Big Ears: Conversations About Music

What does it mean to be a curious listener?  In this episode, recorded live at Big Ears 2026, author and music journalist Liz Pelly joins legendary WNYC radio host John Schaefer to explore the art of curious listening — and what we risk losing in the age of algorithmic recommendations. Alongside guitarist Yasmin Williams, saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, and musician/podcaster Bob Holmes, they unpack how streaming services reduce listeners to data profiles, and why the music that changes your life rarely comes from a playlist built for you.  From Guitar Hero to Tokyo listening bars, vinyl collections to trusted curators, these five share habits, communities, and happy accidents that shaped their musical lives.  In the process, they make the case that real discovery requires friction, surprise, and a willingness to sit with something you don't always immediately like or understand.

John Zorn’s musical world resists any sort of tidy summation. A constellation of projects that refuse genre’s pull, a deeply-embedded philosophy of artistic risk, and an appetite for assembling untested combinations. 
Recorded during Big Ears 2026, this panel of Zorn collaborators assembled by journalist Hank Shteamer, on the 10 year anniversary of an article he published in Rolling Stone exploring Zorn’s explorations into metal and heavy rock. In that article, vocalist and Mr. Bungle/Fantomas founder Mike Patton says Zorn “made the world bigger,” through endless curiosity and a constant desire to expand his own musical world, while also expanding the musical horizons of his collaborators and the audience.
Classical soprano Barbara Hannigan recalls a lunch in New York after which a forbiddingly difficult score landed in her inbox, a test that reshaped her craft over several years. Former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo remembers meeting Zorn at Slim’s and being coaxed from metal’s strictures into the wild freedoms of Cobra and Xu Fang. John Medeski tells of an early ’90s organ‑trio experiment that began with curiosity and, after years away, turned into a sustained collaboration. And bassist Jorge Roeder describes a meeting in a Thai restaurant that led to an ongoing series of projects in which he found himself handpicked for myriad sonic constellations.
Listening to each of these musician’s stories, one begins to appreciate the care John Zorn takes in shaping his world as a laboratory for experimentation. Where music serves as an ongoing experiment in attention, courage, and the ever‑expanding possibility of sound.

At Big Ears 2026, legendary producer Joe Boyd sat down with Big Ears & Bonnaroo founder Ashley Capps and filmmaker Robert Gordon for a conversation around festival culture, prompted by Gordon’s documentary Newport and the Great Folk Dream, which centers on the night Bob Dylan went electric at Newport in 1965.  
Boyd, who was production manager at Newport that summer at age 22, offers a firsthand account of the moment he calls the birth of a genre. He recalls the fracture that follows.  Their conversation doubles as a tribute to Newport Jazz & Folk and New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fest founder George Wein, who is responsible for the American music festival itself, a template for all others that would follow.  Gordon connects his own festival education directly to Wein’s curatorial legacy, while Capps traces his path from hearing music on records from Newport in his childhood home to founding numerous festivals. 
Meanwhile, Boyd closes the loop, observing that the intimacy of Big Ears feels, to him, like a full circle moment, hearkening back to the spirit of what Newport felt like back in those early days.

In this episode of Big Ears: Conversations About Music, Big Ears founder Ashley Capps sits down with saxophonist, composer, and producer Josh Johnson to explore his inspired guest curation for this year’s festival.  Josh and Ashley dig into their feelings on context, discovery and the irreplaceable human element of curation. They discuss the constellation of creative artists Johnson describes as “exceeding the frame,” refusing to be contained by genre or expectation — including Cleo Reed, Qur’an Shaheed, Will Graefe, Chicago Underground Duo, Marquis Hill, Twin Talk, and DeAntoni Parks.  This intimate talk reveals some of the secret sauce behind Big Ears' curation and how deep listening is at the heart of everything we do.

Flutist and taiko drummer Kaoru Watanabe discusses Bloodlines Interwoven, a multi-year project exploring heritage, immigration, and diaspora through music and storytelling. The son of Japanese immigrants and symphonic musicians, Watanabe’s path has included formative time on a remote Japanese island, years touring with the taiko ensemble Kodo, and collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma, Laurie Anderson, Jason Moran, André 3000, and the Silkroad Ensemble.  Launched in 2024 with support from the Mellon Foundation, Loghaven Artist Residency, and the Aslan Foundation, Bloodlines Interwoven brings together musicians and storytellers to transform family histories into shared creative work. At Big Ears 2026, the project unfolds across three performances at venues throughout downtown Knoxville.  Journalist and music critic Larry Blumenfeld has followed the project since its inception. He joins Watanabe for a conversation about its origins, and how it will comes to life at Big Ears.