“Boundary-crossing” and “genre-smashing” have become commonplace terms. While such formulations are sometimes offered in lieu of having anything specific to say about music, that doesn’t mean they are never appropriate. Case in point: the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The governing curatorial principle seems designed to take the zeitgeist at its word. While the programmers specialize in “niche” bookings – think avant-metal, a wide variety of jazz picks and contemporary classical music – the sheer variety of niches keeps things from seeming too narrow. Big pop stars are not on the menu but variants on popular-song traditions are present each day. And those musical forms tend to share venues with some sui generis icons of experimentalism.

This year’s headliners were jazz breakout star Kamasi Washington, performance artist Laurie Anderson and the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra (for an evening of symphonic music written by Philip Glass, the National’s Bryce Dessner and Pulitzer prize-winner John Luther Adams).

Other draws included drone metal auteurs Sunn O))), the contemporary rap adventurists Shabazz Palaces and two wildly different ensembles led by the visionary composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton. It was announced that indie-rock veterans Yo La Tengo would collaborate with weird-country partisans Lambchop – and that both would play sets on their own. Even the artists holding down the early afternoon slots boasted deep histories. After 30 seconds with the programming announcement, I began bothering my editor for an assignment.

Another strength of the festival is its seven different, gorgeous venues – from grand, seated concert halls to standing-room clubs with good sound – all within walking distance in and around downtown Knoxville. By design, there’s too much to take in– which makes “reviewing” the festival a faintly absurd idea. But such a densely packed schedule meant there was always a solid Plan B (or C!) in the event that a show wasn’t working, or if one was locked out of a gig that had filled to capacity.

Between Thursday evening and Sunday’s early morning hours, I caught enough of 15 performances to feel comfortable rendering some sort of critical take. There were half a dozen acts I wish I’d seen – though with one exception, I wouldn’t give back any of the experiences I had. Mostly I hung around for full sets; in a couple of instances I had to run after 30 minutes. Here’s what I heard:

Thursday

7pm: Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, Steven Schick (conductor), Maya Beiser (cello soloist)

I’d seen percussionist Steven Schick work wonders in bleeding-edge contemporary classical repertoire before, so I wasn’t surprised to find him brimming with confidence here. But I hadn’t heard the Knoxville Symphony previously. I’ll make sure to hear them again.



They established a through-line during their performance of Bryce Dessner’s meditative-then-lurching Lachrimae. And in Philip Glass’s Cello Concerto No 2 (derived from his score for the film Naqoyqatsi), the orchestra communicated a sense of delight when engaging with Glass’s ostinatos. (It’s easy to hear when players are “reading” Glass’s music too hard – the fun drains right out of the music.) In the fourth movement, a trumpeter handled long, exposed lines with grace, right after the entire orchestra had exulted in some loud tutti-chord thrashing. At the outset, star cello soloist Maya Beiser’s theatrical use of vibrato threatened to obscure some melodic lines, but she corrected quickly, turning in a brooding account of Glass’s cello writing in the fifth and seventh movements.

After the intermission, Schick and the orchestra gave an immersive, compelling performance of John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean, a symphony-as-natural-world metaphor that spends 45 minutes on a triptych of slowly building (and then grandly teeming) orchestral waves. Good start.

If you missed out: Find recordings of Dessner’s Lachrimae here; Glass’s Cello Concerto No 2 here, and Become Ocean here.

10pm: Sun Ra Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen

Sun Ra Arkestra at the Big Ears Festival. Photograph: Chelsea Kornse

Every time I think I have this legacy big band pegged, they surprise me. This time, these dance-ready avant-jazz explorers made use of a club venue (The Mill & Mine) to muscle into the R&B side of Ra’s sound. Particularly good was a version of Sometimes I’m Happy (a cover Ra originally included on the Nuclear War LP, now best found on the remastered set titled Celestial Love). And you wouldn’t guess that longtime Ra associate and current Arkestra leader Marshall Allen is 91, given the ecstatic alto sax licks and mystical, electro-acoustic solos he produced on a modified soprano-like horn.

