April 4, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic returns from her annual pilgrimage to the Big Ears music festival with thoughts about how voices can mean more than the words they transmit.

Ebru Yildiz

Hello curious listeners,

Don’t worry too much about me when I tell you I’ve been hearing voices. That’s pretty normal for a music addict who especially loves the storytelling side of songs. This past week, though, I set out on a journey — let’s call it an aural quest, a term that I propose should stand next to “vision quest” in the realms of myth and cliché — to locate meaning and inspiration among the 250-plus performers who blessed the annual Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tenn. with their presence. I’d been thinking about how the auditory isn’t acknowledged as much as it should be within the discourse about the momentous cultural changes the 21st century has brought.

Careful consideration of what engaging with voices means, and how voices carry more than the words they transmit, feels crucial now that so many people wrap themselves in the chatter of podcasts, playlists, short-form videos and YouTube’s constant companionship alongside the relatively old-fashioned experiences of listening to physical media or radio. Who better to frame such thoughts than vocalists, the high council of making words matter?

Luckily, this year’s Big Ears Festival — always a choose your own adventure of the many different ways to take in non-mainstream music encompassing jazz, classical, global, folk, punk, electronic, hip-hop and the uncategorizable — presented a particularly strong slate of challenging, mesmerizing singers this year. Early on in the nearly 70,000 steps I took traversing downtown Knoxville to catch as much music as I could across four days, I decided to make that my track. I’d hold room for outstanding instrumentalists and bands, but take notes at the sets where someone’s voice made me think or feel in ways that cracked me open.

Some of the singers who most impressed me reveled in rough edges and spontaneity. Others, classically trained or jazz-steeped, showed expertise in those genres while stretching or leaping over their usual boundaries. A few, like the Texas treasures Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, showed their age in moving ways, their careful phrasing revealing both wisdom and vulnerability. Others, like Zack Borzone of the experimental rock band YHWH Nailgun, erupted with youthful audacity. I started to feel that each vocalist was acting as a guide, not only to the music that was forming around them, but to my own ruminations about what it might mean to speak with heightened consciousness, and to listen with intention amid the din of the everyday.

Sam Amidon, for example, whose loving and unruly approach to folk music has made him a Big Ears fixture since the beginning, matched his ringing voice to a jazz-kissed fusion band that included Sam Gendel on wind synth and Deerhoof’s John Dieterich on guitar, leading sing-alongs that first invoked the folk revival, then challenged its boundaries when he bounced us all into Ornette Coleman’s funky anthem “Friends and Neighbors.” That shift showed how a sing-along can rattle a crowd in the best way; so did the climax of Cécile McLorin Salvant’s show at the church The Point (one of two amazing sets of hers I caught), which concluded with a stunning rendition of “Black Wing and Silver Hue,” a piece setting words from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to music by the late British composer Harrison Birtwistle for a 1981 staging of the play by Peter Hall.

Salvant’s dramatic reading of the moment when that king and his brother Menelaus foresee the Trojan War concluded with her leading the full sanctuary in a chant that echoes strongly today: “Batter! Batter the doom-drum! But believe there will be better!” Salvant’s unrivaled intonation worked a miracle; instead of the usual benign cacophony, the crowd united as if in a real Greek chorus, with each phrase intensifying in volume and drama. Amidon and Salvant both knew what people expect from a sing-along, and pushed those expectations aside to create startling connections.

Miriam Elhajli is another singer whose ruling principle is that a singing voice can make connections that may seem ludicrous, or even impossible, in other settings. The Brooklyn-based multi-talent, who is trained as an ethnomusicologist and rooted in her family’s Venezuelan and North African vocal legacies, offered songs that were both topical and personal, bringing a confessional songwriter’s immediacy to her wide-ranging, politically minded repertoire. Singing the Appalachian ballad “Am I Born To Die,” she turned away from the microphone, shifting the piano bench where she sat, to let out a massive wail that went on for what felt like minutes.

I asked Elhajli about that moment when she appeared on a panel I hosted on Sunday, and she noted that the scream is, in some ways, the only actual universal language; it emerges from every baby as it leaves its mother’s womb. Elhajli’s expressiveness cultivates empathy as she moves through several languages and musical modes in her songs. (You can hear a version of “Am I Born To Die” that Elhajli recorded with the KASA Quartet here.) At the same time, she stands up for the particularities of Latin American and North African vocal techniques and of the often politically charged stories she brings to life. Her conscientiousness and her power offer a model that I wish more casual speakers across social platforms would follow.

I thought about the wide embrace Elhajli’s vocalizing represents as I watched Eliana Glass, whose background is also peripatetic (she was born in Australia, raised in Seattle and now lives in New York) but who takes the opposite approach. Introverted, moving in its own time, her singing feels like a hand caressing a cat, intuitive but careful, as she quietly offers up lyrics that often describe psychic pain in harrowing terms. Also in a church sanctuary for her solo set, Glass seemed to meld with her piano as a curtain of hair fell to hide her face. Her performance, redolent of forebears Dory Previn and Annette Peacock, challenged any easy notion of empathy while still demanding a full assessment of the often bloody details of deep feeling.

