Photo: Alan Messer
Béla Fleck - My Bluegrass Heart Band
Béla Fleck - My Bluegrass Heart Band
Ever since he started performing in 1973, banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck has found unbridled joy in pushing his sonic limits no matter what genre caught his interest. He’s dabbled in genres such as bluegrass, country, Pop, jazz, instrumental music, classical and world music, always seeking to push the boundaries of genre with his skillful prowess. While he enjoys doing all kinds of music on banjo, bluegrass—the style he began his career with—has a particularly special place in his heart.
“I’ve been a bluegrass musician since I started in 1973, started playing the banjo,” says Fleck. “And I keep touching base with it even though I love doing all kinds of music on the banjo.”
Recently, he returned to his roots with his newly released all-star album My Bluegrass Heart. “At some point you got to go back once in a while,” he says. “And what's fun about coming back after a long absence is I have a lot of new ideas from being away. ‘What if I tried this? What if I tried that?’”
It also gave him an excuse to perform with some of bluegrass’ finest. He assembled a top-notch backing band (most of whom he’s played on and off with since the ‘80s) featuring mandolinist Sam Bush, fiddler Stuart Duncan, dobro player Jerry Douglas, bassist Edgar Meyer, and guitarist Bryan Sutton. The album’s songs are further enriched by a number of guest musicians, including Chris Thile, Michael Cleveland, Sierra Hull, Billy Strings, Justin Moses, Mark Schatz, and Molly Tuttle.
“The other great thing about this project for me is getting to play with all the great musicians that I always used to play with, sort of the superstars of this world,” says Fleck. “But also with the new people, the people that come along in the many years since my last bluegrass album. All these people have ripened. These young kids have turned into grownups with great musical points of view. So, I'm getting to experience a new kind of a musical, a new kind of a bluegrass community.”
He's excited to bring the band, which he calls his dream team, on tour—his first bluegrass tour in 24 years—including a stop Monday at the Riverside Theater. For Fleck, it’s special playing with musicians who are all band leaders and have “changed their instrument from what it was before they came to it.”
“When you talk about someone like Edgar Meyer, who plays the bass the way he does, it just hadn’t been done before he showed up and nobody's done it since. And the same is true for everyone else in the band,” he says. “We’ve all somehow turned into the old guys, but there’s something we have that the younger guys don't have and a certain rootedness and a sound that everyone gets out of their instruments and a sort of a primary power that these cats have.”
“And so, although we’re going to be playing music from my record, it's really a celebration of bluegrass in general and the level that all of these guys play on.”
Prior to his performance, the Shepherd Express caught up with Fleck to talk about his return to bluegrass.
How are things going for you?
It's pretty good. I'm teaching one of my kids how to play Let It Be on the piano this morning. So, how my day started. Could've been worse, for sure.
Yeah, it's sweet. He said he doesn't like for me to show him stuff, he wants to be the boss, he wants to do everything. “OK, but I got to show you. You got to stop and let me show you.”
But it’s different than working with musicians, having kids. You can't just tell musicians what’s up. Huh, I guess you can't tell kids what's up either.
I imagine it’s exciting to still be able to find inspiration from bluegrass all these years later.
It is! I’ve always loved it. There's something about being in a bluegrass band that's like being on a basketball team. It’s a real team sport and you really have to listen to each other very, very well. And you respond in real time and provoke each other to do things they wouldn’t do. And this particular group of people, we’ve been playing together since I guess the mid-1980s in one way or another. And it’s really a band, this is kind of one of the great bands of this community. But we've never actually been a full-time band, it’s always been something we got together and did once in a while. And the last time we did it was in 1999 when I made an album called Bluegrass Sessions, and we went around the country with this group essentially, except with a different bass player, with Mark Schatz.
And we played all these great big concert halls all around the country, sold everything out, we discovered people actually loved hearing us as a group. People knew us all separately, like I have my own band, The Flecktones; Sam Bush has his band; Jerry Douglas has been playing with Alison Krauss now for many, many years, but he has his own great bands; Stuart Duncan's one of the great session players of all time and also has been in a lot of great bands; Bryan Sutton, same thing, they make their own music, but they’re the top call. And always, anytime you hear great recordings featuring acoustic instruments, it's them.
And then if your Meyers, just kind of redefine the bass and then plays with the bow, but he's a classical genius, he’s a MacArthur-prize winner. And yet, he loves bluegrass. If he came from Tennessee and before he became kind of the classical god of the bass, he was exposed to bluegrass and he thought it was special and cool. And maybe in the way that someone like Béla Bartók loved folk music in Hungary and considered it an inspiration for his classical writing, Edgar has been that way in his music. So having Edgar in this team is kind of the icing on the cake.
Since the ‘80s all of us have known each other. So, it’s a homecoming, but it's also a kind of an event in that world to have this group together in one place at all, it's amazing.
Your experience working in other styles helped give you more ideas with what you could do with bluegrass. Why is it important to keep an open mind with that?
