Ear Whacks

Finger Pickin' Good: Bela Fleck Storms the Palace

Bela Fleck & the Flecktones

Who’s got my Asheville tickets?
Does anyone have any shows with Sandip? Let’s trade.
I was at 2/7/01 Durham and I need a copy!
Who’s holding?
Atlanta ROCKED! Here’s the set-list for 2/10/01.

Clippings on a Phish bulletin board? Nope, they’re on hiatus. It must be the Dave Matthews Band then. No, their tour doesn’t start until April. These postings are fresh from the Béla Fleck and the Flecktones Web site at www.flecktones.com. For years a success on the bluegrass and jazz scenes and a perennial Grammy nominee, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones have recently gained a larger mainstream audience through their associations with the Dave Matthews Band and Phish. The jam band scene has enthusiastically embraced the improvised musical excursions of the Flecktones, as tapers trade shows and post set-lists fanatically on the Web while people scramble for tickets. While this might seem odd for a banjo-based jazz group, one thing that Béla has always cherished is breaking new ground with his instrument.

I spoke with Béla over the telephone from the studio where he was putting the finishing touches on his latest recordings. I asked him about his current exploding popularity. “It’s been wonderful, it’s been very exciting. We’ve had almost a third again growth, and in some places doubled,” he said in reference to the venues he’s been playing. “It’s kind of like being an overnight success after 25 years.” Not everyone in the Flecktones’ eclectic audience is pleased with their recent success, namely, the jazz purists who “discovered” them first and who tend to be a sit-down type of audience. “Sometimes we have a problem if the audiences don’t mix well. If you pay 50 bucks for a ticket in the front row and then a guy comes down and starts dancing in front of you, you’ve got a right to be pretty irritated…So we ask our audiences to understand each other and to be considerate. If we can we get people to dance on the sides, or if the promoters can provide a place to dance that’s cool, then it enhances the whole scene. We like to see people dancing, but we hate to see people unhappy that people are dancing.”

A native New Yorker, Béla Fleck has been playing the banjo since 1973 when his grandfather brought one home from a yard sale. He began his precocious quest to re-invent the banjo immediately, experimenting with Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Charlie Parker licks from the beginning. At age 16 he took it upon himself to contact progressive banjo player Tony Trischka (who was living in New York City) for lessons. Béla’s association with banjo pioneer Tony Trischka resulted in an open mind about the role of the banjo as an instrument. Mr. Trischka’s 1973 release Bluegrass Light opened the door for Béla as he removed the banjo from its natural country setting and jammed with guitars, saxophones and synthesizers. But if Tony Trischka opened the door, then Béla stormed through it and burned the house down behind him.
Tony recently told me from his home in New Jersey “Béla called me when he was 16 and asked me for lessons…After three months, you know he was so quick he just picked it all up, it was like, let’s just jam, we don’t need to do lessons any more. It was amazing.”

After some success with the Boston-based band Tasty Licks Béla moved to his current home in Nashville and in 1981 joined the New Grass Revival where he quickly made a name for himself as a bluegrass superstar. The NGR generated a devoted cult following as they played bluegrass festivals around the country, even opening for the Grateful Dead at one point. One of the lasting results of Jerry Garcia’s life-long connection to bluegrass music is the cross-pollination of the bluegrass and jam band worlds.
His creativity chafing after years of being pegged to bluegrass, Béla set out to form a jazz band the breakup of the NGR. He created the Flecktones with non-bluegrass players Victor Wooten on bass and Victor’s brother synthesizer-percussionist RoyEl, who goes by the name of “Futureman”. Howard Levy provided keyboards and harmonica for the group’s first three albums. The resulting band had a unique sound that was unlabelable, much to the dismay of record executives at Blue Note who passed on the Flecktones self-titled 1990 debut.

Twelve years of touring and the Flecktones have produced the rarest of combinations, critical acclaim and commercial success. Their style was described by an audience member as ‘blu-bop’, a phrase that would later become a song title on their second album, Flight of the Cosmic Hippo. Due to Béla’s genre bending ways, his commercial success would build slowly. After thousands of live performances his legacy includes a discography covering 20 albums over the past 20 years and 18 Grammy nominations spread across the categories of Jazz, Bluegrass, Pop, Country, Spoken Word, Gospel, Instrumental Composition, and World Music.

