2024-02-18 08:44:43
When the coronavirus pandemic began, someone told Béla Fleck that he should enjoy the forced break from touring. “That it’s an opportunity to be with family and realize what really matters. I realized how much I care about playing. That if I don’t spend part of the day with the banjo, I’m just not happy,” he stated.
The rediscovered passion for music was also evident from the trip that the world’s most famous banjo player now took to the Czech Republic. The winner of 17 Grammy awards performed twice, first this Thursday in Brno’s Sono Center and the day after in Prague’s Pyramida Hotel. Within 48 hours, he played four concerts with the band. They were all sold out long ago, and not only at the Brno evening, which lasted two hours, the ecstatic applause after each solo confirmed the feeling of an extraordinary event.
It was an event. The 65-year-old American, with a wide range from Indian music to jazz, returned to the bluegrass genre after two decades of experimentation and is touring the world with the project My Bluegrass Heart. The Grammy-winning 2021 double album came about after his son became seriously ill. “I suddenly felt the need to reconnect with the bluegrass community. I’ve been putting it off for a long time. But now I realize how unpredictable life is, that we all get older and the opportunities diminish,” Fleck described how the record was born in the shadow of the pandemic, his son’s illness, but also the deaths of friends: pianist Chick Corey and guitarist Tony Rice. He dedicated the recording to them.
He invited bluegrass stars to the studio, from seventy-five-year-old veteran Tony Trischka to younger talents Chris Thile and Billy Strings to musicians Sierra Hull or Molly Tuttle as a symbol that women are beginning to be seen in the formerly male genre.
From the recording, you can hear the musicians heckling each other, but different people perform in each song. On the contrary, Fleck went on tour with a group that had now arrived in the Czech Republic already assembled. The banjo takes a senior role in it alongside double bassist Mark Schatz, who has accompanied him since his debut in 1979. They are joined by thirty- and fifty-somethings: leading Nashville guitarist and studio player Bryan Sutton, who teaches thousands of students online, Justin Moses alternating dobro with violin, mandolinist Sierra Hull, known from a solo concert in Jablonec, and violinist Michael Cleveland. He deserves special attention.
It wasn’t about speed
Cleveland’s story remained unknown for a long time. The forty-three-year-old musician was born blind, completely deaf in one ear and only very hard of hearing in the other. “He didn’t talk about it for a long time. He didn’t want people to listen to him out of pity and know him as the blind boy with the violin,” explained his father, who took the six-week-old baby to bluegrass in a stroller.
Violinist Michael Cleveland is already a Grammy winner. | Photo: AFP / Profimedia.cz
The son fell in love with him, even though his path to him was thorny. Blind, he had difficulty learning the violin, and underwent three dozen surgical procedures in his teens. Today, Cleveland belongs to the top. A movie was made about him, he wins genre awards for violinist of the year, and he also impressed at the evening concert in Brno with his enormous talent, technical perfection and dizzying speed. It was inherent to all the performers, but it was never just about her. Not even in the most hectic composition, the instrumental Slippery Eel, where the musicians repeatedly interspersed composed passages with plenty of room for improvisation.
In mostly Fleck’s original songs, there was a spark between them all evening, as they exchanged ideas, passed the word and used strong melodies to maximum emotional effect with a perfect sense of rhythm. They worked amazingly with the dynamics. And they directly evoked euphoric states.
They played in a typical bluegrass lineup, but in a modern way. Within the framework of the compositions, they formed pairs several times, when they stood facing each other, momentarily connected by an idea or a rhythmic figure, corresponding or contradicting each other.
An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Moses had a dobro, a type of resophonic guitar, on his neck for most of the evening, but also formed a small fiddle section with Cleveland a few times. For example, in the cover version of Dark as the Night, Blue as the Day by one of the founders of bluegrass Bill Monroe, which was sung by Sierra Hull.
For variety, guitarist Sutton sang his song The Time Has Come appealing for unity in a divided society, Justin Moses with Sierra Hull then I’m On My Way Back To The Old Home again by Monroe.
