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Five-String Wizard

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

BELA FLECK TAKES THE BANJO WHERE NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE

The Jazz Factor

The next key phase in Fleck's musical development came largely because of his love for jazz. “I got into Parker, Corea, Martino, McLaughlin, Metheny, because I felt I needed to break away from bluegrass to get a bigger picture of the world,” he says. In the process, Fleck made a significant discovery: he realized that, while the rhythmic strumming of a banjo had been a staple of early jazz groups, no musician had truly played modern jazz on the instrument in the way, for example, a guitarist like Pat Metheny or Pat Martino had. So Fleck devised a system for studying jazz — formally, and in a disciplined way — on the banjo.

Other people had played jazz on the five-string banjo before, notably Bill Keith, who's credited with inventing the melodic style. Fleck, however, points out the difference between learning a melody or set piece that's worked out on the banjo, and playing in the true style of jazz: improvising idiomatically in the swing and bebop style. “Certainly, there were already players experimenting with jazz on the banjo,” Fleck acknowledges, “like when Keith did the Benny Goodman stuff, or [Duke Ellington's] ‘Caravan’ or [Duke Jordan's] ‘Jordu.’” But Fleck wanted to take a more modern-jazz approach.

“I had an epiphany when I saw Chick Corea and Return to Forever at the Beacon Theater in New York,” Fleck continues. “I'm watching Al DiMeola and Stanley Clarke racing up and down their necks, and I'm thinking, ‘All those notes are on the banjo, and there's no reason you shouldn't be able to play them.’”

Although Fleck is respectful and admiring of his forebears, he clearly understood on an intellectual level how his new approach would differ from theirs. For example, the style of Don Reno, an incredible banjo innovator who had elements of both Earl Scruggs and a flatpicking single-string technique on banjo, wasn't where Fleck was headed. “Even the Reno thing is not scales, it's licks,” he says. “And chromatic licks that are comfortable in that position on the banjo neck are still licks too. It's very position-oriented and not a comprehensive scale study that takes you up and down the neck, or that allows you to turn right and left on a dime and take another direction. There's no voice leading, intervals, odd rhythmic patterns. All those are hallmarks of true jazz playing.”

Fleck then developed a more formalized regimen for studying the banjo: “I figured out the modes, which is what you have to learn when you play guitar,” he says. “I learned scale passages that went from bottom to top, in all 12 keys, then in thirds, fourths, fifths, octaves, ninths. Then in odd groupings. I went up the neck, down the neck, across the neck, and switched directions until I knew the entire fingerboard according to the notes and not just licks where my fingers were comfortable going.”

In addition to taking a systematic approach to scale study, Fleck used another practice technique common to jazz players — learning tunes and solos from the masters. “I learned every Charlie Parker tune on every record I had,” he says. “I learned some solos, lots of fragments, Coltrane licks. I learned Pat Martino stuff, which was very chromatic, and I explored heavily the jazz minor scale,” which is the natural-minor scale with a raised sixth and seventh degree.

At this point he made the decision not to alter the banjo's tuning, as some players might do when trying to stretch it from its folk roots to make it more versatile. “I alter tunings to write songs, but for improvising, you need to know where everything is,” he explains. “If you want to internalize the fretboard, you can't have the third in a different place every time you play. I stuck with the G tuning because I found there was as much good as there were problems. Different tunings may be good for working out songs, but that's different than improvising.”

To World and Beyond

Fleck has assimilated other genres by applying the same kind of formalized discipline he used to learn jazz. On Live at the Quick (Sony, 2002), his recent CD and DVD, Fleck tackles Indian music in a trio with Victor Wooten and tabla player Sandip Burman. Fleck doesn't find playing with the tabla to be unusually difficult, even though there is some fierce counting and rapid meter changing afoot in the high-speed tour de force. “What you're seeing is all the hard work that was done at another time,” he says. “You're just seeing the effect. Sandip and I had toured before as a duo. The Bach violin partita was, again, work I had done at another time, and now it's no big deal for me to do it. The Indian stuff follows it [on Quick], but it's all internalized, as is all the Flecktones stuff. That's what's kind of cool: You keep building on top of the last thing. And you don't even remember all the stages it took to get it there.”

