Nestled in Knoxville’s intimate and historic downtown, festival goers are offered nearly 200 performances during the festival—at restored historic theaters, soaring churches, refurbished warehouse spaces, museums, galleries, and clubs—with pop-up events and performances, exhibitions, films, literary readings, workshops, markets and talks taking place in cafes, bars, hotels, restaurants, in alleyways and other nooks and crannies of the city. The festival experience is full of surprises.

A festival pass offers access to all publicly announced performances—enabling festival goers to not only see familiar artists that they know and love, but also to explore the music of artists with whom they are not already familiar.

Big Ears presents extraordinary performances and arts experiences to connect more than 40,000 locals and visitors of all ages throughout the Knoxville community each year.

Founded in 2009, the Big Ears Festival is the flagship event of our organization. It explores the influences that inspire and connect musicians and artists, crossing the boundaries of musical genres as well as artistic disciplines. Every spring, Big Ears presents nearly 200 concerts, talks, workshops, film screenings, residencies, and more in over a dozen venues across downtown Knoxville. With a program budget of $3.5 million and a local annual economic impact of $68.9 million, the Big Ears Festival is one of the highest-profile arts events in the Southeastern U.S., garnering regular national media coverage, hosting numerous world premiere performances, and helping to define the cultural character of the region for many across the country.

Performing will be:

Recently honored as Classical Woman of the Year by NPR’s Performance Today, American pianist (and NY Times crossword clue) Lara Downes has been called “a musical ray of hope” by NBC News, “a classical music instigator pushing the music forward with great gusto” by the NY Amsterdam News, and “an explorer whose imagination is fired by bringing notice to the underrepresented and forgotten” by The Log Journal.

An iconoclast and trailblazer, Lara occupies a unique position of visibility through her dynamic work as a sought-after soloist, a Billboard Chart-topping recording artist, and a beloved NPR personality as host of her popular video show Amplify with Lara Downes. She has garnered millions of fans spanning diverse communities: her devoted NPR viewers and 100,000+ weekly listeners to her nationally syndicated radio programs intersect with her live concert audiences and her followers on streaming platforms to form a broad and constantly expanding fan base.

Harmony is serious business where the Dedicated Men of Zion come from. The group’s eldest member, Anthony “Amp” Daniels, remembers how serious harmony was to his mother. Every day, she would call her children inside, turn off the television, and make them sing in harmony, talk in harmony, do everything in harmony. Singing well together was a virtue that she and her sisters had learned from their own father, and Anthony passed it on to his own children.

The power of harmony fed the souls of the Black communities of rural North Carolina when both respect and money were especially scarce.

“That’s where that seriousness is from,” Amp remembers. “They demand respect. They’re serious about what they do and they don’t play with God.”

The Dedicated Men of Zion — all eight of them — come from a singing tradition that has flourished for decades in eastern North Carolina, around the city of Greenville and its small neighboring town of Farmville. Trained in the church and the home, the group’s four vocalists — Anthony Daniels, Antwan Daniels, Dexter Weaver, and Marcus Sugg — share the bond of that music and the literal bond of kinship. They are all related by blood or marriage.