Welcome to Big Ears conversations about music.
I'm your host Sarah Gilletti. Today we hear from 4 top music
writers covering a broad range of artists they loved in 2025.
We asked each to choose three top picks representing music
they loved in the past year. Call it a Best of 2025 and a
preview of artists you can hear at Big Ears 2026, which takes
place March 26th through 29th in Knoxville, TN.
Let's meet our panel, shall we? First up is the omnivorous
critic Steve Smith, known for his long time coverage of
classical and new music in publications like The New York
Times, The New Yorker, and most recently his acclaimed substack
Night After Night. While he may be most widely
known for his coverage of classical music, Steve is also
an expert on improvised music. For our first pick, Steve
singles out an iconoclast who drew him to New York 35 years
ago. John Zorn.
He is a 72 year old composer, improviser, Jack of all trades.
He has played in pretty much every conceivable genre known to
mankind and invented a few along the way.
And at age 72, he is not slowing down at all.
He is all over the big years. Schedule this year.
Next up is journalist and critic Liz Pelley.
You might know her work from Pitchfork, The Guardian, and
Rolling Stone. In 2025, Pelli released Mood
Machine, The Rise of Spotify, and The Cost of the Perfect
Playlist. Her book examines the impact of
streaming services on artists and the public.
Her first pick examines an intriguing folk duo there.
Was an ancient. There was an.
Ancient. Song now something isn't.
Right now we live in Florida. Hailey Hendricks is someone who
I am very excited to get the opportunity to talk about today.
So this is a record with a songwriter named Max Garcia
Conover called One Of Our Nature.
This is a record that they describe as being really
inspired by Woody Guthrie and I would say is an example of a a
record that actually lives up to that potential tabloid.
Just to try to get the. Best of me, the cards in Lovely.
We also have Ayana Contreras, VP of radio at Rocky Mountain
Public Media. Before her time in Denver, she
spent decades in Chicago as a journalist, producer, DJ and
cultural historian. You can hear all of these
sensibilities in her commentaries.
First, she speaks about a new group she calls Holy Roller
Disco. Probably #1 on my list is Annie
and the Caldwells, which put out a really amazing album this past
year, which is I'd classify it as holy roller disco.
And for you, if you think that gospel music and disco music are
not somehow intertwined, you didn't grow up in my church.
Went. To the one up he left.
That one up put. Me and my baby outside sooner he
got outside. Rounding out our panel is
someone who calls himself a musicer, Peter Orloff.
Over the past 30 years, Orlaf has written for NPR, Rolling
Stone, Pitchfork, and the Village Voice.
His current project, which combines journalism, curation,
and community building, is Data Strain.
The core tenets of everything Peter does are rhythm,
improvisation, and community. We hear a teaser of his first
pick here, a fast ascending vibraphonist and composer named
Patricia Brennan. Patricia Brennan right now is on
a like an album by album winning streak that is slightly
unparalleled in this music called jazz.
Her practice on her own has been like evolving in this wonderful,
wonderful, wonderful way. When she and I have had
conversations, I kept asking her like, are you a dancer?
And she said yes, I, I love to dance and I love for that to be
reflected in my music. Steve Smith rejoins us to make
the case that John Zorn is quote the hidden DNA of the 2026
festival. John Zorn, you know, he's been a
community builder par excellence.
He's always had a knack with putting together disparate
musicians, whether he was included or not, and finding
ways to make things work and putting musicians together that
might not seem like they go together and yet somehow it's
it's it's like he has this sense of the potential that everybody
has. He's run several venues.
He's run a record label, a couple of record labels,
actually. He's just been somebody who has
facilitated so much in the community that you can actually
lose sight of the fact that he's pretty dynamic and extraordinary
as an artist and a musician. He's been playing lately in a
band called the New Masada Quartet with Julian Lodge, and
they've been playing the Village Vanguard.
It's very much the jazz bag. And you think, OK, Zorn is doing
the Masada thing again, and he's been doing it for a very long
time. And then you go see this band
and your jaw is on the floor because not only are they so
good, but they are having so much fun that you get caught up
in it. Zorn also doesn't play the PR
game. So for, you know, 30-40 years,
he's been putting out a steady stream of excellent projects and
they come out and then he's on to the next thing.
