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by Seth Rogovoy
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Aug. 1, 1996 -- Every instrument has had its visionaries who have pushed it beyond all known limits. For the saxophone it was Charlie Parker. The piano had Thelonious Monk. Jimi Hendrix virtually reinvented the electric guitar.
What these musicians were to their instruments, Bela Fleck has been to the banjo. He has taken it from its fixed role as a lead instrument in the traditional bluegrass ensemble, restored it to its long-forgotten home in the jazz band, and by recognizing no limitations on its potential, transformed the way it is played and imagined.
What first drove Fleck to approach the banjo in a non-conventional fashion, however, may have been nothing more than the desire to fit in with his peers.
"I went to the Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Music and Art, which was in Harlem," said the native New Yorker, speaking in a recent phone interview from his current home in Nashville.
"I liked all the different kinds of music people there were doing, and I wanted to be part of things, yet I was stuck on this weird instrument," said Fleck, who performs with his trio, the Flecktones, and special guest Paul McCandless, on Saturday night at 8, at the National Music Center in Lenox.
"When I had my banjo and I was in front of the school, if I started playing bluegrass, which I did, people's arms would start flapping and they'd all start making yee-haw jokes," said Fleck. "But if I played Led Zeppelin stuff or Yes stuff people would get really impressed and then they'd think I was cool."
Who would have thought that at the root of Fleck's ground-breaking, new-acoustic fusion -- in which progressive bluegrass meets contemporary jazz -- was a simple case of peer pressure getting the best of a budding artist. But the one thing peer pressure was never able to do was to dissuade the young Fleck, who got his first banjo at age 15 in 1973, from sticking with his chosen instrument.
"Some people say banjo is an instrument you either love or hate," said Fleck. "For me I just instantly loved it. I couldn't put it down for days. I didn't want to go to sleep. I got up early to play it. I thought about it in my spare time. On the bus to school I was thinking about it. I was so excited to get home and play it again. I tried to play other instruments, but nothing else ever really caught on, nothing else called out to me that way."
It wasn't only a desire to win the approval of his peers that drove Fleck to experiment on his instrument. "I love very earthy music that has a lot of traditioanl elements, and I love complexity and being challenged and exploring," he said.
"The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and Chick Corea and bands like Yes, and bluegrass bands later on, they were all like superheroes to me. So even when I got my first banjo I was trying to bend blues notes and figure out jazz licks and blues licks, bringing ideas over to it from what I was hearing. And growing up in New York City, I couldn't exactly cop a real traditional attitude. It just wouldn't have been right."
Fleck points out the irony in that what people refer to as traditional bluegrass is in fact a relatively recent music. "Bluegrass really started in the '40s," he said. "So we're talking about a music that's really very young. So I don't think it's necessarily appropriate to be making finite rules about the way the music should go when it's so new. When you do that, you make the music into a classical form, where you have to obey certain rules or it's not that anymore."
The 38-year-old Fleck has been breaking rules professionally for nearly 20 years. He came to prominence, and began earning a string of seemingly endless Grammy nominations, with the New Grass Revival, a progressive bluegrass outfit, with whom he played from 1981 to 1988. Since 1989, he has performed with his own group, the Flecktones, which now includes bassist Victor Wooten and drummer/percussionist Future Man, each of whom are are at least as innovative on their instruments as Fleck.
Fleck has also enjoyed musical collaborations with the likes of Bruce Hornsby, Branford Marsalis, Chick Corea, Tony Rice, Phish, Garth Brooks, Amy Grant and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. McCandless, who is a member of the world jazz group Oregon, plays oboe, English horn, soprano sax, bass clarinet and pennywhistle, and has become a sort of unofficial fourth member of the Flecktones.
While Fleck is constantly thinking of new ways to expand his musical palette -- he'd like to perform with a symphony orchestra and has been collaborating with traditional musicians from around the world -- he still returns to traditional bluegrass whenever he can.
"It's like falling off a log for me, I feel so comfortable," he said. "Because playing jazz and new music and all the things we do in some way is a little bit of a strain. There's not a natural place in it for the banjo, so I'm always trying to find something, searching, trying, exploring different things.
"In bluegrass, I know exactly what you're supposed to do. So when I get to play bluegrass with great bluegrass musicians it's just such a joy. For me, what's best is some kind of balance between all the different kinds of music."
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 1, 1996. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1996. All rights reserved.]
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