I sing the body electric

This article is about a young master of the Scottish shortpipes, and a celestially spirited colorist of the zither, and a certified genius of the bluegrass mandolin, all coming to the Big Ears Festival in 11 weeks.

Big Ears is eclectic to a fault, so much so that diving deep into the list of artists for the 12th edition, coming March 27-30, can leave you scratching your head and wondering, “Where have I been? Who are these people?”

You can be excused if you’ve never heard of Brìghde Chaimbeul or Alabaster DePlume. It’s a big ole goofy world, and the half you’ve never heard of comes to Big Ears in Knoxville. Several people have told me that my first preview last month was interesting, but they didn’t know any of the artists I had written about. Come on, y’all. Life’s short. The arts aren’t.

Sam Bush

So I called Sam Bush. He’s coming to Big Ears with his band. He’s a fixture at Mando Mania, the intensive mandolin clinic at MerleFest, and at Telluride, DelFest, Grey Fox, AmericanaFest, Pickathon, Bristol, Baygrass, and the Earl Scruggs Music Festival, but this will be his first taste of Big Ears.

Good timing. Sam has a relatively new record out called “Radio John,” honoring the songs and style of the late John Hartford. And he’s a guest picker and vocalist on Bronwyn Keith-Hynes’ Grammy-nominated new album “I Built a World.” He sings harmonies with Bronwyn and Molly Tuttle on “Can’t Live Without Love,” and you’ll find yourself saying the same thing.

Talking to Sam reminded me that hippies matter, in a huge way. Their cultural significance is muted by the tendency to reduce their legacy to jam bands, head bands, and pot heads, but talent, tenacity, team work and survival are what really counted in the counter culture.

Besides peace, hippies championed Eros and Psyche, in the hope that it would pave the way to happiness. And for quite a few, it worked. What’s truly glee-inducing is that Sam plays by his own rules ... and by the Lord’s. That’s the freakin’ hippie ideal. And the world lets him do it! It’s safe to say he’s never tried on a sequined jacket, worn a string tie, or used styling gel in his hair.

Here’s a kid from Bowling Green, Kentucky who predicates his love for bluegrass on his proximity to Nashville, listening to the Opry on WSM when he was a kid. Sam’s farm upbringing, his musical family, and the fact that Bowling Green is the home of the National Rail Park and Train Museum, as well as the National Corvette Museum describe a matrix of influences that point inevitably to Sam’s 2023 induction into the IBMA’s Hall of Fame.

This guy is a natural strings player, a songwriter of prestigious talent, and an interpreter of songs by other writers who love what Sam brings to the task. On his “Radio John” album, released by Smithsonian Folkways, Sam plays every instrument used for the recording.

Have you ever heard Sam’s cover of Lowell George’s “Sailin’ Shoes,” Wayne Carson’s “The Letter,” or Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country”? Imbued with his particular brand of effervescence, Sam’s covers of other writers’ songs reveal facets that come as complete surprises.

Get yourself to Big Ears and you’ll meet Old Hoss, the 1937 Gibson F5 that Sam has played since 1973. The late great Tony Rice gave the mandolin its name after John Hartford played it banjo-style on his 1972 album “Morning Bugle.” Old Hoss has been maintained for decades by renowned luthier Randy Wood in Bloomington, Georgia, but the instrument’s voice, according to Sam, comes from its original owner, Norman Blake, who subjected the old Gibson to “random hippie sanding” to remove its varnish and thin the top a little bit.

The Sam Bush Band consists of guitarist Steve Mougin, bassist Todd Parks, Wes Corbett on banjo, and drummer Chris Brown. Individually and collectively, there’s only one word for these guys: astonishing. To describe them solely by the instruments they play is like calling an iceberg an ice cube.

Sam is called the father of progressive bluegrass for his stylistic departure from the comparative starchiness on stage of forerunners like Flatt & Scruggs, Doyle Lawson, Bill Monroe, et al. But make no mistake, Sam’s heart is as true as theirs were. So what if he wears faded T-shirts

instead of sharkskin suits, and sneakers instead of cowboy boots. Sam and his band, all of whom are incredibly gifted teachers of tradition, have opened the doors to two generations of players in the last 50 years, from the Bad Livers to Harry Clark, Dominick Leslie, Kyle Tuttle and Wyatt Ellis. They all love Sam.

Laraaji

My friend Laraaji will be making his third appearance at Big Ears. He will do one of his hard-to-describe, but utterly delightful laughter workshops at the Knoxville Museum of Art, plus a solo set featuring his wildly augmented zither and piano improvisations, and then a highly anticipated collaborative set with Carlos Niño, perhaps the most unclassifiable musician and record producer on Earth at present.

Niño produced and performs on the debut solo album by the equally unclassifiable musician André 3000. “New Blue Sun” has Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and Best Alternative Album of the Year. For all this record’s defiance of classification, it is absolutely beautiful and edifying to listen to.

As he did last year, Laraaji comes to Big Ears 2025 as part of the curated programming arranged by the Philly-based professor, producer, and performer King Britt, all under the actually progressive umbrella of “Blacktronica: AfroFuturism in Electronic Music,” which is the single most fascinating contribution Big Ears has made to a broadening awareness in American culture of where we’re all headed.

