more.

Several artists will return to the festival with new projects: Béla Fleck with his unconventional new trio, Bill Frisell with a new sextet, Arooj Aftab’s latest solo works, Joe Lovano’s electrifying Paramount Quartet, and Meshell Ndegeocello’s No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin.

Did we mention that the legendary Taj Mahal will be there? Or that the Sun Ra Arkestra will be joining forces for a unique collaboration with Yo La Tengo — and, yes, each will play separately too!

The full line up of artists and programs can be found at bigearsfestival.org with new additions and details found each week in the festival’s newsletter.

Passes are on sale Thursday, September 12, at 9 a.m. Eastern, following a special presale for previous festival attendees starting Wednesday, September 11, at 9 a.m. Eastern.