Bela Fleck plays the banjo. He was named "Béla" after one of the most influential 20th century composers, the Hungarian ethnomusicologist Béla Bartok. And like Bartok, Fleck is a prodigy. For over four decades, he has pushed the limits of defining what a banjo can do. Since 2024 he's been playing in a trio with Edmar Castaneda, a Colombian savant harpist, and Mexican percussionist extraordinaire Antonio Sanchez.
The BEATrio brings an eclectic, fiery cocktail of sonic experimentations that highlight the highest caliber nuances of their instruments. BEATrio are playing April 26 at the Clyde Theater. WBOI's Cole Furlow sat down with Béla Fleck before his show.
Cole Furlow: Mr. Béla Fleck, thank you so much for joining me here on this interview. We are overjoyed you're going to be playing the Clyde. This version of your group now seems, if possible, even more interesting than anything you've done before. I'm so excited to see this with Mr. Castaneda as I've been a fan of the harp for a long time, and then the fact you add Mr. Sanchez in there, it seems like such a beautiful thing that you're doing right now. Can you speak to the trio?
Béla Fleck: Well thank you, Cole. It's nice to be here. Of course the first thing I always think of is Sweetwater when we talk about Fort Wayne, right? And I have to resist every impulse to go over there and buy everything that I don't need, and very little that I do. But they take really good care of musicians, and that's not a plug but just saying, I love coming up there.
Edmar is a phenomenon on the harp. Not only is he incredibly creative and intellectually complex, he plays with so much heart and so much - oh, I don't know what to even call it - verve? It's so much fun to watch him, because he loves it so much and when he plays. There's a lot to watch with harp playing. It's very, very visual, and he's very visual.
I'm more standing still when I'm playing, I'm hardly moving, so I'm glad someone's doing that so I can stand still.
Antonio is a phenomenal...obviously, an incredible soloist and with someone like Victor Wooten, the accompaniment skills are even higher. Everyone talks about Victor's incredible bass playing, but the way he makes you play when he supports you, the way he listens to you when you're doing your thing, really makes you want to play with people that make you play better. I feel Antonio is one of those guys who, maybe from his years of playing with Pat Metheny, he knows how to add just enough to get you excited and make a bed that's super comfortable for you to solo over and I find myself playing in ways that I don't expect when I play with these guys.
The other thing about this group is we're all percussionists. A banjo is very much a percussion, and so is the harp, so the three of us kind of agree about where we like the rhythm to be. It kind of pushes a bit, but not too much, and it's got a forward energy that gives a feeling of excitement for the listener and also for us.
Cole Furlow: I'm a musician myself, and definitely understand the qualities of a good backbone, having a rhythm section that's under you, that's driving you, that's actually surprising you in the moment sometimes, of how tight and in the cut that can be. I can see that you do find almost a new kind of exploration every single time you play with those cats. It's something about the solid form of it.
Béla Fleck: Yeah, and it's not that it's rigid. In fact, I would say someone like Antonio, or even when I think about Zakir Hussain, who I used to play with a lot, they're playing a lot of delicate stuff all the time and what that does is outlines what all the little inside rhythmic notes are doing. It's not just a bang, bang, bang. You could say well, that's solid, but is that inspiring? No. It's all of the fills, all the little, beautiful, little energetic moves that make the music breathe and feel like a living organism. So, Antonio doesn't lock it down in a militant kind of way, although his time is absolutely impeccable, it's a dance. We're all dancing together.
Cole Furlow: Does he like Dorothy Ashby?
Béla Fleck: I don't know, who's Dorothy Ashby?
Cole Furlow: Dorothy Ashby is a jazz harpist. She's kind of one of the more famous jazz harpist. She kind of took that... well, she's kind of like, you Mr. Fleck. She took this thing and went to a different type of genre with it. He undoubtedly knows about her.
Béla Fleck: I'm sure. Edmar is unique because he's building from a folk style, he's coming from the Colombian folkloric style. If people would ask me "what's unconscious for you?" well, bluegrass. I mean, I know it so well, it's so much in the basis of what I do, if you want to find common ground with me, we play some bluegrass tunes. Boom. There we are. Well, with him, I think his basic first love was the folkloric harp, which is very rhythmic. And we think of harp being very pretty - glissandos and Harpo marks - and very sort of, flamboyant in a certain way, but always very beautiful. He's much, much more complex than that. There's a lot of just raw energy and groove.
Cole Furlow: I saw a write up of one the shows, and it said he did everything but light the harp on fire during his performance. You know, I love that.