You know why there’s no rock music component to Big Ears? Because rock music died a long time ago. I’d be a lot more confident that the USA will survive the next decade if Super Bowl 59’s halftime show was curated by King Britt and Vernon Reid was the headliner.

I have known Laraaji for more than 40 years. He was discovered by Brian Eno in Washington Square Park in NYC in 1981, blissfully playing his zither for anyone who wandered by and might be inclined to leave a dollar in his open instrument case. Eno is the British composer, performer and producer who more or less created the genre of ambient music. And instead of leaving a dollar, Eno left his telephone number in Laraaji’s zither case. Laraaji was so blissed out while he played, he didn’t see the phone number 'til he got home to the rundown apartment building on West 110th Street where he squatted with a couple of Buddhist monks and other ungrounded characters.

This simple encounter suddenly put Laraaji, a struggling street musician playing for spare change, into the heady company of Roxy Music, Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, David Byrne, Talking Heads, Jon Hassell, Devo, ColdPlay, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, U2, and Laurie Anderson, all of whom called Eno Mr. Producer.

Adding to his progression of groundbreaking solo albums, “Here Come the Warm Jets,” “Another Green World,” “Discreet Music,” and “Music for Airports,” a few days after leaving his phone number in the zither case, Eno produced a recording in one session with Laraaji, “Day of Radiance.”

That record, as it turns out, nudged King Britt onto the path he has followed ever since.

In a 2023 New York Times article, guitarist Vernon Reid of Living Colour (who will also visit Knoxville at Big Ears) described Laraaji this way: “His innovation was to bring a rhythmic intensity at the same time as creating this shimmering kind of cloud. There’s a kind of dance that’s inherent in what he does, and at the same time, there’s the celestial vibration.”

“There’s a kind of dance” is precisely what connected Laraaji to my dance company MOMIX, which spun-off in 1980 from Pilobolus Dance Theater. We had Laraaji join us for a MOMIX show at Princeton University in 1983, and the result was a score for our 20-minute rear-projected silhouette piece that was the most popular MOMIX piece ever.

King Britt, Sam Bush, Laraaji, Carlos Niño ... I love the circle, and the circus, because we’re all connected.

Brighde Chaimbeul

Here’s a name you’ve probably never heard before, but you’ll never forget it if you hear this deeply gifted young woman’s music. From the Isle of Skye, Brì (Bree) is a master of the Scottish smallpipes, a beguilingly simple-looking instrument that is a more mellow cousin to the larger and more aggressive-sounding Great Highland bagpipes. The smallpipes use a small bellows to fill the instrument’s air bag, unlike the Highland pipes’ blow pipe.

The bellows fit under the player’s arm, secured with a strap around the bicep. The instrument has two or three drone pipes and produces a softer, more intimate and melodic sound than the large bagpipes.

Brìghde Chaimbeul (pronounced Breech-huh Campbell, by the way), a native Gaelic speaker, studied in Edinburgh. Growing up as an award-collecting soloist on the Highland bagpipe, she took up the smallpipes 10 years ago. She has released three albums since 2019, she debuted in the United States at last year’s SXSW (South by Southwest) in Austin, Texas, and her music bears a spiritual connection to that of Laraaji, Carlos Niño, King Britt, and yes, even Sam Bush. There’s a beautiful mystery in her countenance, in a sort of Wednesday Addams way, if Wednesday Addams could weave the light and atmosphere of the Inner Hebrides into a musical ambience that would stop Brian Eno in his tracks. It wraps around you like a sweet fog that lifts you off the ground and takes you home if you will it so. It’s neither light nor dark. It’s just beautiful, insistent, and weightless.

I saw on Brì’s touring schedule that she has a performance scheduled on Jan. 25 with the Scottish Dance Theater in Glasgow. After seeing Vernon Reid’s observation about dance in Laraaji’s music, I asked Brì how she connected with SDT.

She said, “My collaboration with SDT is based on my track ‘O Chiadain An Lo’ from my album ‘The Reeling.’ It’s a very old Gaelic melody which translates as ‘Reflections of Past Days’ and feels very fitting to explore with dance movement. I also created a piece with dancers last March which was commissioned by Somerset House in London.”

Somerset is a new experimental incubator in Central London for artistic collaboration on new technologies and bold ideas. “I love the collaborative process with dancers, watching how their movement develops with my music. I have plans to do more of this!”

Take note, Big Ears. For years I’ve been urging the Festival to explore dance, but Brì took it even further. “A lot of traditional Scottish music is rooted in dance, so it’s very natural for the pipes and dance to go together. I like to play with the contrast of drones and a rhythmic melody that might make your feet shuffle. I like to feel outside of my comfort zone, to learn and push the boundaries.”

I asked Brì to give me her thoughts on ambient music.

“For me, it’s about creating an atmosphere which takes the listener away from reality, into the center of sound. This is how I feel while playing the pipes. It’s a very hypnotic feeling, yet rooted and centered.”

Into the center of sound.

Has anyone ever taken you there?

John Job is a longtime Oak Ridge resident and frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.