Tag: Flecktones

Béla Fleck Explains How ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ Set Him on a Bluegrass Path

Posted on by Editor

Béla Fleck came to the banjo in quite possibly the oddest way imaginable — via The Beverly Hillbillies when he was a kid. Hearing Scruggs-style banjo on “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” while watching television, he was instantly smitten and fell in love with the sound. But he chose not to tell anyone.

“It would have made no sense to anybody else why I liked it so much, but it just took my breath away,” Fleck remembers. “It was this odd moment at my grandparents’ house, watching TV with my brother even though he doesn’t remember it at all. I never thought I could actually play that. It seemed impossible, not within human grasp.”

Afterward, Fleck got his mom to teach him enough guitar to play folk songs casually. He liked playing guitar, although it did not fire his imagination. But after his grandfather saw him playing guitar, he came upon a banjo at a garage sale and bought it for his grandson, who was 15 and about to start high school.

“Just this flukey thing,” Fleck says with a laugh. “’Here, you like stringed instruments, this was at a garage sale.’ I would never have had the nerve to buy one myself, and he bought it for me not even knowing my interest in it. Bringing it home on the train, I ran into a guy who asked if I knew how to play. I didn’t, so he tuned it in G, handed it back to me and I never put it down. Got a Pete Seeger book and got to work. It was a really profound thing and I became Type-A obsessed. Still am. I’m always thinking about it.”

That work ethic never changed, either. Bob Burtman was an early roommate of Fleck’s in Somerville, Massachussetts, in the late 1970s and recalls Fleck as the perfect roommate.

“Either he was off making money, or he’d be there endlessly practicing,” Burtman says. “He was so dedicated, you just knew how good he was gonna be. There was a mattress on the floor and he’d sit there playing scales for hours. Not typical scales, either — diatonic, weird Eastern European, just everything. Up and down, up and down. Word got around and people started hearing about him and dropping by to jam — people like Tony Trischka, Mark Schatz. I got to hang out and listen, which was fabulous. Béla soon moved on to bigger and better things, like his own apartment.”

Over the decades, Fleck has covered a lot of ground both literally and figuratively. He traveled to Africa to explore the African origins of banjo with the 2008 project Throw Down Your Heart and has also played jazz and classical as well as bluegrass with groups including New Grass Revival and his own Flecktones, winning 14 Grammy Awards. His most recent Grammy Award came in 2015, claiming best folk album for Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn, made with his spouse and musical fellow traveler.

Strangely enough, however, he actually hasn’t done all that much straight-up bluegrass over the years. His latest album My Bluegrass Heart is a star-studded affair featuring notables old and new including Sam Bush, Michael Cleveland, Jerry Douglas, Billy Strings, Chris Thile, Molly Tuttle, and Sierra Hull. It’s just his third bluegrass album, and first in more than 20 years. But the timing does not feel coincidental.

“I always thought there’d be a time when I would want to do more bluegrass,” he says. “Growing up, it’s a great training ground before you spread your wings. Any great bluegrass musician has done that, pushed the edge, but they tend to want to come back when they realize how special the basic root is. Well, we had some family issues, my son got sick and we almost lost him. Once we knew he’d be okay, what to do then? Maybe it was feeling a lack of control, but I wanted to play music where I knew what to do rather than explore the unknown. I needed to connect with where I’d started, and the bluegrass community is one of the most beautiful things. You’re never alone when you play it.

“You know, I remember seeing Ricky Skaggs after he’d become a big country star, coming back to a bluegrass festival,” he adds. “He was this legit big star, and he played with eight bands that day. Bluegrass was still a part of him and servicing that part of himself and that community was important to him. That made a real impression. It’s important to me, too.”

Editor’s note: Read about more about our Artist of the Month, Béla Fleck, here.

Photo credit: Alan Messer

Béla Fleck – Toy Heart: A Podcast About Bluegrass

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

On this episode of Toy Heart, Béla Fleck talks to host Tom Power from his home studio and for the first time, he tells his story in bluegrass.

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Fleck started out in New York hearing Earl Scruggs for the first time, learning from Tony Trischka, and then making the decision to go (new) south to learn from J.D. Crowe. He auditioned for Bill Monroe, but eventually found ‘his people’ and joined New Grass Revival. He tells of mistakes the band made along the way, the hard decision to leave that band and start the Flecktones, recording with his hero Earl Scruggs, and how he found his way back to bluegrass after all. He also unveils the one change he thinks anyone can make to their practicing to become a better musician.

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones Forge Their Own Path

Posted on by Editor

What’s on Béla Fleck’s mind?

Balloons.

Just the day before, his Nashville house was filled with them, as well as with a few dozen kids. It was the 6th birthday of the eldest of two children of the three-finger-style banjo maestro and his clawhammer-style counterpart, frequent recording and touring partner and wife Abigail Washburn.

But the days surrounding this have also had a party vibe. He’s been in rehearsals with his cohorts in the beloved jazz-and-way-beyond Flecktones, in preparation for a tour marking the band’s 30th birthday.

Working again with harmonica player/pianist Howard Levy, bassist Victor Wooten, and the singular electro-acoustic percussionist known as Futureman (a.k.a. Wooten’s brother Roy), digging deep into their group catalog of complex flights of fancy mixing daredevil chops, musical depth, and persistent whimsy has been a blast.

“They’re the same guys they were when I first met them,” he says, speaking from home. “Curious, interested, ever-expanding, ever-pulling me with them. There’s a very special bond we have together. I’m realizing it more and more as years go by, one of the great relationships in our lives, musically and personally.”

