Cheers Big Ears! Ashley Capps On The Best Out-There Music Fest Out There

Ashley Capps is first and foremost a music lover. Though he’s had much success as a promoter with his company AC Entertainment and as co-founder of Bonnaroo, these days he’s running the wonderfully curated Big Ears Festival, based out of Knoxville, TN, which operates as a non-profit foundation. The line-up for this year’s fest, which runs March 21-24, reflects Capps’ omnivorous and adventurous tastes and includes: legends like Herbie Hancock and Laurie Anderson, the brilliant Jon Batiste, hip-hopper-turned-experimental-flautist Andre 3000’, the extraordinary Rihannon Giddens, Detroit techno hero Carl Craig, jazz luminaries Shabaka Hutchings, Mary Halvorson, and Christian McBride and even  John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin preforming with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore — and that’s just a sliver of all the brilliantly programmed music . Pollstar caught up with the Southern outro music impresario to get a bead on this year’s fest, the foundation, it’s similarities to Bonnaroo and how something so experimental and cutting edge could possibly run out of Knoxville.

Pollstar: Are you one of those guys who’s always seeking out that the rush of discovering a great new artist? I seem to only run into you at incredible music performances.
Ashley Capps: Well, yeah. I’m kind of wired that way. I have been, for whatever reason, almost all my life for as long as I can remember and it never went away. it’s really what caused me to gravitate towards becoming a concert promoter and a festival producer. I still love to go to concerts. I love to see music and it gives me a lot of joy and inspiration.

And it goes back to Knoxville’s Ella Guru’s
Yeah, it’s funny. Ella Guru’s keeps coming up here recently for some reason. But yes. I promoted shows about 10 years before I did Ella, it was just kind of It’s a hobby. Ella’s was 1988 to 1990 and a lot of great jazz artists at the time. Sun Ra came there on a regular basis and Tony Williams, John McLaughlin, a lot of great jazz artists, but also like African artists and great country artists like Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Garth Brooks played his first two shows in Knoxville it was quite a quite a scene.

Where were you booking those 10 years before?
I was mostly doing shows at the Bijou and the Tennessee Theatre here in Knoxville. We did maybe a dozen shows a year or something like that. Things that got on my radar and no one else wanted to present. At the time, the two historic theaters in town had just been saved from the wrecking ball and were starting to be looked at as performance venues as opposed to movie houses. So it was an interesting time to start to explore that idea. I had certainly seen historic theaters in other cities, but, Knoxville really didn’t embrace those venues as a performing arts places until into the eighties and beyond.

Am I wrong in saying its Big Ears 15th Anniversary, 2009 to 2024?
Yes, the first one was 2009 and this will be the 11th festival. Because we took 2011, 12 and 13 off because of a scheduling impossibility. And then we got busy on some other festival projects, and it didn’t come back until 2014. And then, of course, we had to cancel 2020 because of COVID. We were one of the first events to go down because of the covid lockdown, and we did not attempt to come back in 2021. So we missed those two years as well.

Once again, it’s an astonishing line-up, you might expect to see in New York or Los Angeles or a  PAC, with a ton of outro music that still shocking, at least on the surface, that it’s happening in Knoxville.
In some ways maybe that’s our secret weapon. The fact that it is taking place in Knoxville, Tennessee is very, very conducive to this type of experience simply because we have some great venues that are all downtown and all within walking distance of each other. And they’re also within walking distance of the hotels. And we now have a great array of restaurants, so you can actually have a city festival with the music happening mostly indoors in these really often extraordinary venues, from churches to the historic theaters to warehouses that have been converted into rock clubs and so on and it feels like everyone’s gathered together for a common purpose. It still feels like a festival. It’s still a social event for everyone that’s attending because you’re passing one another on the street, much as you would be in a field if you were at Bonnaroo, Coachella, Lollapalooza or whatever. It maintains that festival spirit. The city has a really great character to it architecturally and I think it actually benefits from being in the South. All of these things really come together to allow Big Ears to develop a profile that would actually be more difficult to create in some of the culture centers of the world like New York for instance.

It seems like its profile has gotten bigger as people are discovering the quality of the festival and the experience in Knoxville. Is this the biggest year you’ve had? 
The festival gets bigger every year and has from the very beginning every single year has been an expansion of the year before. This year, if anything, we decided to manage the growth of the festival somewhat. So we’re not expanding as far as we could this year by any means. In fact, we’re basically capping the footprint of the festival and the attendance at right about the same levels as last year because frankly, managing the growth of the festival post COVID has been one of our biggest challenges. We’ve literally more than doubled in size from the 2019 festival.

What are those numbers?
The jump from 2019 to 2022 we saw an increase of 35% in attendance, and we added a larger venue at that point, a 2,000 seater, which is the largest venue we use, and our attendance increased from 2022 to 2023 by 52%.  Last year we had about 32,000 people for the weekend or 8,000 people a day over four days.

Is it sold out?
We are not quite sold out yet, but we’re going to sell out in advance. I don’t know if you saw today, but we just announced Andre 3000 is doing this residency. I don’t know what effect that’s going to have on ticket sales, because we were basically right at the cusp of being sold out, but it’s sure to push things over the top.