The song Vertigo from the album My Bluegrass Heart, evoking vertigo from speed, was played by Béla Fleck at the first of two concerts in Brno. Photo: ČTK | Video: Renew Records
Bluegrass Promised Land
The most attention was attracted by Fleck playing the banjo with the so-called three-finger technique, i.e. with the rings on the thumb, index and middle finger of the right hand. This syncopated style was invented by genre pioneer Earl Scruggs, which Fleck builds on. But at the same time, in the spirit of his teacher Tony Trischka, he thinks differently musically, often developing a melody on one string, rather than continuously filling the space of arpeggios in sixteenth-note passages like Scruggs.
The return to bluegrass also has a practical side for the banjo player. When he gave a concert in 2007 in Prague’s Obecní dům with the famous jazz pianist Chick Corea, he played sitting down. Now he stands on the stage again the whole evening. However, not in the foreground, but symbolically alongside the others. In the same way, it does not usurp the space musically.
Fleck does not choose musicians next to whom he would stand out, but those who inspire him to an equal dialogue. In Brno, a particularly thorough one performed with Cleveland in a ten-minute version of the hit Big Country from the repertoire of his most famous band, the Flecktones. First he created a counterpoint for the violinist, then they played in unison, after which the banjo became a full-fledged second voice.
The excellent sound in the Sono Center and the audience contributed to the great atmosphere. From the opening track Strider, which alternated between a mournful theme and a cheerful rhythmic passage, the audience erupted into bursts of applause after each solo.
“We traveled all over Europe, but we were especially looking forward to seeing you, because we know how much you love bluegrass here,” Fleck thanked. After another round of applause, guitarist Sutton asked how many people in the hall were playing bluegrass – a few dozen hands went up. And mandolinist Sierra Hull finally gave someone credit for the New Grass Revival T-shirt that made Béla Fleck famous.
The banjista spent the entire 80s in this progressive group, which found connections between bluegrass and rock. It was here that he was discovered by local musicians such as Robert Křestťan or Luboš Malina, for whom Fleck later performed on a record, and the Czech banjoist in turn composed Song for Béla. Both of them and their teammates from the most famous domestic bluegrass band Druhá trava were in Brno this Thursday. Despite the efforts of the organizers of the concert, i.e. the Brno Jazzfest, they did not perform as guests of the Americans.
Fleck’s band started the second Brno concert with Strider, alternating a mournful motif with a cheerful rhythmic passage. Photo: ČTK | Video: Renew Records
The circle closed
That night showed just how far the New York native has come since the days of the New Grass Revival. Béla Fleck first expanded the boundaries of bluegrass, then connected it with jazz, fusion and funk in the band Flecktones.
In the new millennium, he went even further. He recorded an album with classic compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. He composed a concerto for banjo and orchestra. Working with African musicians, he recalled that the banjo came to the US on slave ships. That it was only in the New World that originally black rhythms met Irish songs and fiddles brought by whites from the old continent.
Even today, Fleck does not stop experimenting. Just this month, he received a Grammy for a part-Indian album, releasing Rhapsody in Blue to mark the 100th anniversary of George Gershwin’s famous composition. He faithfully played the first part of the Rhapsody in Blue adapted for banjo in Brno, including an imitation of the clarinet part – complete with an opening wail and a run through two octaves played with a sliding glissando technique.
Throughout her career, Béla Fleck has pursued a clear goal. As in the original version of Gershwin’s composition, the banjo remained buried deep in the rhythm section, this five-string instrument used to be seen as accompanying and traditional. Fleck emancipated him. He modernized. He’s freed himself from being associated with bluegrass. And he gradually used it in various constellations to demonstrate its potential.
As this led him further and further away from bluegrass, his return to his roots became all the more valuable. The first occurred in the late 80s with the album Drive, the second in 1999 with the recording The Bluegrass Sessions. Fleck’s role model, guitarist Tony Rice, also performed on both, whose death in 2020 contributed to the fact that the banjo player completed the “comeback trilogy” with the My Bluegrass Heart project. He recalled the context in Brno when he included compositions from both records, as well as the song Cold on the Shoulder played by Ric.
Musicians like Rice or Earl Scruggs, with whom the banjo recorded earlier records, are no longer alive. Just as the young Fleck admired them, now Michael Cleveland or Sierra Hull look up to him. So the circle closed. It’s just that together they already play bluegrass unbound by what came before, on the contrary, they push it further. Not even the banjo is the same. Thanks to Fleck, he knows no bounds today.
Concert
Béla Fleck: My Bluegrass Heart
(Organized by Jazzfest Brno)
Sono Centrum, Brno, February 15.