Before Béla Fleck, most people knew the banjo as an instrument confined to bluegrass, country and folk music. But Fleck’s virtuosic and groundbreaking performances have taken the banjo through every musical genre imaginable, including jazz, rock, world beat and classical. The 16-time Grammy Award winner has collaborated with legends like Chick Corea and Jerry Garcia, in addition to performing with symphony orchestras worldwide. Béla Fleck is on tour now for his new album, “My Bluegrass Heart,” which earned him the 2022 Best Bluegrass Album Grammy. He’ll perform at the Eastern in Atlanta on Aug. 27, and he joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom ahead of the show.
Interview highlights:
On a lifelong love affair with the banjo:
“When I first heard the banjo, I was at my grandparents’ house in Queens because I grew up in New York. And I heard this sound that just kind of shook me. I was like, ‘What is that?’ They were letting us watch TV, and ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ came on,” Fleck recounted. “Some people, it grabs them, and it turns him upside down, and some people hate it or could care less. I guess that’s true of anything.”
He said, “It took me a long time to get a banjo because I never thought I could play it. I didn’t think anybody could possibly play one. It sounded impossible. But I was banjo-aware from then on, and I always would look out for it any time it showed up. And then when I was, I guess, 13 or 14, ‘Dueling Banjos’ came out, the ‘Deliverance’ movie came out, and the banjo was saturating everybody. It was a number one pop hit. And that’s the point when my grandfather got me a banjo from a garage sale the day before I started high school. And then I just went crazy. I could not stop playing it once it was in my hands. I wasn’t concerned with whether I could do it; I just loved it.”
On chasing down authentic bluegrass from a New York jazz background:
“I moved down to Kentucky to try and get closer to the traditional sound, not the Yankee banjo sound, but the hardcore North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee kind of banjo point of view,” said Fleck. “There was a lot of great musical rules to learn from it about tone and taste and timing, and I tried to apply them to my more progressive music from then on. It was all about time, bluegrass time, feeling the rhythm a certain way, and the kind of sound people get out of their instruments.”
“It just made me do a lot of work on my playing to get up to snuff, to the level that these guys were at, and it was a different point of view than the New York point of view, which was almost a jazz perspective on playing the banjo and bluegrass. It was some wild, crazy music happening up there. So for me, it was about getting my basics together, my fundamentals together, and then when I could apply that later on to joining New Grass Revival or the Flecktones or even playing with orchestras.”
On Fleck’s highly collaborative new album “My Bluegrass Heart”:
“For me, the whole record is a community effort. It’s a connection with the people that I played with in the ’80s that are still some of my best friends and some of the greatest musicians on the planet — talking about Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and then connecting with a new generation of people that I really hadn’t played with, because I hadn’t been on the scene. I’d been off doing all these other things. So the people like Sierra [Hull], like Billy Strings, Chris Thiele. Guys like that, men and women like that that are just supremely talented, but we just haven’t gotten to play together. So it offers a lot of possibility because when you first meet somebody that you have a lot in common with, there are sparks.”
“Chick Corea, who was my hero… I actually got to play with him for many years there, near the end of his life, the last 15 years or so, I’m guessing. He had a record called ‘My Spanish Heart,’ And if you know Chick’s music at all, you assume he’s got a Latin component because he always has Latin music in his playing. The Latin folks love him … But when I got to know him, I discovered that he was actually an Italian guy from Chelsea, Massachusetts,” Fleck explained. “That struck me because I’m considered a bluegrass guy. Bluegrass informs everything I do, and yet I’m from the Upper West Side of New York City … I started thinking, ‘I wonder if ‘My Bluegrass Heart’ would be a good title.'”
Béla Fleck performs music from his new record “My Bluegrass Heart” at the Eastern in Atlanta on Aug. 27. Tickets and more information are available here.
