A seamless progression from the austere beauty of 'White Space' (by Halvorson) to the pastoral reassurance of 'Cupid' (by Miles) imparted the sensation of pure possibility, an open road under a billowing sky. Sometimes it sounded unmistakably like jazz, sometimes not. He also performed at the Bijou with BANGS, a trio that released one of my favorite albums last year and sounded even better here.īANGS is all about Moran's sensitive, shifting rapport with guitarist Mary Halvorson and cornetist Ron Miles, who each brought furious concentration to the task. Along with the Graves duo, he played a show at the Mill & Mine, around midnight, with his Fats Waller Dance Party, creating a hallucinatory funk jam inspired by one of jazz's foundational heroes. I see this not only as a hopeful turn in the festival's model of inclusion but also as an indicator of present-day permissions around jazz's state of the art. Like that inspiring event, which featured a few of the same artists, this year's Big Ears felt right in tune with an emergent, exhilarating frontier. This coalescence was also a hallmark of last summer's Ojai Music Festival, programmed by pianist and composer Vijay Iyer. Increasingly, improvising artists across the style spectrum are accessing multiple vocabularies, reconciling divergent strategies, bringing other disciplines into the frame. What led me to Big Ears this year, in part, was an unusually high quotient of experimental jazz - or one or another form of unnamable music, like Graves and Moran's spirit trance, that bore a vestigial relationship to jazz. Jason Moran, left, and Milford Graves, right, performing on the second day of the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.

'The more bizarre, the better,' he told me. He wasn't a rare-sound partisan, or a practicing connoisseur he had just learned to count on musical discovery at Big Ears. His eyes lit up as he said it, like a kid about to open a birthday present. When I asked whether he'd been looking forward to Graves and Moran, he said he didn't know a thing about either one. Standing in line, I struck up a conversation with a white-bearded Tennesseean who has never missed an edition of the festival. Their concert was a gemlike centerpiece of Big Ears 2018 capacity at the Bijou is 700, but even with several competing options on the schedule, a lot of people were turned away. Musically speaking, this was a first-time encounter for Graves, who at 76 is a sagacious elder in the improvising avant-garde, and Moran, 43, whose career has branched out from a position closer to jazz's center. At one point, Moran's deep, mournful sonorities at the piano led Graves toward a murmuring hush at the drums, as if anything else would break the spell.

Their spontaneous musical dialogue, onstage at the elegant Bijou Theater in Knoxville, Tenn., suggested a merging of the ancient and the ultramodern, aglow with an ephemeral sort of grace. Milford Graves and Jason Moran were listening hard at the Big Ears Festival on Friday evening, and in this they were far from alone. The festival has always maintained an eclectic schedule, but this year's bookings belied a fascinating alchemy within the current jazz landscape. Milford Graves, performing at the 2018 Big Ears Festival.

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