They’re even pulling out such rarely played and decidedly difficult gems as “Jekyll and Hyde (and Ted and Alice)” from the band’s second album, 1991’s Flight of the Cosmic Hippo. It’s challenging and exciting, enlivening the qualities that made this alchemical combo of characters special from the very start. Futureman, he says, is an “empath and enabler — musical enabler, brings consciousness underneath you.” Victor Wooten too. Levy is “the crazy ideas on top. He’s the brains of the outfit.”

Fleck’s role? “Somehow I thought I was the heart of it, limiting it but making it more understandable for the common man — I was the common man in the band, surrounded by these crazy guys.”

But with a moment to reflect on their collective history and achievements, he finds descriptions of the magic they work together to be elusive.

This is where the balloons come in.

“It has to have heart, has to have melodies, some harmonies,” says Fleck, who turns 61 in July. “Couldn’t just be a groove or a shred-fest. That’s the power of the band. The tunes are strong, good things to pour everyone’s musical power into. Like a balloon. It’s an empty piece of rubber. But these tunes I’d written, we filled them up with Futureman and Victor and Howard — the balloons get real handsome. With the balloons at the party, it occurred to me that you fill them up and they become joyful. That’s what this music is.”

They’ll be sharing that joy on the road now, including two shows of particular import. This 30th anniversary tour began with a big “Friends and Family” kickoff May 30 at Red Rocks near Denver, the friends and family here including Washburn, saxophonist Jeff Coffin, Dobro genius Jerry Douglas, and the Colorado Symphony. And on June 8 they will be taking a cherished headlining slot at the Hollywood Bowl’s vaunted Playboy Jazz Festival.

The Playboy slot is, to Fleck, a particularly meaningful recognition.

“It’s one of the neat things to being around 30 years,” he says of that booking. “From the start I was begging to play it and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll put you on at noon’ and we’d play once every four years or so. Now we’re in the headlining slot and we’re legacy artists.”

Sure, the Flecktones have had several albums go to the top of the jazz sales and airplay charts and they have won two Grammy Awards for contemporary jazz album, with Outbound in 2000 and The Hidden Lands in 2006. And last year the band was given the prestigious Miles Davis Award by the Montreal International Jazz Festival. And Fleck has found himself partnering regularly on recordings and tours with some of the greats of jazz, one in particular in an ongoing partnership. “I’m playing with Chick Corea, which is ridiculous, on a regular basis,” he marvels, having just returned home from a tour with the ceaselessly groundbreaking pianist.

But, while belated acceptance in the jazz world is frustrating, he understands. See, banjo is pretty much standard in any jazz band… in 1919. In 2019, not so much. Even after 30 years of forging a path for banjo in modern jazz, Fleck remains singular. Asked about others doing anything comparable today, he’s kinda stumped.

He cites New Orleans’ veteran Don Vappie, but he’s generally in the mode of traditions going back to those earliest years of jazz. There’s Matt Davis, a converted jazz pianist who’s on the faculty of the University of Michigan. And there are others who use some jazz chops and sensibilities while not strictly playing that style of music, notably Tony Trischka, Noam Pikelny, Alison Brown, and Pat Cloud.

“But yeah,” he says. “They’re rare.”

Not to mention that the Flecktones as a whole is anything but standard jazz, with a truly eccentric approach and reach into a lot of styles. The 3-CD Little Worlds set from 2003 showed a boundless range that felt to some at once excitingly delightful and confounding.

On the other hand, not fitting in any category is par for the course for Fleck. He’s made a career of it, holding the record for the most categories in which he has been nominated for Grammys, 16 total. The most recent win is a best folk album trophy in 2016 for Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn.

He’s a charter member, he quips, of the “Modern American Attention Deficit Disorder Musicians.” There are really only two others he’d put in that association: Jerry Douglas (whose fusiony Jerry Douglas Band may be the only thing out there comparable to the Flecktones) and Chris Thile (who’s resumé runs from Nickel Creek to ongoing collaborations with classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma and jazz pianist Brad Mehldau).

There’s one side of his musical hexadecagon he’s underserved for a while now, though. Ironically, it’s the one that first brought him fame when he emerged as a precocious New York City musician in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

“On the bluegrass side, people go, ‘Whatever happened to Béla Fleck? He could have been a great bluegrass player.’” he says. “Someone told me he had heard that. That was when I was at the top of my game, selling out stadiums with the Flecktones on tour with the Dave Matthews Band.”

Well, it has been 20 years since his last true bluegrass album, the on-point-titled The Bluegrass Sessions. And the one before that, the breakthrough Drive, came in 1988, a year before the Flecktones genesis. Well, as it happens, Fleck has a new bluegrass album in the works with a cast of musicians including such longtime buddies as Douglas, mandolinist Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, bassist Mark Schatz and fiddler Stuart Duncan (all of whom were on the 1988 album) and a mix of fellow veteran stars (bassist Meyer, mandolinists David Grisman and Chris Thile) and relative newcomers (fiddlers Billy Contreras and Michael Cleveland, mandolinist Dominick Leslie, and guitarist Cody Kilby).

The timing? Just seemed right, he says.

“Now the years have gone by and I didn’t have a place for bluegrass to fit in,” he says. “But I had these tunes burning a hole in my pocket and thought I would really love to have a place for them. These sessions have been a knockout. These are hard tunes. And we’re having a blast. It’s as good as I’d hoped.”

The results will be out sometime next year. But first there’s this Flecktones balloon to float.

“One thing I will guarantee you is you will never hear anything else like it,” he says. “There is nothing else like the Flecktones in the world. I promise that. And I am very proud that were are that, and that we are back together.”