So in the last year alone, he's probably released a dozen albums
under his own name, of which I could name 7 as being pretty
significant. He put out two records by his
reunited grindcore dub trio Painkiller with Mick Harris and
Bill Laswell. He put out another another album
with his heavy metal organ band Chaos Magic, 2 albums of chamber
music, and a duo with Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo
at Big Ears. You're going to get a taste of
that kind of extreme eclecticism and extreme versatility.
He's playing with Lombardo and Medeski in a trio called
Awakening Ground. He's doing two programs with
classical superstars, including Jack Quartet and the incredible
soprano Barbara Hannigan. He's doing an All Star version
of his game piece Cobra, which is a piece that he's been doing
for decades with a variety of players.
And because it's structured like a game, anyone can come into it
and succeed in this piece and it's never the same way twice.
He's got a duo with Lori Anderson, who he's been working
with regularly lately. He's got his love song project,
which is basically 10 Pan Alley style singer-songwriter material
with Petra Hayden. And Speaking of Masada, he is
reuniting the original groundbreaking lineup of Masada
for two shows. Dave Douglas on trumpet, Greg
Cohen on bass, Joey Baron on drums.
If you look across the entire spectrum of the the whole span
of the Big Ears schedule in 2026, you see shows by Julian
Lodge, by Jesse Harris, Mark Rebow, even Pat Metheny.
There are connections to John Zorn literally everywhere.
He's he's like the hidden DNA of the 2026 festival.
Here's Liz Pelley continuing her commentary on Hayley Hendricks.
Hayley Hendricks and Max Garcia Conover have this record.
What of our nature? That's the title of it this
morning. I.
Am born and I am for the. Forms.
We. Are.
In our great eternal. Moment in the.
Thrall of our own. *. In our border in.
Our. Neighbor in our torture little
yard fighting all this emptiness.
To me, it feels like right now, in a moment where there's a lot
of records that are being made as part of this sort of indie
country, indie Americana, kind of like indie twang resurgence
of sorts. What I'm like most interested in
is if artists are going to employ the aesthetics of
Americana and American folk music.
I'm interested in music that actually grapples with what that
means, that actually grapples with American identity.
This is a record that does that in a very sharp way.
Haley being half Filipina and Max being half Puerto Rican.
There's songs on this album that really look back to history.
It opens with this song that is an ode to a Puerto Rican
independence activist named Alicia Rodriguez, who spent a
lot of her life in jail. There's a song that is an ode to
the Filipino American writer and labor organizer Carlos Bouloson.
Perhaps since we don't talk, they cannot tell we're going
under. Perhaps we've been too fearful.
I'm not doing what we're told. They describe this as a record,
a collection of music about colonialism, generational
identity, commercialism and quote, the slippery target of
addressing social equity and song and quote, there are a
couple of songs specifically that take on the subject matter
of commercialism. And maybe not in a very on the
nose way, but that sort of seemed to be about dealing with
what it looks like or feels like to release art into like very
hostile conditions in the year 2025.
Including this song called Mr. Marketer that is just like a
very sad song about the commodification of art and the
man on the screen. He is freaking me out saying.
Don't let. Me down and you're letting me
down with the weight of all the subject matter that is tackled
on this record or that is sort of like, you know, it forms this
record. There's this really strong sense
of the need to sort of fight emptiness and alienation.
Again, Ayanna. Contreras, Amy.
In the Caldwells, that thin line between club music and gospel
music and soul music has been sort of a line that keeps
getting blurred generation after generation, and Annie and the
Caldwells are a great example of this happening today.
The. 1. We're dying.
Hello, my sister. Love.
My brother. Recorded in West Point, Ms. at
the Message Center which is a small, you know, storefront
church and it's 6 songs, which is how long an album should be.
It's just beautiful. It's a beautiful recording.
Can't wait to see them in person.
Now back to Peter Orloff. Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan.
She was classically trained from Veracruz, Mexico, has been
participating in the New York City improvisational scene,
playing music that is often referred to as jazz and playing
in relatively traditional jazz combos, but also expanding using
a lot of electronics around her vibraphone and marimba playing
composing for bigger and bigger bands for a new record of this
year called of the Near and Far, which is one of my favorite
records of the year, has string section on it.
Very evocative of like David Axelrod, but also it's based on
data from constellations, so it's got a very space age theme
without being very space age. So it evokes the orchestra.
It's got Miles Okazaki playing guitar on it.
Very, very Prague and crazy, chaotic but wonderful music.
