Béla Fleck unbreaks the circle with new pluck
By Donald Liebenson
Béla Fleck has not performed at Ravinia in 20 years. To put this in personal terms, this writer’s son was in fourth grade at the time; this fall, he is getting married. But absence does make the heart grow fonder.
“For sure, I love Ravinia,” Fleck said. “I always have played there with [my group] the Flecktones, once with Nickel Creek on the bill. This one should be a blast, with my dearest friends in bluegrass playing with me.”
For the June 24 reunion with the festival’s stage, those friends comprise a bluegrass dream team including 14-time Grammy-winning dobro master Jerry Douglas and three-time Grammy-winning mandolinist Sam Bush. They are touring together in support of Fleck’s first bluegrass album in two decades, My Bluegrass Heart. Released last September, it recently won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album.
The double-album My Bluegrass Heart forms a trilogy that began with Drive in 1988 and continued in 1991 with The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Volume 2. Why the long interim to return to his musical roots? “It was just time,” he said. “Life had been charging forward so fast, and the bluegrass portion of it wasn’t happening. It suddenly became a compulsion. Just needed to touch base with my community, I guess.”
Fleck has played a pivotal role in expanding that community. He is the world’s most popularly known and honored banjo player. He is the recipient of 15 Grammys, according to the Recording Academy’s website. He has recorded more than 50 studio albums in various configurations, including alongside his signature band, the Flecktones; his first bluegrass ensemble, the New Grass Revival; and his wife Abigail Washburn, herself a Grammy-winning banjo player.
And then there are the collaborations that have broadened the banjo’s horizons and, in the parlance of Star Trek, explored new life and civilizations for the ancient instrument. The banjo, with its roots in Africa and the Middle East was, in the first decades of the 20th century, the most popular instrument in America. Depending on your generation, it may be most associated with the Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In rural knock-off Hee Haw, Kermit the Frog strumming “The Rainbow Connection,” or comedian Steve Martin, who incorporated the banjo into his act (“Hey, he’s good,” his unctuous show biz persona joked).
The title of an episode of the 2019 PBS series Sound Field would seem to succinctly sum up Fleck’s musical mission statement: “It’s Time to Rethink the Banjo.” Fleck recorded and toured with jazz pianist Chick Corea (who died in 2021 and to whom My Bluegrass Heart is co-dedicated) and created a Grammy-winning classical album with bassist Edgar Meyer, Perpetual Motion. The 2008 documentary Throw Down Your Heart, directed by Fleck’s brother, Sascha Paladino, chronicles Fleck’s musical pilgrimage to Uganda, Tanzania, Gambia, and Mali to explore the instrument’s African roots and to make musical connections.
He credits his far-reaching explorations to his banjo teacher and eventual collaborator Tony Trischka, who, Fleck said, “boldly did everything first, before I was even on the scene. All I could do was mop up after what he pulled off!”
Fleck received his first banjo from his grandfather at the age of 15. What originally turned him on to the instrument’s primally powerful sound was Earl Scruggs, along with guitarist Lester Flatt, playing “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Another influence, he said, was the classic “Dueling Banjos” scene in the 1972 film, Deliverance.
Later on, he said, he discovered Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a seminal 1972 album in which the contemporary Nitty Gritty Dirt Band collaborated with country music’s elders, including Roy Acuff, Vassar Clements, Mother Maybelle Carter, and Scruggs.
“I did love that album,” Fleck said.
Like Circle, My Bluegrass Heart spans generations of musicians, from peers such as Douglas and Bush to next-generation virtuosos such as Chris Thile and rising instrumentalists such as mandolinist Sierra Hull and guitarists Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle. But Circle’s biggest influence on My Bluegrass Heart, Fleck said, was including the dialogue amongst the musicians between the tracks. “I did love that on Circle, and it probably did seed the idea,” he said.
Fleck and company finished recording My Bluegrass Heart “just under the wire, before the pandemic,” he said. “Everything was recorded, but nothing was completed. So, the pandemic gave me ample time to complete the project the way I intended it. Being at home, Abigail and our kids, gave us the opportunity to take the disaster and find silver linings. All the time together as a family was fabulous, and I could always go downstairs to my studio to be involved with my musical friends, albeit on tape. As time went on, I also collaborated with Chick Corea on some very special tracks; that we did virtually.”
My Bluegrass Heart is also dedicated to guitarist Tony Rice, Fleck’s mentor and collaborator, who died in 2020. Rice appeared on Drive and The Bluegrass Sessions. “Tony Rice was the Holy Grail, the guy I wanted to play with so badly,” Fleck said in a tribute he wrote for Tidal Magazine. “When it happened, it was even more than I expected.” He compared him with Scruggs in how he blazed new directions for his instrument: “When Tony came in and started playing flatpick guitar with such precision and feel, so rooted to the ancient sounds in a new way, he changed the whole ballgame for everyone.”
Artwork for Béla Fleck’s 2022 tour with Jerry Douglas and Sam Bush, representing each of their trademark instruments—banjo, dobro, and mandolin
The bluegrass community is one to which the native New Yorker felt like an outsider early in his career, he told NPR’s Fresh Air. This would prompt a later move to Kentucky, where he could shed the “Yankee banjo player” label. He has continued to shed labels in relation to the banjo. Did he face resistance early on from more traditionalist-bent audiences?
“I think Tony [Trischka] and Sam Bush took a lot of the heat before I was around,” he said. “By the time I arrived, folks were getting used to the idea that there would be people expanding bluegrass music. They may not have been happy about it, but they got over it.”
His bluegrass forebears, he added, perhaps had more of an issue with “that Yankee problem, being a New York City native. But it was not insurmountable, and when Kentuckian Sam Bush brought me into New Grass Revival in 1981, that really helped.”
All artists are works in progress. Is Fleck inspired in different ways playing with his elders, peers, and a new generation of bluegrass musicians? “I’m at the point where I have created my personal language,” he responded, “but I am looking for ways to continue to stretch and expand it, and apply it to new things. I am more comfortable now with being myself musically, and less tense about what will or won’t happen. I’ve also had more than my share of fortune musical experience and connections. So over all, I’d say I’m getting away with it!” ●
Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based entertainment writer. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Times, and on RogerEbert.com. The first Ravinia concert he attended without his parents was Procol Harum in 1970.