Big Ears Festival will return to downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, from April 1–4, 2027, with another enormous lineup that treats genre boundaries as polite suggestions. Passes are on sale now.
Jeff Tweedy, Robert Glasper, Weyes Blood, Courtney Barnett, Thundercat, Mavis Staples, Oneohtrix Point Never, Sylvan Esso, Wednesday, Daniel Lanois, Jim James and Natalie Merchant are among the artists announced. Dinner Party — the supergroup featuring Glasper, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington and 9th Wonder — will also perform.
The four-day festival will present more than 250 concerts, films, conversations and exhibitions across over 20 Knoxville venues.
Its deeper programming includes residencies from Bill Frisell, Vijay Iyer, William Parker, and Valentina Magaletti; a 40th-anniversary celebration of Bang on a Can; the return of the 12-hour Ragamala program; and a Melvin Gibbs-curated series titled How Black Music Took Over the World.
Nathaniel Rateliff, Norah Jones, and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings performing Grateful Dead Acoustic Reckoning will appear in reserved-seat concerts ticketed separately from regular festival admission.
The complete lineup is available here.
Curation Is an Incredibly Powerful Driver of Business
At a moment when many festival posters seem assembled from the same rotating pool of proven names, Big Ears continues to sell something harder to duplicate: trust.
Its audience does not need to recognize every artist before buying a pass. The curatorial identity is the draw, and Knoxville’s network of theaters, churches, clubs and public spaces turns discovery into part of the product. A listener might arrive for Tweedy or Weyes Blood and leave talking about a pedal-steel experiment, an improvised jazz set or 12 hours of Indian classical music.
That matters for independent and adventurous artists. Festivals do not have to make every booking independently famous when the event itself provides enough context, and enough credibility, to make audiences curious.
Big Ears’ 2027 lineup is sprawling, and it wants its listeners to wander as much as the artists do.
