Aurora Nealand wowed a packed crowd in Knoxville, Tennessee at the Big Ears Festival on Sunday, April 2. She walked out with a box on her head to perform a solo piece with vocals and looping station before being joined by the Monocle Ensemble (Persis Randolph and Lauren Oglesby on vocals and percussion, guitarist Cliff Hines and drummer Jebney Lewis) for a full set of mysterious songs with abstract lyrics and great joy.

Big Ears is a unique music festival with an avant-garde focus that offers jazz, contemporary classical, rock, folk and world music.

Nealand’s concert was just one of almost 200 events over four days celebrating its tenth year with thousands of attendees cramming the downtown streets of Knoxville at a dozen indoor venues and a free outdoor stage at the city’s old railway station. She also was part of a panel led by NPR’s Ann Powers on “Roots Rethought” and appeared as a guest on WDVX’s lunchtime “Blue Plate Special.”

New Orleans had a further presence with shows by Tank and the Bangas and a film series curated by New Orleans filmmakers and curators Lily Keber and Nic Brierre Aziz.

This is the third year Aurora Nealand has been featured at Big Ears, the first was in 2019 as part of saxophonist Tim Berne’s group Absint Quartet with a special appearance by the legendary guitarist Bill Frisell. Nealand was to appear at the 2020 Big Ears, but Covid caused the festival cancellation.

With the return of Big Ears last year, Nealand was part of a special focus on New Orleans music and culture which included a number of performances by Nealand with her traditional jazz band the Royal Roses and was part of the community parade led by Krewe du Kanaval with Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the Haitian group RAM of Haiti (who are now based in New Orleans).

Last year Nealand was also featured in composer John Hollenbeck’s new group GEORGE which made its first appearance at Big Ears. Hollenbeck described on his website wanting Nealand in this band: “The moment I knew I wanted to have a band with her was at the opening faculty jam at the Langnau Jazz Nights Workshop that Chris Speed curated in 2019 in Switzerland. Aurora spontaneously sang and played soprano sax on a standard with my old friend, the incomparable pianist/writer Ethan Iverson. She made me cry on that occasion.”

Nealand has recently done both east and west coast tours with Hollenbeck’s group and their first album Letters to George has just been released.

Photo by Elsa Hahne.

Behind the scenes of the Big Ears Festival both last year and this year, Nealand teamed up with New Orleans musician, artist, and set designer, Jebney Lewis, on the City Songs: Knoxville project which is a community involvement component of Big Ears Festival. Nealand and Lewis have known each other for years and were both curators on the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans’ 2018 Southern Sonic, an experimental music and sound-based art festival.

Conceived jointly by Lewis and Nealand, City Songs is a repository of the “place-based reflections, memories and experiences of a group of Knoxville’s young people” in both creative writing and music courses at Fulton High School. The project starts with place-based compositions from various students in a creative writing class taught by Christy Brown that are set to scores by students in a beat making class taught by David Miller. The scores are then added to by professional musicians at the sites discussed in the writing. There were months of zoom sessions with the students and then meeting with the classes in the week of the Big Ears Festival when all the recording and filmmaking occurred.

Last year’s City Songs resulted in eight remarkable videos released in June.

This year Big Ears brought in Knoxville Community Media directed by Amos Oaks to handle filming and much of the editing. Oaks also plays the saw and is featured on one of the pieces with a couple of Big Ears musicians. Also added were two local musicians Jarius Bush, who runs the hip hop group Good Guy Collective and Jonathan Clark director of Carpet Bag Theater, both of whom served as mentors to the young writers and beat makers throughout the process. This year there are eight videos of student compositions plus a collaboration by Clark and Bush from the workshops with the students. They will be released on the Big Ears website in the weeks to come as the pieces are finished. Jebney Lewis is excited about City Songs, and hopes it will continue, bringing in younger kids and more local advisers and keep building a map of places and personal histories in Knoxville through storytelling and music.

Monocle is Aurora Nealand’s “solo project of original compositions and performance pieces” though she often performs the work with other musicians, and even sometimes dancers and theater performers. Nealand has been presenting Monocle shows for several years around New Orleans in various settings from solo to large casts. She has also presented it at Symphony Hall in New York City and in Berlin at the Haus Festival. In 2017, Nealand issued one Monocle album KindHumanKind, and over the years released several Monocle performance videos on Nealand’s YouTube site.

Nealand was involved in the biggest and most complex theatrical presentation of Monocle at the Contemporary Arts Center in March 2020 after a short run the year before and had been in rehearsals with Goat in the Road productions with a full cast and complex staging when Covid struck, and the production was shut down just weeks before it was to premiere. She hopes that the CAC will decide to revive it.

Aurora Nealand has been an omnipresent musician on the New Orleans scene since she first moved to New Orleans in 2004. OffBeat’s editor Jan Ramsey in 2017 has called her “relentlessly creative” and she was the cover artist for the March 2016 issue of OffBeat where writer Brett Milano called her “a bit of an enigma” given she doesn’t just perform with her traditional jazz band the Royal Roses but is a regular with Panorama Jazz, innumerable duets with Tom McDermott at Buffa’s plus Monocle and guesting with different bands around town. She was just featured on Nick Spitzer’s American Routes radio show on February 22, 2023, focused on the Royal Roses.

Recently, Nealand has been touring more and more across America, playing more gigs in New York City from traditional jazz settings like a Town Hall concert, Django A Go Go, featuring the music of Django Reinhardt, to work with Tim Berne at both Winter Jazz in 2020 and Barbes in Brooklyn last October as well as the tours with Hollenbeck’s George.

She returns from Knoxville with lots going on. She was featured at French Quarter Fest with the Royal Roses and has two upcoming Jazz Fest gigs. On April 30, Nealand participates in a special tribute to Sidney Bechet with Donald Harrison Jr. and Dr. Michael White and appears with the Royal Roses on May 4. She also is featured on April 26 at the Jazz Museum and a May 11 Monacle show at the Broadside with Louis Michot.

Meanwhile, Aurora Nealand will be all over town in the clubs with her appearances with Tom McDermot at Buffas on Thursdays, her Wood Floor Trio at d.b.a. on Saturday afternoons, at the Spotted Cat on Saturday evenings with Panorama Jazz, Sunday evenings with her band the Reed Minders and lots of guest appearances in other bands as well as that band of mystery, Rory Danger and the Danger Dangers. Soon as Jazz Fest is over then she is busy as a facilitator for Bang on the Can’s Found Sound Nation’s OneBeat creating international exploratory music collaborations! Is there anyone more hard working in different settings?

Jazz on the Tube’s Ken McCarthy in his new book on New Orleans music Death, Resurrection and the Spirit of New Orleans includes her in his lists of credits, noting “she does what musicians are supposed to do: channel beauty and bring light where it is needed.”

by Ray Funk