If you missed out: The original recording of Sometimes I’m Happy is here; the current Arkestra’s latest live album is also plenty vital-sounding.

Friday

12pm: Marc Ribot

The innovative guitarist, a sometime bandmate of Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, was a genre-spanning festival unto himself as he played a set of music by John Cage (a guitar adaptation of the organ piece Some of the Harmony of Maine), Haitian composer Frantz Casseus and downtown New York experimental titan John Zorn.

In a packed Knoxville church, Ribot performed suites and some unpublished works by his onetime guitar instructor, Casseus, on a steel-string acoustic (and apologized to his late mentor for doing so). But he needn’t have worried about seeming disrespectful – he produced suitably lyrical performances all the same. He switched to electric guitar for some conceptual items from Zorn’s mid-90s Book of Heads. (The retinue of extended techniques includes the rubbing of various balloons.) The best moment came when Ribot inserted some Delta blues licks into the postmodern maelstrom. His guitar arrangement of Cage’s organ piece somehow managed to bridge the divide between the foregoing sound worlds – being both sensuous and experimental.

If you missed out: Ribot’s CD of Casseus pieces looks to be out of print (and really ought to be reissued). The guitarist’s recording of the Zorn works is available here. There’s also a somewhat shaky YouTube video of Ribot playing his Cage adaptation.

2pm: Zeena Parkins and Tony Buck

Parkins, a composer and free improviser with a deep legacy, brought an electronic harp of her own design to this jam with the drummer from the Necks. Parkins started with some delicate, plucked figures as Buck lightly brushed his kit. It didn’t take long for them to throttle into power-improvisation mode, however, as Parkins hammered out thick, loud chords (both by strumming and by banging on preset implements housed on the instrument’s body), while Buck responded in kind. Though largely free-sounding, the players poured out such a variety of textures that the nearly hour-long set proved consistently engaging.

If you missed out: Listen for Parkins’s range of sounds on harp on this track from a recent collaborative project. The most recent album by the Necks is Vertigo.

4pm: Anthony Braxton 10+1tet

Anthony Braxton Trio. Photograph: Adam Brimer

I am on record as a fan of Anthony Braxton. His range of compositional approaches is impressive and inspiring. (He released 14 CDs on Friday – including a studio recording/live Blu-ray video of a recent opera.) I also love hearing him improvise on whatever saxophone he chooses to pick up.

At Big Ears, Braxton offered two radically different groups, both of which played music from a new “system” that Braxton calls “Zim Music”. It requires musicians to navigate graphic notation scores illustrated with multiple colors – as well as selections from past Braxton compositions that are more traditionally notated. A principal attribute of the Zim system involves group play with volume. After Braxton cues in a page of this new music, musicians coalesce around single pitches, gradually increasing the dynamic level to a peak of loudness, before sinking back into pianissimo.



On Friday, Braxton presented an 11-piece group that included his own saxophone playing, two reed players (Ingrid Laubrock and James Fei), two guitarists (Mary Halvoron and Brandon Seabrook), two trumpeters (Taylor Ho Bynum and Nate Wooley), a cellist (Tomeka Reid), a French horn expert (Vincent Chancey), a bassist (Carl Testa) and a percussionist (Tim Feeney). Section leaders cued in various riffs from Braxton’s stomping catalog of Ghost Trance Music pieces: at one point, I heard one of the whiplashing “accelerator class” numbers from this series playing out underneath the newer music. (A Braxton collaborator helpfully identified the older piece as Composition No 355.)

There is a harried, playful quality that Braxton is aiming for, when multiple complex works are being played at once (while still other musicians in the group are taking solos). The music can feel like it may go off the rails at any moment, though the irregular pulses navigated in unison by two or three musicians help keep things oriented. A highlight of the set was Braxton’s soloistic playing with subsections of the group, particularly with Reid’s flowing cello lines and, at another point, a power trio of guitar, bass and percussion. The crowd’s reception was enormous and sustained. Turns out Braxton had managed to pack Knoxville’s Bijou theater.

