Fleck’s reputation as an innovative, technically impeccable, super-high-energy three-finger player was cemented during nearly a decade of wowing bluegrass festivals and recording successful albums with the New Grass Revival. By the time the ensemble broke up in 1989, he had already formed his own band, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, with brothers Victor and Roy “Future Man” Wooten and Howard Levy, none of them identifying as a bluegrass musician. The Flecktones took Fleck’s music – by now dubbed “spacegrass” – to a whole new level of virtuosic weirdness and provided a broad canvas for his burgeoning gift for composition.
Even if you think that you’ve never intentionally listened to the Flecktones, you’ve probably heard them. Their second album, Flight of the Cosmic Hippo, reached Number One on Billboard’s chart of Top Contemporary Jazz Albums. Nearly exclusively instrumental and sounding like no one else on Earth, their cuts get sampled everywhere. NPR in particular loves to use them as filler between news stories: Anytime a religious leader gets involved in some sort of newsworthy scandal, you can bet that the coverage on All Things Considered will be followed up by a clip from Fleck’s goofily ominous “The Sinister Minister.”
After several personnel changes cycling back to their original lineup, the Flecktones are still pumping out the stuff, but Fleck has simultaneously paired off with a Who’s Who of collaborators in a bewildering variety of musical genres for short-term projects. The great classical/bluegrass bassist Edgar Meyer is a frequent partner, and in the past decade Fleck has increasingly worked with world-music stars like Malien kora master Toumani Diabaté and Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain.
Recent projects include an acoustic jazz fusion “super session” with Jean-Luc Ponty and Stanley Clarke, and a return to a more traditional bluegrass sound in the Sparrow Quartet. The latter is tinged with surprising Asian accents provided by Fleck’s wife, Abigail Washburn, a clawhammer banjoist who traveled widely in China following the 2008 earthquake and now incorporates elements of Chinese folk music into her playing. Fleck’s classical arrangements and compositions for three-finger banjo are also starting to be taken very seriously: A recording of The Impostor, a banjo concerto that he wrote on commission for the Nashville Symphony, along with a quintet for banjo and string quartet, has just been released on Deutsche Grammophon.
Béla Fleck’s gig this Sunday at Opus 40 will be a duo banjo performance with Washburn: not the outer limits of the musical space that he often explores, but it’ll be interesting to hear how the unusual configuration of clawhammer and three-finger banjo can work together in harmony – or creatively deliberate dissonance, perhaps. Let’s just hope that the recent repairs to Harvey Fite’s monumental earthwork don’t shiver apart again under the influence of Fleck’s pandimensional harmonics.
The gates open at 3 p.m. and the concert is scheduled to run until 7:30, with Mike + Ruthy and Elijah & the Moon as opening acts. The cost of admission is $45 general, $75 for the VIP package. For tickets call (845) 246-3400 or visit www.opus40.org/events/bela-fleck.
Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn in concert, Sunday, September 1, 3-7:30 p.m., $45/$75, Opus 40 Sculpture Park, 50 Fite Road, Saugerties; (845) 246-3400, www.opus40.org.