Here's Steve Smith once again, this time on a string quartet
originally known for their gnarly, uncompromising classical
music, but also a more meditative and contemplative
state. The Jack Quartet is currently on
the back half of its 20th anniversary celebration.
It's kind of amazing actually that these four young guys, or
they still certainly come off that way on stage, have been at
it for as long as they have and have been achieving at a very,
very high level from the very beginning.
They originally put themselves on the map 20 years ago with the
most gnarly, uncompromising modern classical music.
Giannis Xenakis was their early calling card and they did
complete cycles of the Elliott Carter string quartets and
developed a really, really close relationship with the German
modernist Helmut Lachenman. They've also got a real knack
for spacious, contemplative, meditative pieces, especially
those involving altered intonations, just intonation,
micro tonality. Hearing them playing music by
Catherine Lamb or Jank Aragon can be akin to a spiritual
experience. I've felt myself completely
transported out of my body hearing some of their concerts
when they're in that mode. The four players of the quartet
now are Christopher Otto and Austin Woolleman on violins,
both of whom are a very accomplished composers
themselves, and the quartet has recorded music by both of those
two players. The violist is John Pickford
Richards and the cellist is Jay Campbell.
At the very beginning of this year they put out a recording of
all of John Zorn's string quartets all together in one
place. A couple of decades worth of
work, from really early things that they that he wrote for the
Kronos Quartet decades ago to things that he has written
specifically for Jack more recently.
It's an astonishing recording for anybody who is involved in
contemporary classical music. I have to say.
It's one of the major events of the year.
And of course it came out in January and it still has that
resonance. So the fact that Jack will be
playing at least one program with John Zorn at Big Ears is a
big deal. That's a relationship that you
want to hear. But the other concert that
they're doing at Big Ears tends towards that more meditative and
contemplative state that I was talking about.
Because they also have a very long working relationship with a
composer named John Luther Adams, whose main concerns are
the environment, nature conservation, climate change,
you know, really hot button issues.
And he's not expressing them in sort of in your face stormy
protest test music style, but rather with these enveloping,
beautiful, meditative pieces that feel as if you're
inhabiting the music rather than simply listening to it.
Jack has really developed a beautiful working relationship
with Adams. They've done all of his
quartets. They've recorded virtually all
of them over the years. There's a through line of beauty
and tranquility and sincerity and necessity that runs through
this entire body of work and through this relationship.
Attending it. You're not just listening to a
string quartet, you're really coming into kind of a holistic
experience and you'll be changed when you come out.
Here's Liz Pelley on a country tangent.
Indie rock artist who's been compared to the late David
Berman. I can park the Monte Carlo in
the street, just so you know that I am there when you.
Pass we could make. A business satellite.
Ryan Davis has really made a splash the past couple of years,
specifically this year with this record that this group put out
called New Threats from the Soul on the label that Davis runs
Sophomore Lounge. And this is like a very dense
and the best way country punk country rock record that I'm
excited to get into when he was in college.
Ryan Davis. Interned at drag city records
and I think that is like you know totally checks out like
this band's a band that often gets compared to David Berman
there's like a quote shortly before he passed away Berman,
you know said that Ryan Davis was the best lyricist going
who's not a rapper I. Left my wall in El Segundo I.
Left my true. Love in a West.
Lafayette escape room. You know, in a similar
tradition, music that is like very funny and very heavy at the
same time. Another thing that kind of makes
it a critics record or critics artist is just kind of like how
clearly like very ambitious these records are for country
tinged like indie rock records. It is really like a record that
I think the payoff is strongest when you listen to it front to
back. Here's Ayana Contreras on, a
young trumpeter from Baltimore who's released his debut on Blue
Note Records in 2025. Brandon Woody and his group
Avendo are really like a community based group that came
up in Baltimore, which is not necessarily a city you think of
as being the centerpiece of jazz right now, but he sounds like
right now. Upendo is really interesting.
The term is Swahili, and it roughly translates to love in
all forms. And that's really the reflection
of what he tries to give to his Baltimore community.
It was interesting. How many times can you say
Baltimore in one article? But he's not just rooted in that
one community. This spring, he actually toured
alongside artists including Toronto Electric jazz group Bad
Bad Not Good and pianist Luther S Allison.
He also has released his debut, For the Love of It All, which is
really a love song to Baltimore on Blue Note Records.
He studied at the Brubeck Institute.
In fact, his roommate was Chicago saxophonist Isaiah
Collier. And he also studied at the jazz,
studied jazz arts at the Manhattan School of Music.