You’ve been through this before, with Bonnaroo. Things can get harder as demand goes up and everyone won’t be able to get tickets. And maybe security and safety is tougher and bigger production costs. And are you finding more challenges as you grow?
This is one of the reasons we’re capping our attendance and not expanding our footprint this year. Because for me it’s not about continued growth. The nature of this festival is that it’s very important that we nurture the character of the experience. So we don’t want to just continue to grow at the pace that we’ve been growing at, it starts to undermine what people have embraced about the festival to begin with. It’s very important  we maintain what we think is a very unique and very special character for this event.

How will you control that going forward?
We’re a nonprofit organization, and this is something I’m encouraging our board to start to think about what the options are. They’re probably some obvious ones like maybe doing a second festival a different time of year. I’m not sure about that, but there’s always just appreciating what you have and just working to make it the extraordinary experience that you want it to be year after year after year. I don’t have grand growth ambitions, though. I think the intimacy of the festival and the fact that you’re going to see shows in venues that are anywhere from 250-300 capacity to, 2,500-capacity, and each of those performances in each of those venues are tailored to the venue and to making sure it really optimizes whatever the concert experience is and we just don’t wanna lose that because Anssi Karttunene it’s really what sets us apart.

This line up is insane. I mean just the first three lines Herbie Hancock, Rhiannon Giddens (my favorite show last year), Laurie Anderson, Sons of Chipotle with John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin — is he playing bass?
It’s not really a band, he’s mostly playing piano and electronics and maybe a bit of mandolin. He’s with this extraordinary cello virtuoso from Finland named Anssi Karttunen. These are the first shows in North America. There are no recordings, because they only played a little bit before COVID, so this may be their first show since then.  John Paul Jones, who of course played bass for Led Zeppelin, also did all of those arrangements for songs like “Stairway to Heaven” that helped make Led Zep what it was and he’s been involved in writing operas and doing all sorts of bold experimental music. He’s also a mandolin player who loves bluegrass and loves to jam with bluegrass musicians. He’s just this musical omnivore always exploring new territory. We’re very excited to see what he’s up to. And then at the last minute, a couple of weeks ago, we added Thurston Moore.  Thurston and John Paul Jones have become friends because Thurston’s been living in England for the last few years. I think they’ve done a couple of small things themselves there. But, ironically, Thurston has never been to Big Ears. Not because he hasn’t been asked, but it’s just never quite come together. And this year it just happened to work out, and he and John Paul Jones are very excited about doing the duo thing together. Who knows? Maybe a first and only performance?

How does that even happen?
People often ask me, what is this? How is it programmed? And to me it’s about the love of music, but also about creating an environment that allows people to explore and discover and, trigger their imagination. Hopefully inspire some curiosity so attending the festival becomes a musical adventure of some sort on its own. You know, as we all know, music brings us together, and it’s also it can be very tribal at times and we relish trying to  eliminate those tribal boundaries and bring people together to explore one another’s enthusiasms and not just their own tribes.

Is there a long tail of Big Ears that its impacted Knoxville year, perhaps with cooler radio or record stores?  Are there tangible ways that you see the impact on Knoxville?
Since its inception in 2009, the festival has had a growing influence culturally in the community and it’s very exciting to see. For instance, our local NPR affiliate, WUOT, I have heard their traditional classical music programming take on a new dimension in recent years which I know because I know the host is somewhat Big Ears influenced. It’s also influenced by the fact that these hosts are younger and are starting to look beyond the true canon of classical music and explore some of the more contemporary work. 

What is the Big Ears Foundation doing to support Knoxville?
We work more and more with the community doing educational programs. We have some really exciting programs that pairs up Big Ears Artist with young people in schools. There’s one called City Songs where kids write about their lives and create these vignettes about their neighborhood, families or experiences in school. And they work with musicians and actually create videos and set their work to music. Some speak or rap,  but it’s become a really powerful thing to see. We have internship programs and work with young people in schools who are interested in considering a career in the arts, even if it’s not as a performing artist. There are workshops in the schools. Some of what we do has a literary component, so we’ve had poets come and work with school programs with young, aspiring writers, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, (artist multi-hyphenate) Lonnie Holley.

We also have free programming in the community during the festival weekend and sometimes outside the scope of the festival weekend. The purpose of the free programming is to make aspects of the festival available to everyone. You can’t overestimate the value of these experiences and it’s really important people develop a cultural awareness of the wider world and the opportunities and get exposed to these ideas and influences and learn a lot about what’s possible in the world.

Is there a mission statement for the festival?
Our mission statement is to use music primarily, but also the arts in general, to trigger the imagination, inspire curiosity and open up possibilities for people to explore and discover not only new music, but the value of art in general. Music is not an end in itself. Music gives voice to much of what it means to be a human and what the human spirit is about and also to help us understand all human cultures and the common things that bring us together. So to me, there’s an invaluable component in offering as many opportunities as possible for not just young people, but for everyone to be exposed to great art.