Let me put it this way, guys like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane brought ideas from classical music into jazz and changed it in a positive way, giving it a lot of new elements. And I always thought I should try to do that in bluegrass. Some people will say, “Oh, I liked it better before.” And some people will say, “Well, I like both.” And some people will say, “I like this new stuff.” You can’t make your musical decisions based on what you think people are going to think, you just have to go explore and see what you come up with. And you might not even like them all yourself.
Exploring is part of human nature and I think musically, it’s actually a lot of fun. And a lot of our audience that tends to follow all of us guys really enjoy that. They want to see what we’re going to come up with next. And yet, there is that bluegrass community that wants to hear these people that have played that music for decade after decade, that are sort of the front row people, they want to hear us do that too. So, we want to do all of that on this show.
But just to come back to it, I think music can be stagnant if it doesn't draw from outside of its world. So, it just gets very inbred; it stays strictly within its idiom. And I think it doesn’t take much to joke a little bit. For instance, if you're playing bluegrass and you fall in love with flamenco music and you just find one little element of flamenco music could go into bluegrass, it might change the whole form a little bit. It just gives everybody something new to chew on and everyone will start reacting to that little idea differently. It doesn’t mean you have to turn it into flamenco music, it's just you get a little influence, a little idea. And all of a sudden, everything is just a little different and everything is lively and alive again.
So, I feel like what I learned from classical music and world music, African music, jazz, all makes my bluegrass better.
What was one song that surprised you with how the arrangement turned out?
“Our Little Secret,” which was originally written for a classical string orchestra. And I decided to see what would happen if I taught it to a bluegrass band. A very complex piece with a lot of specific parts for people to play. It’s not like we're just going to play the tune, but like, “No, you got to play this. You got to play this. This is alternating with another set of notes. There’s harmony. There's dissonance.” I was just surprised how natural it sounded on the bluegrass instruments. It was like a new orchestration idea, really.
And I’ve learned to never underestimate musicians from the bluegrass world. But sometimes you think, “OK, I got to make it fit that world.” The truth is they can play anything, and they might make it sound really special.
I wasn’t surprised at how good everybody was going to play the bluegrass, but I was occasionally surprised by how well people took some of my more esoteric ideas and made them sound very rooted.
Michael Cleveland is an incredible fiddle player. What was it like getting to work with him?
Oh, he’s a killer. Yeah, I think he's on five or maybe even six of the tracks, and he did the whole first tour with me and he was just a gem. And I remember hearing about him and thinking, “Oh, he's just a straight bluegrass guy,” which I loved, but I’m amazed by him. But I didn’t see us playing together. But then I met him and started talking to him and he said, “I’d love to try some of your music sometime.” I was a little bit surprised.
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And then I have a friend up in Louisville where he’s often in the community up there. And this friend of mine said, “Hey, that Michael Cleveland guy, he’s one of you guys.” And when he meant "He’s one of you guys,” he meant somebody like me and Sam and Jerry and Stuart and Bryan, somebody that is exploring the corners and shouldn’t be typecast as only one thing. Sierra Hull is the same thing, she’s one of us guys. So is Molly. So are all the people on this record. They love the tradition, but they're also looking for the edges, but they play it with a certain truth. And that's really special.
What was it like working with the fantastic young guitarist Billy Strings?
Everybody wants to talk about Billy, because he’s been such a new breath of fresh air in the community and is bringing the music to a whole new pile of people that, just like Billy Strings, it's not that they really necessarily knew bluegrass before, they just like him, he's just got something.
And Alison Krauss did a lot of that, and so did Chris Bailey, did a lot of that for the community where they brought the music to a whole new audience. And bluegrass needs that every few years. And I did that too, by doing the Flecktones for all these years brought the banjo to a whole new audience. And a lot of them followed me when I went back to bluegrass in the late ‘90s, and I’m hoping we'll see a lot of those folks here too. It’s just good to have a wide variety of people out there and in the audience.
He also draws upon a lot of different influences besides bluegrass. It must have been exciting to play with like-minded musicians like him.
Exactly. If you’ve got the foundation in common, you can go way up on the roof and nobody's going to fall off. I love playing with people that have that bluegrass roots but are certainly way up in the trees trying stuff as well.
It must've been a rewarding challenge working with all kinds of people for this album.
Yeah, it was. This band that is coming to the state is pretty much the original band that I started working with in the ‘80s. At the time it was Tony Rice on guitar, he's passed away since. But Stuart Duncan, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, and myself, we're all the guys that played on the Drive album that I made 1988, Bluegrass Sessions in 1999. And it's just a community, it’s a family and everybody’s just excelled through their whole careers. But we don't all get to play bluegrass very often and come together in a group like this. So, it’s going to be a lot of fun.
You’ve said that you used the traditional structure of a bluegrass band and built onto that. Can you explain what you meant?
I could have decided to make a traditional bluegrass record, but I don't really think that's my strongest suit. Maybe someday I'll decide I want to do that, but it's been done so well. And to me, everybody should bring something of their own personality to their music, otherwise there's no real point.
