Bela Fleck – Natural Bridge
Archive
Posted On May 1, 2000
Bela Fleck was a young man — just 24 — when he made Natural Bridge in 1982, but it wasn’t his first album, nor even his first solo album. Young though he was, the New York native was already something of a veteran. From virtually the beginning of his career, he was determined to do something new and different with the banjo, and it’s no accident that, like his earlier solo release Crossing The Tracks (1980), this title denoted movement from one place to another. Fleck was on a journey, and the album both acknowledged where he’d been and pointed in directions he’s been going ever since.
What we have here, then, is a sampler of sorts; all the tunes are originals, but they span a range of styles. While many are based on solid bluegrass rhythms (chopped upbeat chords from the mandolin are the biggest clue), the tunes push complex melodic figures and accents against the timing of the rhythm section. It’s a pleasing mixture, and though they’re scarcely traditional bluegrass numbers, cuts such as “Punchdrunk”, “Bitter Gap” and “Rocky Road” still unmistakably belong in the bluegrass category.
Not so with “Flexibility”, a pure jazz number, or the delicate banjo-dobro duet “Daybreak”, with its lovely interplay of unisons and harmonies. On these, the lilting “October Winds”, and the album’s piece de resistance, a nearly seven-minute-long “Natural Bridge Suite”, Fleck’s playing bears hardly a trace of the instrument’s rural origins and associations.
Others had been working in that New Acoustic Music (NAM) vein for a few years by the time Natural Bridge was released (several of them, including David Grisman, appear here), but the banjo rarely made an appearance in the realm until Fleck came along. Though the technical basics had been available for a long time (going back to Bobby Thompson and Bill Keith’s “melodic” stylings of the early 1960s), Fleck broke new ground by marrying a highly developed elaboration of theme to a musical sensibility that roamed way beyond the bounds of bluegrass. With an all-star cast keyed to the music itself — bluegrassers such as David Parmley are on hand for the bluegrass stuff, while NAM stalwarts such as Darol Anger tackle the more free-ranging material — Natural Bridge is a fine meeting place between two worlds.