But based on my conversation with him, his true education or
we'll just say the stuff that made him was found when he
returned home to Baltimore. He reconvened with his high
school friend and collaborator Troy Long and built a unique
sound was really like honed in clubs,
but also non traditional performance spaces from porches
and backyards and the like to spaces that you wouldn't even
imagine would be hospitable to jazz music.
It's great music and it's also very approachable music.
If you think that community rooted music almost on a
spiritual space isn't for you, this is a great gateway drug to
that sort of sound and energy. Now we switch gears.
Here's Peter Orlov on the New York City Post Hardcore sound of
Yahweh nail gun. I would call it post hardcore
music. No bass, but a Moog that is not
playing kind of bass lines, but it's almost dropping digital low
end bombs as part of the sound. Got screamo vocals.
It's got incessant rhythms from the drummer.
The guitar is doing this kind of stuff that is more like akin to
My Bloody Valentine and David Thorn.
There's very, very intense, visceral music.
But at the same time, these drums that are roto Tom drums is
what a lot of people have been writing about, which is kind of
like these these TomTom, these hollow sounding Tom Toms.
So this very, very loud, very, very punky sound.
But Yahweh Nail Gun kind of streamlines it into a very, very
precise kind of thing. Once again, here's Steve Smith
on a Polish artist making a stir in the world's of songwriting
and ethereal classical music. The final artist that I'm really
fascinated by this year is someone that I'm actually not
personally very well acquainted with.
Somebody that I've really been sort of digging into just
lately, the Polish pianist and composer Hanya Rani, who kind of
started out in a very traditional classical training
kind of background and then moved in the sort of neo
classical, deceptively simple and beautiful area that we find
occupied by the likes of Max Richter and Nils Frahm.
She started very, very young. She studied in Berlin, and then
she rebelled from that kind of orthodox path and started making
the kind of really deceptively simple music that we think of
when we think about artists like Nils Frum or Olafer Arnold's,
you know, just simple, beautiful music.
But it's really a whole lot harder to make that kind of
music and make it stick than people think.
She started this with a 2019 album called Asya, and of course
she's since broken into film scoring, as people like Max
Richter tend to do. And she's got the score right
now for Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value, which won the
grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
So she's really got a sense of sort of deeply baked in
wanderlust. And so at Big Ears, she's doing
2 projects that don't entirely have anything to do with the
music that put her on the map. Now one of them is called
Chilling Bambino and that's really all about live
synthesizer music. Some of the clips that I've
heard online sound like Tangerine Dream and vintage full
blown sequencer driven mode high Berlin school style, but others
are more ambient, more drifty and Spacey.
She taps into the kind of electronic singer-songwriter
mode that she introduced on her album Ghosts in 2023, and the
artist that I would most liken her to in that mode is not
Bjork, but more the the Norwegian singer Aurora.
So it it's full on pop but with real atmosphere and and real
interest to it. Oh yeah, down.
The floor with all. Our science it was.
Down the. Science.
Science down with. Dreams with fears with art of.
Science. The Piano Concerto that Ronnie
wrote is unorthodox in a lot of really great ways.
It was commissioned in memory of Yosima Feldschu, who was herself
a young Polish prodigy. She was renowned at age 12 for
playing Chopin in concert, and she composed music when she was
confined to the Warsaw Ghetto during World War 2.
Her family escaped in 1943, and she died of tuberculosis.
So we don't know very much about Yoshima Feldschu, but we have
her music because her composition notebook survived.
Ronnie's Concerto takes that story as the inspiration, but
she also connects it to contemporary sites of conflict
and strife, including pandemic. And it's very much also about
Ukraine, and it's about Gaza. The title Non fiction indicates
that the piece isn't about escape.
It's about actually, you know, digging into reality.
It's a fascinating piece. I can't imagine what it's going
to sound like live. And Big Ears audiences are truly
fortunate. They're going to get a crack at
it with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.
So, I mean, you know, as much as anything makes me want to attend
Big Ears next year, this is really a draw.
And now we return to Liz Pelley talking about a group with a
language and a sound all their own, with a very relevant
message. In addition to taking their
music off Spotify, Deerhoff also put out their 20th studio album
as a band, which is happening during their 31st year as a
band. So this album that they put out
is called Noble and God Like and Ruin and it is just like an
amazing entry into a long lineage of great records.
The music that they're making now feels so current and urgent
and I feel like they're just an example of a group that have
like a language that they operate within.