Béla Fleck: Yeah! I mean, he's just a very spontaneous, beautiful musician. It's a harp like you never heard it before.
Cole Furlow: He's also doing bass right?
Béla Fleck: He's the bass player, exactly. He has a cool trick he does where he splits the harp into two halves and sends half of it into a bass rig and cuts off the top of that half, and then the other side is like the full instrument. So that bass rig enhances the bass function of it even more and I've learned from playing with another good friend of mine, Edgar Meyer, because he solos with the bow, whenever he solos with the bass it usually drops out, and I've learned from him that that doesn't have to be a bad thing, because when it comes back in, it's so satisfying.
You've got to figure out how to cover so the bass, instead of being incessant or constant, is, I'm not going to say occasional, it's probably more than half of the time, but it serves a great function. Then you miss it, and then it comes back.
Cole Furlow: I haven't thought about it that way. So on that topic I wanted to ask you this. This is more, maybe even a selfish question, but very good one at that: Live Art. Live Art has, for lack of better word, a je ne sais quoi to it. The sound floor is unique in its own way, not just from the uniqueness of the tonal qualities going on, but in between songs, the little interludes, the way that even to Mr. Wooten's solo, that part of the record, there's so many little intricacies, and I don't know it's exactly kind of what you were just speaking of with Mr. Meyer, when things drop out and come back in, I don't know, can you speak to the je ne suis quoi? Was that on purpose? Because it's a live record, it does not feel all the way live, but it is live.
Béla Fleck: It is live. Yeah, it really was live, but it was culled from a lot of performances, right? But I guess what you're talking about is a sound signature, conceptual signature. And I feel like every record needs to have its own, just like every movie creates a world. Every great book creates a world. Every great piece of art creates a world. And music is no different. So you've got the instrumental signature of what are the instruments and the sonic signature about how you recorded it. I mean, that record was just recorded with the recording of the time, the digital recording that was possible through that time.
Cole Furlow: And it sounds like it's got a good digital quality to it
Béla Fleck: I was running the machines in the mixing part of it, I had a certain aesthetic I was looking for, and so it followed what I thought we were supposed to sound like when we were playing live. So, in other words, when you record digitally, maybe you don't have the room as much, so you have to add certain reverbs or certain effects to create the feeling of what was really going on, because really, you just have the notes. So that's that comes down to what the artistic part of producing, and I've gotten kind of good at it just because I can't afford to pay somebody to spend the kind of time I'm willing to spend on my records.
Cole Furlow: Well, no one knows what you want more than you do.
Béla Fleck: I don't even know what I want until I go through a long process of like, listening to it and suddenly changing things, leaving it alone for six months, maybe even years, and coming back to it and going, "Oh, now I know what I need to do," and I do that process and just like when I was playing with Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain and Rakesh Chaurasia, it's a different sonic world, both the instruments themselves create that world, and then the way we treated it on the record, or a duet with Chick Corea is a different sonic world. It's different rules of engagement. How are the influences going to interact with each other? And this group has its own sonic world. And I think that's what you're trying to do, is create these different worlds.
Cole Furlow: You've explored the banjo in so many different contexts, bluegrass and classical. Actually, one of my favorite times I saw you was in Oxford, Mississippi. You played solo and you played a bunch of Bach. It was amazing. It was you and you had your ribbon mic, and it was just the most beautiful night of banjo.
Béla Fleck: I love that fathead ribbon mic.
Cole Furlow: I thought it was a fathead
Béla Fleck: Gosh, they're like, not expensive, especially for solo. But if I tried to use that same mic in a group, it would just be mud but I get to have all that body because there's no other instruments to fight it.
Cole Furlow: But what I was going to say though, have you ever thought about making just a purely atmospheric, almost like an ambient record, almost like Brian Eno or Daniel Lanois with the banjo? I know you've kind of gone close to it, but have you ever thought about making just like a textural thing?
Béla Fleck: Yeah, I think I would love to do that sometime. I mean, I'd love to do like a hip hop, right? Things that occur to me, right? You know, but then I don't. I have to have enough passion to actually do it. That's right in time. I have a tendency to get excited about playing with other people a little bit more than some of the more produced records. But now, as I'm getting older, I think it'd be fun to check those boxes.
Cole Furlow: Do you ever sit back and just - this is something I think every musician wants to do but I think you have a different plight than most - do you ever sit back and are just so grateful for all the jam sessions and amazing musicians you played with?
