JOURNAL EXCERPT: The People and Moments That Have Propelled Béla Fleck

EDITOR’S NOTE: Below is an excerpt from a profile in our Summer 2024 journal issue of the issue’s guest editor, Béla Fleck. You can read the whole story — and much more — in that issue, here. And please consider supporting No Depression with a subscription to keep our roots music journalism, in print and online, going all year long.

A lot of people can trace their first exposure to the banjo to the opening theme of 1960s hit TV show The Beverly Hillbillies, and there’s no shame in that. “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” laying out the fictional Clampett family’s oil-fueled rags-to-riches story, was sung over music provided by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, with Scruggs delivering the banjo’s distinctive sound to living rooms across the land.

That sound got a lot of people’s attention, among them a young Béla Fleck.

“I think I was either 4 or 5 years old, and we were visiting my grandparents in Flushing, Queens, and to get rid of us they stuck us in the other room and let us watch television during the day. And on comes The Beverly Hillbillies,” Fleck, now 65, recalls.

As soon as the theme song kicked off, Fleck was mesmerized.

“Hey, did you hear that? Wasn’t that incredible?” he asked his big brother.

“I don’t know, what are you talking about?” his brother replied.

At the end of the show, the theme played again.

“There it is! There it is again! There’s that sound,” Fleck gushed. “Isn’t it amazing?”

“I don’t know,” his brother responded. “I guess it’s okay.”

And that, Fleck says, “was my first lesson in how banjo can reach out and grab one person, and the next person it leaves them completely unmoved.”

After hearing Scruggs’ three-finger picking on The Beverly Hillbillies, Fleck couldn’t get the banjo off his mind. But growing up in New York City, he didn’t encounter the instrument very often. He stayed quiet for years about his simmering passion because he didn’t consider the banjo something he’d ever be able to conquer.

“I didn’t think anyone could actually play it,” Fleck says, “because it was so impossible what I was hearing.”

But the banjo — and the impossible — became what Fleck does best. He helped find new frontiers in bluegrass in the 1980s with New Grass Revival, then formed The Flecktones to bend bluegrass into jazz. He delved into African music, a journey back to the banjo’s roots that was captured on a series of albums and in the 2008 documentary Throw Down Your Heart. And he launched recurring collaborations with a slew of standouts on other instruments, including bassist Edgar Meyer, tabla player Zakir Hussain, and jazz pianist Chick Corea.

Along the way, Fleck has won 18 Grammy awards spread across an astonishing array of categories, including bluegrass, world music, Latin, folk, jazz, and classical. That’s one way to understand the depth and breadth of his music. Another is to look back with him at a few key moments and people that have shaped his playing and figure prominently in his most recent work.

Flipping the Switch

Although Fleck sidelined his interest in banjo as a child, he did get a guitar and took lessons. “I was one of those half-ass guitar students who likes music but doesn’t want to do the work,” he admits.

But when he was 15, his grandfather surprised him with a banjo he’d found at a flea market. “I flipped out,” Fleck recalls. “I was like, “Oh my God, there’s one right there!”

He brought the instrument back home with him on the train, and a fellow passenger tuned it for him and gave him a quick lesson. “And from then on, I was just hooked,” Fleck says. “It was like flipping a switch.”

There was nothing half-ass about his approach to this instrument — “I became a very different person, a very obsessive person,” he says. “I couldn’t stop playing it. I was just transfixed by it.”

He’s followed that obsession ever since, letting the music guide him, paying no mind to genres or expectations. There are no straight lines in his musical story. It has moved more like ripples expanding outward from multiple points of inspiration.

His latest project, Remembrance, is an homage to his long musical and personal friendship with Chick Corea, who died in 2021. Released in May, Remembrance compiles recordings from a tour they did together in 2019, as well as songs that took shape via audio files they traded during the pandemic lockdown.

Chick Corea and Béla Fleck (photo by C. Taylor Crothers)

Fleck first encountered Corea’s music in high school, about a year after he’d started playing banjo. The teacher in his jazz appreciation class put on a recording of “Spain” and warned the class “you’ll hear something a little different.” What stood out to Fleck was that the song “moved in a different way” from other jazz pieces he’d heard, with shorter rhythmic lines that seemed like they might just be possible on a banjo.

“It sort of opened a door in my mind to how banjo could fit into jazz,” Fleck says. “ … It grooved in a different way than I expected, and I could relate it to bluegrass almost immediately. There was something about it that spoke to me the same way Earl Scruggs spoke to me, when I listened to Chick Corea play. I had to stop in my tracks and listen to what he was doing.”

Fleck started attending Corea’s concerts in high school and even wrote him a fan letter. Corea’s music had a profound impact on Fleck’s playing, pushing rhythm to the forefront of his approach. “I think as a banjo player, I’m a percussionist,” Fleck says.