If you missed out: This particular Braxton ensemble has yet to record in the studio. But many of the players appear on Braxton’s spate of recent releases. And a vintage performance of a section from Composition No 355 can be heard (in part) here.

7pm: Hieroglyphic Being & Marshall Allen

The Chicago-based DJ played a solo set later in the festival that I wound up missing, so I was happy to find half an hour to check out a fully improvised set the producer whipped up with the Sun Ra Arkestra director Marshall Allen. Allen switched between alto sax and his mysterious electro-acoustic axe, but this time he was engaging with Being’s minimal techno rhythms and washes of chords that are more familiar to the house music scene. The collision gave off plenty of zany, danceable energy – a contemporary update of the sort club-free-jazz sound that David Lynch and the composer Angelo Badalamenti were after in the film Lost Highway.

If you missed out: This was a Big Ears festival one-off, and there’s nothing I’ve heard in either artist’s catalog that quite captures what was going on here.

8:30pm: Vijay Iyer + Wadada Leo Smith

This piano-and-trumpet team also has a stellar new album out, which provided the basis for this performance. There were differences between the live performance and the recording, as both Iyer and Wadada stretched the material on the album to new lengths. The first half-hour passed in a generally quiet and serene manner, with Smith seemingly husbanding his resources, pointing a muted trumpet at the floor. As on the new release, Iyer switched between a Fender Rhodes, a piano and an electronic setup that he controlled via laptop. His electronic palette occasionally had a glitchier, edgier quality than on A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke. But the heart of the performance was a rousing section toward the end during which Iyer focused on piano and Smith set aside his mutes and launched fierce figures that made you wonder if paint might be peeling from the ceiling.



If you missed out: This one’s easy! Just pick up A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke.

11pm: Faust, Tony Conrad’s Amplified Drone Strings, and Laurie Anderson

Unfortunately, modern classical icon Tony Conrad was unable to make the festival. (It was announced that he is currently recovering from surgery.) But his scheduled reunion with the Krautrock band Faust – with whom Conrad created the minimalist touchstone Outside the Dream Syndicate – went ahead in a different form. Conrad’s “drone strings” were played by a trio of seasoned collaborators and an additional string player stepped in for Conrad himself: Laurie Anderson. Though she spent most of the set hiding behind a cabinet of amplifiers, the sound of her electronically modified viola was unmistakeable. Thicker than the piping tone of Conrad’s sound on the original album, Anderson’s playing helped keep this performance from seeming like a a museum-style recreation of a historic record – and was a useful reminder of the album’s wide influence in both experimental rock and contemporary classical music scenes.

If you missed out: Outside the Dream Syndicate has recently been reissued.

Saturday

12:30pm: Mary Halvorson

After her appearance with Braxton’s 11-piece ensemble, this formidable guitarist presented a set of covers – many of which can be found on her 2015 album Meltframe. As on that album, she offered the Big Ears crowd bracing-but-recognizable takes on Ornette Coleman’s Sadness and Duke Ellington’s Solitude. But she also found new inspiration in some of the pieces that she’s already recorded – in particular, adding a longer, rock-inspired passage to her exploration of Oliver Nelson’s Cascades.



If you missed out: Listen to her recorded version of that Nelson tune, and pick up Meltframe.

3pm: An Evening with Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass

Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. Photograph: Kara Smarsh

On paper, it seems like these musicians could have a lot to say to each other in a duo format. But this performance, whose setlist drew from both artists’ solo catalogues, misfired frequently. Unfortunately, each player seemed to subtract from the other’s music.

