The EM Poll

Five-String Wizard

Mar 13, 2008 4:29 PM, By Jon Chappell

           

BELA FLECK TAKES THE BANJO WHERE NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE

Photos: Greg Kessler

Heralded by many as the Charlie Parker of the banjo, Béla Fleck has taken his unprepossessing instrument to places unimagined even by the immediately preceding generation of five-string virtuosos who were his mentors. And the world is taking notice: in just seven years, Fleck has won seven Grammys across multiple genres including jazz, classical, pop, and country. He's done it on an instrument that some might think is limited in approach and appeal — until they hear Fleck.

Béla Fleck has made a career of dashing expectations about what can be done with a few strings tuned to an open G chord. He's assimilated classical music by producing note-for-note banjo transcriptions of Bach violin partitas. He's a superb modern jazz player, improvising bebop-type lines on an instrument that hasn't been a part of jazz for 70 or more years. His uncannily intuitive musical sense allows him to traverse various genres of world music; he's collaborated with Tuvan throat singers, Indian tabla players, steel drummers, and a host of other musicians, including violinist Joshua Bell, bassist Edgar Meyer, pianist Chick Corea, saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and singer-songwriters Dave Matthews, Shawn Colvin, Bruce Hornsby, Sting, and Bonnie Raitt. He's even played with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

Aside from his eclectic musical pursuits as a soloist, one of Fleck's greatest musical achievements is his inspired creation of the unique ensemble in which his banjo is allowed to shine. Since 1989 Fleck's musical home has been his own band — the Flecktones — consisting of core members Victor Wooten on electric bass and Victor's brother Future Man on Drumitar (a guitar-shaped electronic percussion-triggering device of Future Man's own conception). Early on the band included harmonica player Howard Levy; he was eventually replaced by saxophonist Jeff Coffin. Béla Fleck and the Flecktones have released eight albums since 1990, producing some of the most progressive, original, and diverse new acoustic music of our time.

Early Influences

Despite keeping pace with such instrumental wunderkinder as Mark O'Connor and Chris Thile, Fleck's musical background is somewhat unremarkable and fairly typical for someone who attended high school in the '70s: “I'd been playing guitar since I was eight, and I was into the Beatles and really falling in love with Joni Mitchell,” Fleck says. “When I was 15 and got my first banjo, I had already been playing folk guitar and Beatle guitar.”

That almost makes Fleck something of a late bloomer, considering how many musical prodigies get their start a decade sooner. But Fleck made up for a lost time by adopting an almost obsessive approach to the banjo: “I couldn't stop once I got my hands on it,” he says. “It turned me upside down.” Fleck then began to play the banjo day and night. He would wake up early just to play the banjo before going to school. If he couldn't play it — like on the bus or in class — he was thinking about it. As he puts it, “Guitar was a hobby. Banjo was a life.”

Thanks to his ever-increasing virtuosity and the fact he lived in Manhattan, the young Fleck soon found himself in the company of some of New York's leading banjoists. “I took lessons from Erik Darling of the famous folk band the Weavers. There was a certain point where Erik said, ‘You have to learn “Keith-style.”’ And when I found out who Bill Keith was, I ate it up. Then I took lessons from Marc Horowitz, who taught me all the Keith and melodic stuff and the music of Tony Trischka. After a while I just wanted to learn Tony's stuff, and Marc got tired of trying to stay ahead of me. So one day he said, ‘Here's Tony's number.’”

“Keith-style” and “melodic-style” are synonymous terms referring to a complex type of banjo playing where successive melodic notes are played on different strings. It involves almost no fill or drone notes — something the banjo naturally excels at — and instead requires a rigorous, intellectual, almost counterintuitive approach to figuring out melodic passages.

Fleck's gifts allowed him to absorb the new style easily. In fact, he often took the longer, more arduous road to come to a relatively simple place. “When I got together with Tony, I found I had learned a lot of his stuff, but I wasn't doing it right,” Fleck recalls. “Most of our lessons we just sat around and jammed, and I would say, ‘How did you do that on this record?’ He'd show me, and mostly I had learned it ‘wrong,’ except that I had the notes right. Usually it was easier than I was making it, and he would just laugh because of how hard I had made things. But Tony and I got to be good friends, and I've never met a more gifted and knowledgeable musician — on any instrument.”

After high school Fleck left for Boston; there he cut his teeth with the band Tasty Licks at age 19. Fleck then joined another bluegrass band, Spectrum, with which he recorded three albums. His big break came in the early '80s when he replaced Courtney Johnson in the well-known progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival, having been recruited by the band's founder, world-class mandolinist Sam Bush. It was with New Grass that Fleck became widely recognized as a progressive bluegrass banjoist of the highest caliber. He soon began cutting solo albums for Rounder Records; by then it had become clear that Béla Fleck was a bluegrass force to be reckoned with.

However impressive his bluegrass accomplishments were, Fleck's eclectic musical curiosity was also taking hold. “Ever since I was a kid in high school I was also playing progressively,” he stresses. “I was just as interested in sitting in and playing Led Zeppelin along with my friends, or blues, or Joni Mitchell, as I was the folk stuff. So I had been developing this parallel path along with my bluegrass one.”