The smorgasbord of styles served up on Quick illustrates a variety of approaches to the material. For instance, Aaron Copland's “Hoedown” requires a different mind-set than some of the other classical pieces Fleck plays. “‘Hoedown’ is more like a jazz tune or a bluegrass tune,” he says. “There's a lot more leeway there. In the Bach, there's no leeway: every note must be played as written. In the Copland, it just doesn't seem like that to me. Maybe because I grew up hearing Emerson, Lake, and Palmer play it and it's just a great tune. After we recorded it, Victor said, ‘Man, I had no idea that this thing would ever sound any good.’ And by the time we added bassoon and tabla and a horn section, it had taken on a life of its own. And it doesn't sound at all like the ELP version.”

Banjo Breakdown Playing a live show that runs the gamut from baroque to East Indian to Appalachian music naturally requires more than one axe; Fleck uses three banjos and a guitar as his main stage instruments. Closest to his heart is his prewar vintage Gibson banjo. “My main axe is a 1937 Gibson Style 75, called that because they [cost] $75 at the time,” he explains. “It's a great old banjo, a flathead, one of the ‘holy grail’ banjos. It's like the Earl Scruggs vintage, but a different model.”

Banjo Breakdown

Playing a live show that runs the gamut from baroque to East Indian to Appalachian music naturally requires more than one axe; Fleck uses three banjos and a guitar as his main stage instruments. Closest to his heart is his prewar vintage Gibson banjo. “My main axe is a 1937 Gibson Style 75, called that because they [cost] $75 at the time,” he explains. “It's a great old banjo, a flathead, one of the ‘holy grail’ banjos. It's like the Earl Scruggs vintage, but a different model.”

His other two banjos are electrified: “The black one is a Nechville Meteor, with a small head,” says Fleck. “Some [electric] banjos have no head, but then they have no characteristics, and you might as well play a guitar. The head and the wood bridge have to be in there somewhere. The Nechville sounds like a banjo, and it's in a different tuning, a dropped C, which John Hartford used to do a lot, and which is a sound I just love. I use that tuning on ‘Big Country.’ My other electric banjo is a Deering Crossfire, which was one of the first electric banjos during my time. It has a real rich, dark sound. It sounds more like a jazz guitar in a lot of ways, but I use all the banjo techniques on it. I run a Yamaha hex pickup on it to drive the synths.”

For occasional guitar passages, Fleck uses a Swiss-made Paradis guitar, which is also equipped with a hex pickup. “I have a lot of systems onstage: an acoustic banjo, an electric, a synth system for an electric, a guitar, a wireless system, preamps, and EQs,” he explains. “It's a lot of stuff, so I just use the onboard sounds. Live, the Roland GR-33 works just fine.”

The pickup in Fleck's acoustic banjo is a special floating element made by Gerald Jones. As Fleck explains, “It's a magnetic pickup that floats underneath the bridge and under the head. A sliver of metal fits between the middle bridge foot and the head. That makes the banjo into a mic. The problem with that, though, is that mics feed back. So I have a 10-band Klark Teknik parametric EQ to kill the feedback. I have to go pretty deep and wide, but once I filter out the muddy stuff, it sounds a lot more acoustic than any pickup I've ever heard.” Fleck mixes the pickup sound with an instrument-mounted mini condenser mic, a Shure SM98.

For effects, Fleck keeps the banjo paths isolated, each with its own separate signal chain. The acoustic rack contains the Klark Teknik EQ and an Eventide Eclipse. “In my electric rack, I've been using the Line 6 Pod Pro,” says Fleck. “I use a little bit of delay and not much distortion, but occasionally I want some crunch. Sometimes I like it to crunch when I'm doing single-line stuff. And there's a really nice chorus and some good amp sounds in the Pod. After playing a lot of digital guitar processors, I've found that a lot of them don't play well. They sound good, but you can't play through them. They slow you down. But the Line 6 sounds good and feels really good to play through.”

All effects are applied by the time the banjo signals come out of their respective onstage racks and go out to the house engineer. The three banjos feed a Trace Elliot TA 200S 4-channel combo amp, which Fleck uses as a stage monitor. The guitar signal goes through a unit called a Polysubbass Controller, which processes the hex pickup signals and sends them out to a Roland VG-8 Guitar System. That goes into a Lexicon PCM80 for effects and then straight to the board.

The Flecktones' stage-monitoring system is entirely wireless. All the musicians use Shure PSM 600 in-ear monitors, which drastically reduce the feedback potential created by conventional speakers bleeding into open mics. “The in-ear monitors really help with the banjo, especially the acoustic banjo,” says Fleck, “because the louder we get, the more volatile the situation is with feedback. And the band has naturally been turning up recently, and that would be much more problematic with conventional monitors. We adopted them pretty quick after they came out.”