Anderson sounded cautious when accompanying Glass on his brisk and engaging Piano Etude No 10 (with viola intonation sounding consistently flat). And when Glass was obliged to read out some of Anderson’s lyrics, I came away with a renewed appreciation for the stylistic high-wire she dances on so effortlessly. While she can invest a single word or phrase with absurd humor and a sense of gravity at the same time, Glass’s charming but mumbly conversational voice cannot. It was a disappointment in a festival that didn’t have many (at least that I saw).



If you missed out: Listen to Glass playing his first 10 piano etudes and Anderson’s Homeland. (And see her excellent recent film Heart of a Dog.)

7pm: Anthony Braxton Trio

I saw two extraordinarily long lines at Big Ears: one for a performance by Eighth Blackbird, Nico Muhly and Philip Glass (I took one look and didn’t even try to get in), and one for Braxton’s second performance of the weekend. (I arrived an hour beforehand.) Though the trio performance was often quieter and more intimate feeling than Friday’s excellent 11-piece set, its effect was somehow even more overwhelming. While once again using his “Zim music” system, the instrumentalists here – Braxton (on saxophones and electronics), brass specialist Taylor Ho Bynum and vocalist Kyoko Kitamura – drew from a different group of Braxton compositions when it was time to create multi-piece collages.



In addition to vocal improvisations that included clear beams of fragmentary song, or else keening screeches and guttural bellows, Kitamura has also performed in Braxton’s most recent operatic productions. So while Braxton’s interactive laptop system emitted electronic washes of sound – and as Braxton displayed his famous wealth of solo saxophone exclamations, timbres and melodies – Kitamura would cue Bynum into strangely comic soliloquies from Braxton’s Trillium opera series. The crowd laughed, where appropriate, but mostly stood in communal rapture for the hour-long set. It was my favorite performance of the weekend – a high from which I still have not come down.

If you missed out: Root for a live album release (as this trio has not issued a recording yet). Kitamura’s vocals can also be heard in the studio recordings of Braxton’s operas Trillium E and Trillium J – while her improvisations with the saxophonist can be heard on four albums included in the massive box set titled 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012.

8:30pm: Big|Brave

This avant-rock outfit was my favorite discovery. Their sound reminded me of the patient, pounding sections of outsider-thud found on albums from Keiji Haino’s trio with Oren Ambarchi and Jim O’Rourke, but with that aesthetic condensed into generally shorter song forms that were also more melodic. Co-guitarist Robin Wattie contributed vocals that embraced post-punk catharsis as well as more mystic moods.



If you missed out: Grab their album Au De La. (Opening track On the By and By and Thereon worked particularly well at Big Ears.)

10pm: Sunn O)))

Sunn O)))). Photograph: Eli Johnson Photography

These heavyweights of the contemporary drone-metal scene kept the crowd waiting – both before and during a 90-minute set that moved rather deliberately through a narrow range of guitar/synth progressions and gravelly/asphyxiated vocalizations from guest star Attila Csihar. Though the grind was overlong, there were 15-minute stretches that were deliciously transporting in their crushing force, which was delivered through a phalanx of amplifiers that pushed out sound waves capable of shaking the sternum. (Pity the audience members who, for some reason, came to a Sunn O))) concert without earplugs.)

If you missed out: Monoliths & Dimensions remains the classic.

Sunday

12:15am: Kamasi Washington

Though his career took off in 2015, thanks to his work on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, Washington’s triple-LP debut The Epic was actually recorded a number of years back. Which means he’s had a lot of time to continue developing cuts from the album, such as Change of the Guard and Leroy and Lanisha. In concert, the latter track has moved decisively away from the smooth and chill reading present on The Epic, the better to work as a party-moving anthem. Washington’s band threw frequent tempo changes at their leader (and the audience), but nothing too abstract. Like many of the other transitions engineered by the Big Ears curators, this one felt perfect. This irony-free vibe of good-natured groove was an ideal chaser, after being pummeled into slack-jawed submission by Sunn O))).



If you missed out: Check out The Epic – but also be on the lookout for Washington’s next move (or concert in your area).