Like you hear it and you're this is a dear hoof record.
The subject matter of the records and this record in
particular is just like so true to what we need from advance
like them in 2025. I think like the ability to take
on kind of like the current political environment.
I mean, this is a record is called Noble and God Like and
Noble and God Like in Ruin, which is a reference to a a
quote from Frankenstein. But I think in some ways, when I
like, listen to this record, it really sounds like a band sort
of staring down in a really like, deeply existential way,
like what it means to make art at a time of societal collapse.
Something that maybe sometimes with Deerhoof like the like
deeply sort of like sharp and political nature of the
songwriting and the the, the subject matter can be a little
bit less apparent because of just like how exuberant and
joyful their music also is. But the thing that really struck
me with this record is that there's actually, I think like a
lot of it that feels really like sad and heavy also.
For her final pick, Ayana Contreras talks about a trumpet
player and producer from Chicago who's become known for bringing
gospel, neo soul and even house music into his jazz sound.
I'm so excited to see Marquis Hill, who I've seen a bazillion
times but never ever disappoints.
He's plays in Mackay Mcraven's band, he's played with Kurt
Ehling, Dee Dee, Bridgewater, so many other artists, just a
spectacular cat. His album this past year, which
is really written around other composers, is something unique
for him. Composer's collective Beyond the
Jukebox. Mark Keith Hill is an artist
that has been sort of on my radar since he was essentially a
student in the Chicago scene. And the Chicago scene is really
an interesting scene and he is a great example of it in a lot of
ways. And he continuously brings in
gospel, soul, even house into his quote UN quote jazz music
and also works with folks who are in a lot of different
capacities. A couple of my favorite
projects, recent projects from him include 2019's Love Tape,
which is really in sort of an almost neo soul mode.
Composers Collective Beyond the Jukebox contained 6 of his own
compositions, as well as pieces by Chicago Zone, Ernest Dawkins
and Saba and Jeff Parker again of Tortoise and a million other
groups, and Matt Gold. His core band, the Black Tet,
includes Joel Ross as well as pianist Michael King, bassist
Junius Paul and drummer Corey Fonville.
All of these people to me in the modern jazz scene are, I guess
you would call them, Swiss Army knives in their ability to play
in a lot of different modes in very authentic ways.
So it's just it's fabulous music and to me it's a continuation of
the music that I grew up with and the music that I love to
hear. Peter Orloff's final pick is an
artist who makes his big year's debut in 2026.
The last artist that I picked is kind of a veteran artist and
that is Flying Lotus. Stephen Ellison, he started the
Brain Feeder label. Combines electronics and
improvisation, some done by jazz artists, some done by dance
artists. So I think he is kind of like a
great apex of some of the stuff that happens at Big Ears and and
I think in music communities worldwide.
I first met him when he was an intern at Stone's Throw Records.
At that time he was just, you know, somebody who was making
beats and was really, really into Mad Lib.
And but this, this organic way of blending the idea of
improvisation with what is happening musically, that is,
that is all digital and sample formed.
And it's the most interesting idea happening in music right
now, whether we're talking about an artist like Joy Guidry,
whether we're talking about Caroline Davis, or if we're
looking at more things like Makaya Mcraven and Ben Lamar
Gay. It's a little different kind of
jazz. And they've always been
grooving, rhythm oriented with a lot of their work, but
electronics keep seeping into it.
And when I look at a lineup like Big Ears and I see Flying Lotus,
I see that as being sort of at the height of this kind of to
music. To me, the thing that's really,
really great about Fly Low in 2026 is his emergence as a
legacy artist. So that's how far we've come
into music, and that is how big the tent for Big Ears is.
Thanks to our esteemed panel of critics Steve Smith, Liz Pelley,
Ayana Contreras and Peter Orloff, you can hear all these
artists and many more at Big Ears 2026.
If you dig any of the music you heard in this episode, it's all
in the show notes. Big Ears Conversations about
Music is a production of Big Ears Festival.
I'm your host Sarah Gilletti. The show was produced by Matt
Marowitz. This episode was edited by Alex
Arif. Ashley Capps is the executive
and artistic director of Big Ears Festival.
Big Ears 2026 takes place March 26th through 29th in Knoxville,
TN. For more information and
festival updates, including detailed day by day schedules,
visit bigearsfestival.org. Thanks for listening and until
next time, keep those ears wide open.