In 1994 Béla recorded the solo album Tales from the Acoustic Planet, an experience that would affect the development of the Flecktones. The special guest roster included jazz pianist Chick Corea, Sam Bush on mandolin, classical bassist Edgar Meyer, Jerry Douglas on dobro (a slide guitar meant to emulate a lap steel or pedal steel), sax player Branford Marsalis and Bruce Hornsby on piano. Since then Béla has made a point of reaching out and playing with as many different musicians as possible. In a recent interview with WDET/Michigan, Béla related, “Our band at the core, being me, Victor and Futureman, we’ve all tried to re-invent our instruments, and we like to play with people who play their instruments in an unusual manner.”

Although the Flecktones do over 150 shows a year and Béla plays another 40-50 solo, he told me that he really doesn’t get worn down, due to the flexibility of the band and the wide array of guests that often join them onstage. When I asked him about his extensive touring schedule he replied, “The key to keeping from getting too tired is changing it up and doing a lot of different kinds of things. It keeps me fresh and makes everything fun. If I were doing the exact same thing every night, no matter how good, I would feel more fatigue...A change is as good as a rest.”

Continuing his quest to go where no banjo has gone before, Béla decided to sample the world music scene. 1996 saw the release of the album Tabula Raga on which Béla was accompanied by VM Bhutt on Indian slide guitar and Jie-Bin Chen on the erh-hu, a two-stringed Chinese violin. Another genre, another nod from the Grammys. In 2000 he toured with Indian tabla player Sandip Burman resulting in a guest slot for Sandip on the Flecktones recent release Outbound.

Commercial success notwithstanding, surprised to learn of his demise in a bluegrass magazine, Béla realized it was time to reinvest in the music that he considers his touchstone. In 1999 he recorded Tales from the Acoustic Planet Volume II: The Bluegrass Sessions with three generations of bluegrass stars, including the legendary players Earl Scruggs and Vassar Clements. Back to his roots and yet another nomination from the committee, proving that rumors of his demise had been greatly exaggerated.
This year Outbound, the eighth album from the Flecktones who have added Jeff Coffin on saxophone, is up for Best Contemporary Jazz Album and the track Zona Mona is up for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. In addition, Béla is nominated for a guest appearance on Allison Brown’s Leaving Cottondale in the category Best Country Instrumental Performance.

Commenting on Outbound Béla said, “This record is an opening of arms to a greater musical community and we had a lot of guests playing. When you think about “outbound,” it’s the trip out, you’re not coming home just yet, you’re on a journey…It’s about trying stuff and being open-minded.”

The extensive list of guest players includes guitarist Adrian Belew, keyboardist John Medeski, and Tuvan throat singer Ondar, any of whom might show up to jam when the Flecktones are in their neighborhood.
After years of musical freedom experimenting with abstract compositions and improvisation, Béla found himself attracted to the complex forms and structure of classical music. In 1997 he dabbled with Bach on the album Uncommon Ritual by bassist Edgar Meyer. Unable to dabble in anything, Béla has recently immersed himself and is slated to release an entire album of classical material ranging from Bach to Scarlatti and Chopin later this year. When I inquired about whom he looked to for musical inspiration, in addition to jazz greats Chick Corea and Miles Davis, he said, “A lot of the classical composers that I’ve been studying now. I mean Bach, he’s a motherfucker. Well, there’s probably a better word, but taken in a[n] historical context, he really turned the whole thing upside down because no one had ever written in 12 keys before, and it blew people away. And people fed off that, just kept trying to push it in different directions and there was just an incredible amount of creativity going on with talented people sitting around in rooms trying to create beautiful music. And if you approach it like that, you can connect to it in a different way than if you just think ‘dead composers’.”

When I asked about the possibilities of playing classical festivals as well as the bluegrass and jazz and jam festivals the Flecktones currently play he laughed and replied, “Yeah, you know I really like the way that the people dance at the classical music shows. But yes, I know that Edgar Meyer and I am planning on doing some touring and who knows what that could lead to. I also hope to be pushing the composing side more and writing pieces for the group and orchestra or for a string quartet and banjo, and combining these different worlds…But that doesn’t mean that from now on I’m going to be Mr. Classical Man. I tend to do projects and then move on.”

The final frontier for the banjo? You’ll just have to listen. Born of bluegrass, tempered by jazz, rolled in jam, with a twist of world beat and classical, you can find Béla Fleck and the Flecktones in the blu-bopical jam section at any music store.

[Editor’s Note: As we went to press, Bela Fleck won two grammy awards: Best Contemporary Jazz Album and Best Country Instrumentalist on Allison Brown’s Leaving Cottondale.]

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones will be performing at the Palace Theater in Albany on March 10th. For information, call (518) 465-3334. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster, (518) 476-1000.
—Jonathan D. King