You’ve been in both worlds with Bonnarroo and Live Nation. How do you compare and contrast working in the for-profit and the not-for profit worlds?
We do have generous support from the city and the county and a number of local foundations and much of it, frankly, is predicated on the financial impact that the festival has. One of the unique things about the event is 75% of the people are coming from 48 different states and 24 foreign countries. And they’re coming to Knoxville and they’re living in downtown Knoxville for sometimes as long as five or six days. So the festival weekend for our hotels, for many of the restaurants and even for some retail establishments, is their best weekend of the year.

The other major economic driver is, of course, Tennessee football. But UT football is something of a different beast in the sense that people come in and yes they stay in the hotel, but then they go to the stadium for the football game and they may have a meal, maybe even two meals. The audience that’s coming to Big Ears is staying not for one or two nights, but for multiple nights. And they’re living downtown. They’re eating at all of the restaurants, sometimes three meals a day, maybe more. So it’s a powerful economic driver for the for the community as a whole, and that’s been recognized.

One of the reasons we became a non-profit organization—we started as a for profit back when I was running AC Entertainment—this was just one of many festival ideas that emerged from our interest in doing more festivals and exploring different ideas for festivals. But when I started seeing the potential for this event in particular, and the way that it resonated with both the outside world and in the local community, I realized that there was an element of this that really needed to be nurtured, for lack of a better word. It was kind of like lightning in a bottle, something that you could try and try and try and never capture. But once you got it, you wanna hold on to it and see what you can make of it. So we made that change in 2016 to a nonprofit simply because we felt like the mission of the festival went way beyond artists on stage. The sheer impact of music and art and what that can do both in building a community and also in really inspiring a community.

So Live Nation picked up AC Entertainment in 2016 did that include Big Ears?
No it didn’t, that’s when Big Ears morphed into a nonprofit. I was wearing two hats in a sense, I was running Big Ears and also running AC Entertainment. Big Ears had a production agreement with AC Entertainment, because obviously we wanted to use our festival staff to produce the event because they were very experienced and very capable at handling something like that. So there was a kind of production relationship that existed in 2016-19.

The festival was starting to grow to a point and AC Entertainment’s other businesses were growing to a point that we had already determined. And after 2020 we were going to start to change that relationship because it was no longer making sense for AC Entertainment. And it was really necessary for Big Ears to develop its own team in the production realm. So obviously COVID both slowed that down and sped it up, because we had a couple of years to think about it really hard. And then when we came back, things had changed dramatically because AC Entertainment had dissolved. A lot of what Live Nation had dissolved was a lot of what was AC Entertainment. Many of the people that were part of the festival team had been absorbed into either C3 Presents or had gone on to other opportunities. So COVID really forced us to dig in and develop our own team. So the nonprofit started in 2016 at the same time that Live Nation purchased AC Entertainment. And this is something we discussed as we were negotiating that deal.

Are you working on other for profit festivals outside of Big Ears?
No, I parted ways with AC Entertainment and Live Nation in the spring of 2021. Basically, everything was coming back post-COVID and I hung in there as long as I could. But I started to come to the realization that for me personally, it was time for a change. And I think for Bonnaroo and a lot of other things, it was time to pass the torch. In many ways, the torch had already been passed. It’s always tempting to hang on for dear life, but that’s not really my personality. So I was ready to embrace, a new path. And so that’s what I did.

For those other festivals you programmed, you would include elements of edge-y music into  the programming, and it was very interesting, but you couldn’t just do all programming like this. Are you like a kid now in your own candy store?
A lot of people initially talked about the differences between Big Ears and Bonnaroo and I see a tremendous number of similarities. One of the things that made Bonnaroo very successful from the very beginning was the passion that my partners and I had for the live music experience. We took a lot of risks at Bonnaroo in those early years. So we were bringing in the Bad Plus and some of Les Claypool’s wild bands and Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos. We brought Ornette Coleman and we created a Jazz Club, basically, we tried to recreate the Village Vanguard on site complete with table service and waitresses and so on. And David Murray played there, and Robert Glasper and it was really incredible. And then the world music scene, for lack of a better word, we had some great collaborations with GlobalFest bringing in these great artists from all over the world. In many ways the Big Ears ethos, was also present, especially in those early days at Bonnaroo where we were exploring all sorts of musical tangents in the program. Obviously we’re indoors, not in the field, but we probably got as many artists and as many stages as Bonnaroo, we just don’t have the mega headliners, but that gives us a certain amount of freedom to program in really creative ways.

Are you as happy as you’ve ever been? When you look at your festival line up and see what’s about to happen?
I love it. I’m as amazed as anyone at how much this festival means to so many people and how committed they are to it. And as a music fan myself, it is extremely inspirational. You know, it gives me a lot of satisfaction and joy in life. It’s still a lot of hard work and we’re still refining our new team. Managing the growth of the festival itself has at times been a challenge, but it’s a great challenge. I had a great run with Live Nation. They’re fantastic people that work there. I had a great run with my AC Entertainment team with the Bonnaroo team. Those are some of the great memories of my life. And I’m so grateful for all of those experiences, but you know, I just turned 69. I’ll be 70 and those festivals need fresh young blood and new perspectives and so it was time to move on. Let’s put it that way.