I also feel that creating music should never be about fear. It doesn't go as well if the creation is fear-based like, “Oh, I’m afraid what people are going to think,” or “It’s not going to be bluegrass enough,” or “It’s going to be too progressive,” or “It’s going to be not progressive enough,” or “It’s going to be ....”
Whatever you come up with, that’s just not the way to make art. And I know it's presumptuous to call it art, but that’s what we're shooting for. Whether it becomes art is actually up to the audience to decide.
But we’re trying to make something meaningful and representative of personalities as people in the world. And we’ve only got our certain time here and let’s do something that makes some kind of impact that shows ourselves. So anyway, all of these people have been doing that their whole lives. They’re all idealists, great team players, creative sparks that have changed the nature of how their instruments are thought of and wonderful people, good old dear friends. So, once again, couldn't ask for a better bunch of guys to go out on tour with.
When did you mostly record the album?
It was all recorded before the pandemic hit. And I just recorded all this stuff and I just put it away; I didn't even finish it … I work up some new music and we would have a new recording session with rehearsing play. So, it didn't all happen in just a couple of weeks, it happened over the course of six or eight months. And then, again, I didn't finish it, we just recorded a bunch of takes. We all knew we had gotten something really good. And then during the pandemic, I got to go through it, pick all the best stuff and put the record together from all of our sessions.
Do you think that the time off really shaped how the album turned out?
I had more time to take my time with it, because I knew I wasn't going to be touring for a while. It wasn't like I had to rush through it. I really got a chance to get to know the music we recorded and make decisions about what I thought was the best stuff, really mull it over. And then I got to mix it. Typically, I would have maybe got some great engineer to come in and mix it, but I couldn’t have anybody coming in and out with my kids unvaccinated. So, I just did it myself and I enjoyed that process. It's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. The only bummer about engineering and mixing and editing is that you don't play the banjo.
So, when it came time to start touring again, it took a little bit of work to get my hands back up to pre-pandemic speeds and things like that. But it’s back now and I know it's going to be strong by the time we've been out for a few days with this band. These guys, once you played a few days with them, you play very differently. I’m looking forward to feeling that as well.
What does it mean to have made an impact on young musicians?
It’s a validation … The nature of the bluegrass community is that people of all different generations interact with each other. And so, I’ve seen a lot of the people that I looked up to become my peers and friends. In fact, I was always the young one when I was playing with Sam and Jerry, they were a little older than me, and so I always looked up to them because I was listening to them before I was really any good on the banjo, I was big fans of theirs. And then Stuart came along after me. So, whether he likes it or not, I’m an older guy to him. He grew up with me already around doing my thing and it had influence on him.
And then people like David Grisman and Tony Trischka, who were both mentor people for me, they’ve been around well before me. But yet I could interact with them and be friends and play music with them. They could be heroes and also peers. So, I understand the syndrome. And now, as it applies to me, now that I’m in my sixties and I see people like Billy Strings, or Chris Bailey, or Sierra Hull, or Michael Cleveland who know me as someone who's always been around, and they’ve always known about my music, kind of, since they started playing. They're going to look at me the way I looked at Tony Trischka and Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas and David Grisman.
The song by Joni Mitchell called “The Circle Game” is a song about the world spinning around and every year going by until your time is done, and you just keep changing positions as the years go by. First year, the kid that’s interested and you’re learning to play, that's your heroes. And then you find your peer group and then life goes on and some of the people that you were crazy about, they move on, they pass along like Earl Scruggs has and Tony Rice have, and Chick Corea have for me. And all of a sudden, now you’re one of the older guys. You don't even feel that different. And now there's all these younger people coming up beneath you and you're seeing. So, it’s just a constant changing of position.
And I guess also being a parent, there's a lot of that too, where you get to experience childhood from the parent's side and it's in a way it answers a lot of questions that you had when you were younger. When you get to be a parent, you get to see why a lot of choices are made and how hard it is to do things the way you wish you could see them done as a child. I think in the music world, it's the same thing. You might be critical, or you might have people that you love or people that you don’t like, and as the years go by, you start to discover a lot more about their motivations and why they’re who they are. And that’s sort of a beautiful thing about being part of a community. And we've seen people over and over and getting to know their music really, really well.
So, I know, once again, I just feel fortunate that this is part of my world. I live in a lot of different worlds. This is the world that I most come from and that I have the biggest community sense of. I work in the classical music world, but I wouldn't say that's my community. I work in the jazz world, and I have some community there, but I don’t, I wouldn't say those are my people. But in the bluegrass world, for some bizarre reason, even though I’m from New York City and fell in love with the banjo, this bluegrass world ended up being my world.
So anyway, it's good to touch base with it and try to contribute to it and pull this great band together to go out and play together, that's going to be good for it, for all of us, and also, I think good for a lot of people to get to see.
Bela Fleck performs at the Riverside Theater on Monday, Nov. 29.
