TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061190/0611440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 79

He's Finger-Pickin' Good


Bela Fleck takes the banjo from bluegrass into jazz and beyond

By JOHN ELSON -- With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles


    The Paganini, or maybe the Jimi Hendrix, of the five-string
banjo recalls the first time he heard that instrument. "I was
four or five years old," says Bela Fleck. "My brother and I
were on my grandparents' bed watching TV when The Beverly
Hillbillies came on. The theme music started, and I had no idea
it was the banjo. It was Earl Scruggs in his prime. I only
remember hearing something beautiful. It called out to me."

    And Bela answered. At 31, Fleck has surpassed the
semiretired Scruggs -- who, with guitarist Lester Flatt,
fronted the nation's best-known bluegrass band from 1948 until
1969 -- as a banjo virtuoso, taking this jangling folk
instrument into jazz, classical music and beyond. Three times
a Grammy nominee and a perennial winner of the Frets magazine
poll as banjoist of the year, Fleck now has a potential
crossover hit: a jazz-inflected album called Bela Fleck and the
Flecktones (Warner Bros.). Released in March, the album has
been bulleted on the jazz charts and has sold a respectable
55,000 units so far.

    To anyone who still thinks of the banjo as suitable only for
rippling accompaniment to high-pitched country harmonies, Bela
Fleck and the Flecktones is pure revelation. As a technician,
Fleck is hummingbird-fast, whether picking with three fingers,
Scruggs-style, or with the back-and-forth, thumb-and-forefinger
method pioneered by Don Reno. Yet his technique is always at
the service of a sophisticated musical imagination that can
make the instrument sound as if it were born to play jazz.
Unlike a guitar, a banjo cannot sustain a note for very long.
("Pop, ping,  and then it's gone," Fleck says.) Yet on his
ballad Sunset Road, Fleck creates an illusion of satiny, legato
plangency. If you want one word for the album, call it mellow.
Says Tony Trischka, his former teacher: "Bela Fleck is making
the banjo safe for mass consumption."

    Musically speaking, jazz banjo is a long way from where Bela
began. He was born in New York City. His mother was a public
school teacher. "I never met my father," Fleck says. "He taught
German for a living but was crazy about classical music. He
named me after Bela Bartok, the Hungarian composer. He named
my brother Ludwig after Beethoven. It was rough. The torture
started in kindergarten."

    Growing up, Bela fell in love with the Beatles, fooled
around with guitar and took up the banjo at 14, after seeing
the movie Deliverance, with its Dueling Banjos bluegrass theme.
"The sound of the banjo just killed me," he says. "It's like
hearing mercury."

    The instrument offered more than aesthetic satisfaction. "My
brother and I were overweight as kids," Fleck recalls. "So I
didn't have a great self-image, but I found this thing I could
do that made me feel good. I played banjo all the time and
stopped eating for satisfaction. I almost feel that I have a
deal with the banjo, that if I put the time in and take care
of it, I'll be thin and have something. And if I don't, part
of me is afraid it will all fall apart."

    Fleck attended Manhattan's High School of Music and Art,
where banjo was not considered a serious instrument. So he
studied privately, first with Erik Darling, onetime member of
the Weavers folk quartet, and eventually with Trischka, an
urban bluegrass whiz. Even then, Fleck was an eclectic, trying
to absorb everything from salsa to jazz. Especially jazz. "I
bought a Charlie Parker record, and I thought, "Wow! This is
incredible." I tried to learn Parker's licks on the banjo, but
I couldn't find the notes." One day, in a high school
jazz-appreciation class, the teacher played pianist Chick
Corea's Spain -- for Bela, another revelation. "It was just so
immediate. It was a light going on and a door opening for me."

    In 1979 Fleck moved to Lexington, Ky., to help start a group
called Spectrum. Exposure to bluegrass -- the real thing -- was
a "big culture shock," he admits. "I was a little cocky, but
down South, they didn't think I sounded so great because I
lacked tone and I didn't have a great sense of rhythm. They
were right." In 1981 Fleck moved to Nashville and joined the
group that would be his musical home for the next eight years:
the New Grass Revival, which played what Bela calls "high-tech
bluegrass with a lot of heart and intensity; the singing was
like R.-and-B. soul, like Motown."

    Television provided Fleck with the chance to escape what he
eventually felt were the Revival's constraints. Two years ago,
producers of the Lonesome Pine Specials asked him to do a solo
show. Bela Fleck and Guests began with the tux-clad banjoist
joining the Blair String Quartet in a four-movement classical
work by Fleck and composer Edgar Meyer. It ended with a jazz
section riffed by Bela and the trio that became the Flecktones:
Howard Levy on keyboards and harmonica, the brothers Victor and
Roy ("Future Man") Wooten on bass guitar and Drumitar (a guitar
wired to electric drums). Bela Fleck and Guests was one of the
series' most popular programs and led to the record album. "I
want to give people stuff they can move to and that is melodic,
and that is also complex and satisfying for us to play."

    Fleck can be as eloquent talking banjo as he is playing it.
"There are things I want to play that I haven't been able to
yet," he offers. "Like improvising. That can be a very
spiritual experience. Stuff you don't even know pours out. I
want to become more tuned into pulling off the notes I hear in
my head at the exact moment I hear them. It's a lifelong goal."
Stay tuned.