The sometimes disconcerting rhythms of Glass’s singing are grounded in her connection to the piano, an instrument she first learned by ear as a pre-schooler. As the master of self-taught musicianship Arto Lindsay said to her once in a Talkhouse conversation, Glass doesn’t follow prescriptive notions of time in her music, letting it flow in a more bodily way.

DoYeon Kim, whose instrument is the majestic, dauntingly huge Korean zither called the gayageum, also led with her body during the improvised set she performed with the guitarist Rafiq Bhatia (whom she’d just met!) in Knoxville’s Black Box theater. Her singing, in Korean, resounds with the dialectical energy that she identifies with two qualities central to her birth country’s character: han, which she describes as the inherited wound caused by oppression and dispersal, and jeong, the warmth that makes survival possible. Kim has spoken of the gayageum, a sixth-century instrument, as a conduit through which she connects her own body to the Korean past, a repository of “stories, memory and resilience” which she absorbs and then channels through her playing and often improvised singing.

In Knoxville, the sharp plaintiveness of Kim’s zither playing entwined electrically with her voice as she sang soothingly, then caterwauled, then cried. Bhatia’s playing, hitting hard and then billowing like smoke, gave her a stage where he could enact this ritual of loneliness and slow reconciliation. I couldn’t follow her spontaneous words in the moment, but later asked her for a rough translation. One phrase that stood out seemed to make possible the union of han and jeong, starting with the wail of a lost spirit and ending in hope: “Whatever we are, whoever we are, whatever meaning our existence may hold — what matters most is that we are here together, holding hands.” The way Kim entwined her singing with the sound of this “folk” instrument to draw listeners into one very particular experience of searching for home showed how styles that have sometimes been robbed of their power within the “global music” industry can be reclaimed and revitalized.

I witnessed many more examples of this phenomenon, of singers using not just their words but their breath, phrasing and timbre to honor the particularities of their home sounds and stories while making them feel completely relatable. The British indie bard Richard Dawson clamored a capella through “The Ghost of A Tree,” an original ballad that glowered and glowed with ancient light. The North Carolina rapper, singer and multimedia artist Shirlette Ammons turned a modestly attended Sunday night set into a massive family barbecue grounded in funk’s freaky call and response. The D.C.-based Ethiopian chanteuse Munit Mesfin brought Mariah energy to an Addis Ababa songbook, while the Indonesian composer and operatic soprano Peni Candra Rini expanded my understanding of melodrama.

Best of all was a surprise from McLorin Salvant that came at the end of another performance, one that paired her with her main creative companion, the pianist Sullivan Fortner, at the grand Tennessee Theater. She announced that the next half hour would be occupied by her rendition of Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Murder Ballad,” a filthy, fantastical rant of the highest order that the legendary jazzman had largely improvised during a 1938 oral history recording with folklorist Alan Lomax.

This song (if you can call it that — it’s more like a Douglas Sirk melodrama mashed up with an August Wilson saga and dipped into Bessie Smith’s bucket of beer) relates the tale of a woman who kills for love and lives to share every detail of the crime and its aftermath from her prison cell. It requires Salvant to not only deliver hundreds of lines (as Fortner supports and plays off of each), but to go full Hamlet on a soliloquy encompassing sexual betrayal, revenge, despair, sexual (and very queer) reawakening, spiritual enlightenment and liberatory death. Among other things. Salvant, whose eloquence uniquely combines utter clarity and unfettered daring, kept her phone nearby to check the text, and yet every listener surely felt themselves time-traveled into that tiny recording booth with Morton, and back to the prison cell of his anti-heroine, an Everywoman if there ever was one. This was jazz; it was rap; it was true crime; it was gospel. It was hilarious and filthy and transcendent in a way only live music can be.

Overwhelmingly grateful to have been in the room for “The Murder Ballad,” which Salvant had not performed for nearly a decade and never before with Fortner, I walked out into the Knoxville twilight considering how crucial it is to listen to singing voices now. There’s so much talk about how we live in an age of dominant visual information, of scrolls and shorts and screens; rarely, though, do we consider that we’re also plunged into a mess of sonic and particularly vocal information. All day long we are bombarded with other people’s voices, offering opinions and jokes and ersatz news reports and impressions and, yes, song after song. So much speech, so little consideration about how it’s affecting us. Singers take the time to craft each utterance, or at very least, to train their voices to deliver multi-layered, maximally impactful messages. They know that speech, sung or not, is an art and a way of capturing history. They dwell in breath and in the registers that link the stomach to the heart and the head, and weave together those threads of story and emotion that are the basis of narrative. Receiving what they offer with care encourages care in each of us by restoring the time and space needed to genuinely listen. Amid the din, nothing is more worth protecting.

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