Big Ears Festival 2017 Leading the impressive jazz roster, iconCarla Bley conducted the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra with sharp motions. Her five-part 2001 composition "The National Anthem" ("What better time," she quipped with a laugh), is technically a big band piece, but the minor-key funkiness (anchored by bassist Steve Swallow) and dissonant satire of the Francis Scott Key composition made it part Funkadelic, part Spike Jones, part On the Corner. Recent Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Threadgill's Zooid brought an unlikely set up (acoustic guitar, cello, tuba, flute, drums) to unlikely arrangements, coalescing into lumbering flat-tire rhythms. Matana Roberts played a jazz show that felt like a noise show, complete with drones, loops and some shouting over the chaos, bringing some of the narratives of her 2011 album Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres into the intimate swirl of her more recent work. The 74-year-old free-jazz drummer Bobby Kapp teamed with pianist Matthew Shippfor an amazing dance of improvisation. Kapp's loose-limbed playing drifted in and out of Shipp's precise, almost militaristic tumbles of notes for a performance that swung between jaunty, apocalyptic and almost telepathically in sync. Steve