Big Ears founder Ashley Capps on the art of collaborative curation
thefader.comYou won’t find many festival promoters like Ashley Capps. A Knoxville native, he built AC Entertainment into a music empire centered in his unassuming Eastern Tennessee hometown.
It all started with Ella Guru’s, a 220-capacity club (often pushed past 250 on busy nights) in the once-deserted, now-thriving “Old City.” From the Neville Brothers, who played the venue’s opening night in 1988, to the Goo Goo Dolls, who performed its final show a week before Christmas 1990, Ella’s was a proving ground where Capps learned the ropes of concert promotion and experimented with ambitious bookings — Emmylou Harris, Townes Van Zandt, and Garth Brooks, but also jazz greats like Wynton Marsalis, Tony Williams, and Jay McShann, and African giants King Sunny Ade, Baaba Maal, and the Bhundu Boys.
These bookings would have made perfect sense in New York or L.A., but bringing some of those artists to Knoxville was risky; touring costs money, and tickets need to sell.
Nearly 20 years later, Capps applied the same forward-thinking attitude to the founding of Big Ears Festival, which held its 10th iteration (spread out over 15 years) on the final weekend of March. “Knoxville is, in many ways, our secret weapon,” Capps told me over the phone before this year’s festival.
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