Julian Booker

This July 4th weekend, for our Sounds of America programming, WRTI’s jazz team will present three-song sets of some of the music’s greatest artists. From Friday Mixtape to Sunday Rotation, classic artists like Miles Davis and John Coltrane will sit side-by-side with genre-blurring artist Georgia Anne Muldrow, New York salsa legends Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto, the "Father of Soul" Ray Charles, and many more.

There are few musicians in the history of jazz that have as deeply and significantly affected the direction of the art form as Miles Davis. To celebrate his centennial on May 26, WRTI will present 24 hours of programming devoted entirely to his catalog. That catalog spans many phases and permutations of style, reflecting a restless, ever-searching career. The artist born Miles Dewey Davis III, the son of a dentist, began playing the trumpet in elementary school.

For years now, some of my most trusted friends in music have had the same refrain: “you have to get to Big Ears.” The annual festival, founded in 2009, takes place in the heart of lovely downtown Knoxville and showcases acts that range from jazz to folk to rock and many things in between. A defining characteristic of almost every act that plays, though, is a penchant for the experimental.