Béla Fleck: I have the greatest job in the world because not only do I get to do something I love, I get to do it with the greatest musicians in the world that I revere. I've gotten a lot further than I ever thought I would, and I've had to redefine what and who I am, and what I need to do after achieving things I never expected to happen, but I feel like I owe it to all of those successes. And when I say success, I mean that I get to keep doing it like comedians say, if you're still working, you're a success, right?
Cole Furlow: Well, yeah, you're existing.
Béla Fleck: I feel like I'm so fortunate that I need to actually be as good as people are saying. I am. I have to do the work. I have to make sure I'm actually doing something new and making sure that it's idealistic and you know try to be good and thankful. You know, remember how lucky I am.
Cole Furlow: What was it like playing with Jerry Garcia?
Béla Fleck: Jerry Garcia, he was just very sweet the two or three times I got to be around him. The first time was opening for the Grateful Dead with new grass revival for our final concert, last day of 1989 and he came up to us and said "Hey, you guys are great. You should open for us more. "And we said, "Sorry, man, we're breaking up. Maybe, if we if you had said that a few years ago, maybe we wouldn't be breaking up. " And he said, "No, you'd still be breaking up."
Cole Furlow: That's incredible.
Béla Fleck: And then I got to play with David Grisman at Squaw Valley, at the Greek in San Francisco, Berkeley, and he got me out to play with him there and he was really very nice to me.
Cole Furlow: That's amazing.
Béla Fleck: He liked what I was doing with the banjo. He said, "Yeah, you're doing things I hadn't thought of", and I was like, well, that's pretty cool.
Cole Furlow: Are there any tonal qualities still with the banjo you're searching for? Back when I discovered you, my father showed me your music in the 90s, he used to describe your music as the banjo is like ringing a bell. I've always thought that that's such a subtle, nice way of describing just what you do, the delicacies, the chords, the modes. I just wonder, are you still discovering the banjo?
Béla Fleck: Still? Yeah. I mean, if you want to make me happy, just sit me in a quiet room with my banjo, and I just started looking around for sounds and registers and strings ringing into each other, and it still gets me excited. I love the instrument. I feel like the instrument tonally, is like, if there's wood, there's metal, there's like bone, it's like their skin. It's like, all of those are part of the sound, and one component is bell, right? Like, Oh, your banjo sounds like bells up the neck or whatever. Another component is wood, like a woody, rich chestnutt-y kind of sound that I like to go for, rather than the super bright, harsh quality. But that shouldn't always be bad either, there are times when that's appropriate to need to cut through something, or when the music is very intentionally abrasive or harsh, and intense that way, that can be very powerful too.
Cole Furlow: All right, I'm going to ask you one more question, and I'll let you go here. What's your favorite Beatles song?
Béla Fleck: Oh, not fair. Well, here's the thing. I'm the biggest Beatle fan in the world, and so at my banjo camp, which I do every year, this is going to be the Beatles year, and we're going to be doing a bunch of Beatles stuff. So we're going to do - we have 120 banjo players - and we're going to be doing arrangements of Beatles songs for 120 bands to play orchestra and one of the ones I really want to do is 'Because' and 'All You Need is Love' because I think that's going to sound wild with banjos into that song.
I love, you know, obviously the second side of Abbey Road is like one huge song, that whole record. I like the whole, every period of the Beatles music.
I'm always surprised, and I know part of it is because when you hear something again that's already imprinted on you, you're rediscovering something that's already in your brain and you say Oh, I recognize this. So it's not like hearing it the first time. It's a different experience. I have that experience so much with the Beatles. Of like, this is so good.... how can, how did they do this? And how did they grow so much in what was it? Seven years?
Cole Furlow: Seven years, I guess. I mean, if you consider Hamburg early, you know? I mean, I think that's the biggest thing with the Beatles, people forget they had this long, long period of time where they were working musicians. They were the jukebox for a lot of people that didn't want to care about who they were, they just wanted to hear the music. And I think that there's this nascent kind of forgettability when you listen to the Beatles now that, oh, wait, they weren't just four lads that just got together and started banging on this thing. They went and worked, you know, they did the work.
Béla Fleck: Well, they had that to fall back into, like instead of making record, when they started making records just in the studio, they knew what it was like to be a band on stage, and they brought that with them, even as they did all their experimentation and so forth. You know, it was ingrained in them to make a band sound.
Cole Furlow: Béla Fleck, thank you so much for doing this interview
Béla Fleck: my pleasure
Cole Furlow: We're going to listen to a little Béla Fleck right here, right now on 89.1
WBOI, thank you so much.
