Love and Healing with Meshell Ndegeocello & Rufus Wainwright
Softening and Empathy at Big Ears Festival with two ever-evolving artists.
Part 5 of a visual journal of Big Ears. (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
Although I’ve been a longtime fan of both artists, I hadn’t explicitly planned to cover Meshell Ndegeocello or Rufus Wainwright at Big Ears. But the sets turned out to be the most healing and grounding experiences I had during the sonically and physically challenging four day marathon of music.
Ndegeocello and Wainwright are both 30+ years into their careers, each launched on an early trajectory aimed at pop stardom in the 1990s but have taken many creative turns to express their restless ambitions. The achievement of both performances was in harnessing the power of vulnerability through honest testimony, and how that can bring us towards softening, acceptance and community.
Ndegeocello presented music from her Grammy-winning 2024 album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin with an excellent band of frequent collaborators Abe Rounds on drums, Chris Bruce on guitar, Justin Hicks, vocals, and Jake Sherman and keyboards and organ. (Rounds and Sherman did a brief warm up set as Jake & Abe before the full band took the stage.)
Exemplifying the religious push of the music, the song ‘Love’ began with a chant-like melody before moving into what felt like a service in a progressive house of prayer with Ndegeocello as an Earth Mother priestess.
The refrain goes:
To live In Love, is to be uncertain
To live in Love, is to bear the burden
Love takes off the masks, That we fear we can’t live without
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On the closing night of Big Ears, Rufus Wainwright performed a career-spanning (mostly) solo set at the Knoxville Civic Auditorium, moving between piano and guitar with a video projection on a screen behind him. With a T-shirt under his jacket that read, “Do you really think you go to hell for having loved?,” Wainwright began the set with an invocation of the liturgical prayer of absolution “Agnus Dei” as sung on his 2004 album Want Two.
The set moved on to his wry and confessional fan favorites like “Vibrate” and “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,” then dipping into his musical theater and opera projects as well as selections from Folkocracy, a 2024 album of covers of ancient-to-modern ‘folk’ music chock-full of notable guest artists including David Byrne, Ahnoni, Brandi Carlile and John Legend.
Mid-set, he was joined by singer Amber Martin for the classic country-inspired “I Want You To Be a Real Man,” who returned at the encore to lend vocal harmony to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
UP NEXT:
A Joyful Noise + Larry & Joe
PREVIOUSLY on BIG EARS:
Ambrose Akinmusire: Bloomed at Big Ears (with Nate Chinen / The Gig)
Guitar Worlds of Rich Ruth & William Tyler
Instrumental Explorations with Tortoise x SML
Tindersticks
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