After years of run-ins at parties and festivals, and a few guest contributions on each other’s albums, Fleck and Corea decided to record an album of their own. The Enchantment, released in 2007, won a Latin Grammy and was the basis of a world tour that would add an enduring friendship to their musical collaboration. “He was always my hero, but we got to be human beings as well,” Fleck says, “and it was a wonderful, unexpected turn of events.”

Waxing Rhapsodic

The release of Remembrance came just a couple months after another project close to Fleck’s heart, a meticulous arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for banjo.

Released 100 years to the day of Rhapsody’s premiere in New York City, Fleck’s Rhapsody in Blue album offers three variations: The original score, here played by the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and with banjo subbed in for piano; “Rhapsody in Blue(grass),” featuring fellow bluegrass virtuosos Michael Cleveland on fiddle, Sierra Hull on mandolin, Justin Moses on dobro, Mark Schatz on bass, and Bryan Sutton on guitar; and “Rhapsody in Blue(s)” with mandolin player Sam Bush, dobro player Jerry Douglas, and bassist (and Flecktone) Victor Wooten.

Béla Fleck (photo by Hazel Coonagh)

Gershwin’s Rhapsody made its way into Fleck’s heart and mind not long after he first heard Earl Scruggs’ banjo on TV, and it had a similar impact. He saw the movie Rhapsody in Blue, a 1945 film about Gershwin’s life and music, with his uncle in a theater that showed old movies. His uncle was a giant Gershwin fan, and Fleck, in that theater, immediately understood why. “I got indoctrinated. I drank the Kool-Aid,” he recalls with a laugh. “I loved that movie, and I loved that piece from then on.”

But it was just a piece to savor listening to, not to play, he figured. After all, how in the world would someone go about translating a piece for full orchestra, led by a piano’s 88 keys, to a banjo’s five strings, and that pianist’s 10 fingers to a banjo player’s use of three?

It turns out, all Fleck needed to figure out that impossible question was time. And he finally had some during the pandemic.

“There are other things I’ve come back to over the years that I didn’t think were possible that eventually did become possible at a later point in my development. So I came back to it during the pandemic, just sort of sniffing it out,” he says. “… I started working out a measure at time, seeing, ‘Is there any way I could make this work on the banjo?’ Honestly, I had my doubts. It was more just something to do, just a bucket-list question mark that I wanted to get off the list or get to it. But as I went along, I found that there was no measure I couldn’t find a solution to, and I’d go through lots and lots of drafts, but eventually I’d find something.”

Measure by measure, phrase by phrase, he kept at it, and booked a few dates to perform his version live, including a debut with the Nashville Symphony last September. While the piece was still in his mind and in his hands, he decided to record it, but he wanted to time the release to coincide with Rhapsody’s 100th anniversary the following February — a short turnaround for any recording, let alone one so ambitious. And he needed something to supplement the 18-minute classical adaptation. Thus the “Blue(s)” and “Blue(grass)” takes. “Rhapsody in Blue(grass) came to mind as kind of a really bad idea that wouldn’t go away,” he quips.

But the more he worked on it, the more it made sense. He first brought in Sutton, who added a Tony Rice-inspired rhythm with his guitar that unlocked the rest of the arrangement. Amid a tour for My Bluegrass Heart, his 2021 album returning to his bluegrass roots, Hull, Moses, Schatz, and Cleveland worked out their parts quickly, and the piece fell into “a unique place,” Fleck says. Rather than copying the orchestral version, it added something new to the conversation: “All of a sudden it became very clear that a great version was possible with that band.”

Once again, an impossible task — translating Rhapsody for banjo, let alone three different ways — became possible. And with that particular bucket-list question mark turned into a check mark, Fleck is freed to reach for the next impossible goal that catches his ear.

From the Heart

While Fleck’s collaborations have bridged genres and instruments, his most meaningful pairing is with a fellow banjo player: his wife, Abigail Washburn.

After playing together in Sparrow Quartet, which blended old-time and Chinese musical traditions in the mid-aughts, and marrying in 2009, Fleck and Washburn finally performed and recorded as a duo after their first of two sons was born a little over a decade ago. It was a way for them to tour and record together, to sync their schedules and work around their newly expanded family life. But it worked musically, too. Fleck’s virtuosic playing and Washburn’s soulful clawhammer style and vocals blended into a fresh take on traditional music, one that was rewarded with a Best Folk Album Grammy for their 2014 self-titled debut. They released a follow-up album, Echo in the Valley, in 2017.

Playing as a duo with Washburn, Fleck says, “was a whole new influence, and the influence was about heart. It’s like, ‘What are you trying to say? How can you use your abilities to serve these songs?’”

He still tours frequently with Washburn, with audiences often in stitches over the folksy, familial humor they dish up between songs. But even when he’s touring with other configurations, her emphasis on heart stays with him.

“I find that musicality is more important to me than technical virtuosity at this point, even though it’s very important for me to play as well as I can, and I don’t want to lose my edge, and I want to be able to do the things I’ve been able to do, and I want to be better at new things,” Fleck explains. “That’s all got to be in the service of a piece of music or a feeling or a soul that matters, or it’s just throwing your fingers around.”