A tone of their own
ireland.com:80/newspaper/features/2000/0902/fea11.htm
By Stuart Nicholson
FUSION: There is no band quite like Béla
Fleck and the Flecktones. Jeff Coffin, the
band's tenor-saxophone star, often plays two
saxes simultaneously. Electric bassist Victor
Wootens greases the bottom with high-energy
funk lines while his brother, known as Future
Man, dresses in a Captain Hook costume and
looks for all the world as if he's playing a
guitar. In fact it's a Synth-Axe Drumitar, a
computerised drum machine with a startling
range of effects. Then there's Fleck, a
stunning virtuoso who plays - wait for it - the
banjo.
The music they make is beyond any kind of
category and while the banjo is its central
point, there are countless interlocking
internal styles, some familiar, some not, that
shape its direction. "The more ideas we bring
into our music, the more unique we become,"
Fleck says. "I love all kinds of music and I
don't see why we can't play them all, blend
them all into one thing, one music." It's a
musical manifesto that makes the word
`eclectic' appear narrow and limiting.
Combining jazz, bluegrass, funk, world
music and a whole lot else, it has brought the
Flecktones two Grammy Awards from 15
Grammy nominations, while last year they
topped the Critics Poll for "Best Electric
Band" in the Talent Deserving Wider
Recognition category of an influential
American jazz magazine.
This week sees the release Outbound, their
seventh album and first for record giant Sony.
In scale and ambition it exceeds anything
they've done before. "This record fits into the
context of us never wanting to make the same
record over and over again," Fleck laughs. "A
recording is a document of what we sound
like at a moment of time. But since we allow
people to tape our shows there's thousands of
documents out there with audiences taping
shows and trading tapes, so we wanted to
produce something people can't get during a
live gig, so we did what we had never done
before and got a lot of our friends to appear
on the album!"
Those friends include John Medeski (of the
group Medeski Martin & Wood), vocalist Jon
Anderson (of the group Yes), woodwind
player Paul McCandless (from the group
Oregon) and guitarist Adrian Belew. The
range of music the band covers is predictably
unpredictable, from the Word Beat of A
Moment So Close to the unreconstituted funk
lines that burst out of Scratch & Sniff to the
electric jazz of Zona Mona and Something
She Said. One of the album highlights is a
version of Aaron Copland's Hoedown that
never stops for breath. It's an
over-the-shoulder glance to where Fleck
began his career in music, "I was a roots
musician first - roots meaning bluegrass and
American folk - and I guess I'm the first
musician to come from folk music to jazz!"
During the 1980s Fleck was a bluegrass
legend, considered one of the greatest living
banjo players who was voted into Frets
magazine's "Gallery of Greats" at 26. Then he
crossed over into jazz. "I was in a progressive
bluegrass band called New Grass Revival," he
reflects. "I had won a lot of awards and many
people thought I was the top banjo player. So
when I went into jazz most people thought it
was unusual. Yet even though there's been
some pretty incredible banjo players,
technically excellent, none had gone all the
way - studied harmony, modes, Charlie
Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and do all
the stuff you need to do to play jazz.'
In 1989 he formed the Flecktones. "When I
put the group together I had the option for
form a 'jazz group', like a typical jazz group
with the banjo as lead instrument, or make a
group that was unique, more than just the
banjo in a jazz setting. I realised I could make
the music much more diverse and much more
reflective of the other kinds of music I loved
as well. The fact we were so unusual was
never a problem, in fact people like us
because what we do is so unusual!"
When the group started out, they had to
"build an audience from scratch". Part of
their success came on the American
"jamband" circuit, a phenomenon that has not
had much publicity this side of the Atlantic.
The Flecktones often open for groups like
Phish and Dave Mathews, who have plugged
into the underground following for the late
lamented Grateful Dead, which was wound
up in 1995 with the death of lead guitarist
Jerry Garcia. "Jam bands are more talented
than the average rock band because they really
want to develop their improvising," says
Fleck. "They don't come to it with a lot of
jazz knowledge but people are hungry for
something that's alive and different. Kids
come along and there's these incredible solos
and drumming going on and they're minds are
blown. There's nothing like it on the radio, or
MTV, where they're spoon-fed pop by the
mass media."
Fleck, who year in year out does around 200
gigs a year, is quick to point out the
Flecktones are not really a jam band. "We
have too much structure and form in our
music for that," he says. "But these kids really
enjoy improvisation, so you get jazz groups
on the circuit like Medeski Martin & Wood,
who are really a jam jazz band! Play and play
on one chord. But once audiences become
familiar with us, what we do, we're able to
benefit from the association with the jam
band scene. Audiences continue to check us
out and come to our shows, buy our albums.
We've gradually built this audience that's
bluegrass fans, funk fans, Grateful Dead fans,
jazz fans, jam band fans, and you look out
and the audience is really mixed - young, old,
different racial mixtures - which is very cool
and so very rewarding."
Outbound by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones
(Columbia 498921-2) has just been released. |
