The Phenomenal Bela Fleck

AIM Gives Back!
All Profits Support
NonCommercial Music

Home
* * *
AIM Radio
Program 17 -
Armenian/Jazz Fusion
with Musaner
Playlist and
Artist Info here
* * *
Music Mart
Guest Recordings
New & Noteworthy
More
* * *
Standouts
Recommendations
Interviews & More
Adventures in Film
ComposerRoundtable
Spotlight Artists
Sign of the Times
* * *

"THE BANJO BEING WEIRD"
- The Phenomenal Béla Fleck

By Christopher M. Wright
© 2006 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved

CD Links Below

Hard to find good music these days? Here are some albums worth listening to. These recommendations are completely independent - AIM accepts no promotional fees or CDs whatsoever. The music rises or falls on its own merits. To be recommended, the music has to find its way into my collection and get played repeatedly. That rates an 'Honorable Mention' while 'Discovery', AIM's highest distinction, is reserved for those rare occasions when the music is among the best of its kind.

I guarantee, you have never heard the banjo played like this before. American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck melds jazz, bluegrass, and whatever other genres he can get his hands on into some of the most inventive music of our time. As of this writing, he has picked up seven Grammy Awards in six categories - country, composing, jazz, pop, classical, and arranging. All from a simple stringed instrument that African slaves brought over to America.

Named for classical composer Béla Bartok, Fleck was born in New York in 1958 and attended the Fame high school (New York City High School of Music and Art) where he started out on French horn and folk guitar. The banjo bug bit him after he heard the Beverly Hillbillies theme, The Ballad of Jed Clampett. "Suddenly I got into banjo and [my guitar teacher] was shocked at how fast I took to that," Fleck once told an interviewer. The bluegrass music of Flatt & Scruggs was another early influence.

Not knowing what to do with a banjo player, the school stuck him in the choir, but Fleck began experimenting with different styles on the banjo in off-hours jam sessions with other kids. "My friends were playing every kind of music you could imagine - jazz, blues, rock and even stuff I'd never heard," Fleck told the Denver Post in 1992. " I'd sit in and try to make my banjo fit, try to add something. I guess that's what I've always tried to do with my music."

"I always heard things a little differently," Fleck continued in the interview. "When I first started playing banjo, I learned all the usual stuff - the Scruggs rolls, the scales and the melody notes. Then I started studying with Tony Trischka who was an extremely innovative banjo player in New York City. Tony was very open-minded. He showed me you could do a lot more with the instrument than people thought."

After high school, Fleck tried the Julliard Extension School but soon moved to Boston at the age of 19 to play with a band. He was eventually drawn to Nashville where he joined the New Grass Revival in 1982.

The Flecktones came into being in 1989 and their first two releases were nominated for Grammies. Appearances on The Tonight Show followed.

The band's original lineup included Victor Wooten on bass and synth drummer Roy 'Future Man' Wooten. Howard Levy, a jazz keyboardist who also played exquisite harmonica, left in 1992 after which the band used floor pedals and electronics to fill out their sound. Saxophonist Jeff Coffin was added later.

The Flecktones have been on the road a lot, playing as many as 200 dates a year, which has been both blessing and curse. "If you're a ballplayer, you have to play a certain amount to stay in shape," Fleck told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2003. "We need to play. We're supposed to play. If we could stay home and do it in town and make a living, we would. But I've never heard of that happening anywhere except Branson [Missouri] and Las Vegas. The only way we can do it is to play to new people every night and drive around the country with our stuff. We're not going to be great musicians unless we're playing a lot."

The studio is put to other purposes. "A record should be an opportunity to try something you haven't done before," he told the Washington Post in 2000. "When we go into the studio, we want to do something that you can't hear in the live show," he continued. "I've always liked people like Jimi Hendrix who used the studio to do things they couldn't do on stage."

He tries to make each record different. "Each album has its own set of rules," Fleck said in the Washington Post interview. "The rules help the records have their own identities. It's a way to have a clear concept for each record so you don't keep making the same one over and over again."

Everything on the early albums could be played on stage. "People didn't believe that Howard could play piano and harp at once like that or that Victor could get all those notes out of one bass. But they did," he said in the Washington Post interview. On Left of Cool, it was overdubs - several horns from Coffin and simultaneous banjo and synth banjo from Fleck, for example. On Outbound, Fleck used a variety of guest artists - Edgar Meyer (bluegrass bass), Shawn Colvin (folk-singer), Ondar (Tuvan throat singer), Andy Narell (steel drums), and the Love Sponge String Quartet among them.

Fleck touched roots on Little Worlds with his interpretation of Flatt & Scruggs' The Ballad of Jed Clampett, the Beverly Hillbillies theme that inspired Fleck as a youth. "It's pretty psychotic," Fleck said in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch interview. "You have to hear it."

Fleck also has a number of solo releases. One, The Bluegrass Sessions (Tales from the Acoustic Planet - Volume 2), is an intelligent updating of the genre that will win over anyone who thinks bluegrass has to be corny. Less successful is Fleck's album of classical banjo transcriptions by, among others, Bach, Chopin, and Scarlatti. But such bold journeys are necessary to stay creative, Fleck maintains.

"I learned more doing that classical album than I have in years. I was so out of my element. You know how you make your greatest leaps when you're doing something you're totally unfamiliar with?," he said in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch interview. While working on the album, he told the Washington Post: "Whenever nothing's happening, I'll pull out my book and work on the fingering. Just doing that work has already had an impact on my other music. On stage, in the middle of a solo, a phrase or a harmonization from a Bach piece will surface. The other day I was writing a piece that never would have come out if I hadn't been working on this classical stuff. It's always good to pour new fuel into the burner."

My picks -

Top of Page