Bela Fleck

Interview by Bill Evans

"Do you want to get some coffee?" asked a smiling, slightly bleary-eyed Bela Fleck on an early Sunday May afternoon in San Francisco's Japantown. No more than twelve hours before, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones played before two sold-out houses at the Great American Music Hall, one of the Bay Area's most prestigious concert venues. No more than eight hours later, they would do it again. You can't blame Bela for wanting a caffeine fix now and then. The Flecktones' tour schedule this year has been steady and constant, with the band playing high profile shows such as the Texaco Jazz Festival in New York City as well as the Telluride and Winterhawk Bluegrass Festivals. With the June release "Left Of Cool" (Warner Brothers 9 46896-2), the band's sixth Warner Brothers recording and the Flecktones' first studio release in five years, the general pace of things has heightened. Between the traveling, the sound checks and the actual concerts themselves, Bela spends time conducting phone interviews, meeting with such folks as record company representatives and set designers, and keeping in constant touch with management and home. Following the San Francisco dates, Bela was due to fly down to the Los Angeles area to perform with the Dave Matthews Band on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. There's no question that this is all outrageous stuff for a banjo player and one gets the sense after being around Bela for just a short time that this fact is never lost on him. For this afternoon, he's the calm in the center of the storm: relaxed, affable and extremely articulate about his music, his career and life. Quite a lot has happened to Bela Fleck since BNL last checked in with him in the May 1995 issue. "Live Art," the double CD release from 1996 received a Best Pop Instrumental Grammy award for the slinky Flecktone favorite Sinister Minister. Bela has continued to lend his voice to a variety of collaborative projects, most notably the world music project "Tabula Rasa" and the Dave Matthews Band's "Before These Crowded Streets." The first single from this recording, Don't Drink The Water, is at the top of the rock charts, introducing the sound of Bela's banjo to millions of new listeners. More recently, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones won the award for Best Jazz Group in the Playboy Jazz Poll. At the current time, "Left of Cool" is near the top of the jazz charts and the Bela-penned vocal number Communication is beginning to receive substantial airplay on album-oriented rock stations. Now, more than ever before for Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, the future seems wide open. This is the first of two installments of a long conversation with Bela recorded amidst the bustle of a crowded Starbucks in San Francisco. This month, Bela talks about new Flecktone Jeff Coffin, the making of the new recording, how he keeps the inspiration flowing and where his music stands in relation to today's music scene. Next month, we'll discuss more banjo-specific topics, including Bela's banjo collection and his new sitar banjo, as well as current musical interests and practice ideas. –Bill Evans

PART 1

BNL: Let's talk about the new Flecktones record "Left of Cool." How would you describe the music on it? BF: Since the last album was a double live album and the five albums before that were all like live albums in that they were basically recorded live in the studio, we thought it'd be nice to change it and just get creative. For this album, we didn't have any guest players but we have extra "us-es."We didn't feel like it had to be like it is live, where there was one of each of us. Whatever sounded good to us, we would do. There are fifteen songs, and four of them are vocals. We were trying for the songs to be not only groove tunes but also very melodic. It's been a long time since we've done an album and I wanted the writing to be really good. There's a lot of layers. You'll hear stuff when you listen to it again that you didn't hear before. And it's a long record–it's 76 minutes and 30 seconds, which is the absolute longest they would allow us to put on it. There's a tune where I played the basic track with the guitar and overdubbed a couple of banjos in harmony, that kind of trading back and forth banjo-type thing. I also overdubbed mandolin on some tracks. That was a nice stretch! The sitar banjo is on a song. I played some gut string banjo, I play my electric banjo. I have a studio in my house. It's a hard disk system called Pro Tools and I was doing a lot of the engineering and everything myself. For me, it's kind of like a hobby. It's not playing, but it's using a different mind set to be creative. We recorded this record at my house and then everybody went on hiatus. We were off the road between October and February. For those months, I was in the studio working on the record. I did all of this editing and mixing and everything on my computer. We added instruments, did overdubs and everything, so that was kind of like a whole new career for a while. It was fun. I liked it because it means that the music came right from me to the audience without having to go through a bunch of people trying to change it. A lot of times, music gets changed between what the musician originally intended and what ends up in the consumer's hands. It didn't happen this time.

BNL: This new record features sax and wind player Jeff Coffin, the new Flecktone. Hasn't he been playing in the group for a while?

BF: Yeah, about a year now. These changes are sort of organic, you know. Aside from the three of us, what completes the Flecktones for me is having another melodic instrument. It's the voice that we need. That voice can be a fiddle. It can be a saxophone. It could be a flute. It could be something vocal. We've had different people playing with us but it's never been like, 'This is the guy who's going to be in our band from now on.' Sam Bush played with us for a while. It was great for a long time and then it felt like it was time to do something else and I think it felt like that to him too. Jeff has been living in Nashville for quite a while and had played in some jam sessions with Victor and Future Man's other brothers. There's three more brothers. They are all musicians and two of them live in Nashville. Reggie is a guitar player, an astonishing jazz-funk guitar player with his own completely unique style and Joe is a great keyboard player and songwriter who plays with the Steve Miller Band. They have like a weekly funk night at a local club, they just play Motown stuff and really great groove music and Jeff had played with them some. So I invited him over and we sat down and played one day and it went really well. We had a really good time jamming. A little while later, the Flecktones were doing a five night gig in Nashville at a place called Cafe Milano. It's a little jazz club and we had different guests every night. On the Sunday night, Jeff came and sat in and it was really cool. The thing that I loved about playing with him that night is that we had some great interactions. He and I did this thing that I like to do where you sort of solo simultaneously. You trade phrases and they get shorter and shorter and pretty soon you're just both playing, but you're listening to each other. You're not just playing your stuff. It's like a mind-melding. It's one of my favorite things to do with musicians when they really listen. So that was real exciting. It seems to me that Paul (McCandless) was starting to do more gigs with Oregon at that time and there were some gigs that he might not be available for, so we asked Jeff to come out and it just sort of grew from there.

BNL: One reaction that I have as a result of catching your recent live shows is that I used to think, ‘Wow, this is so great because the banjo, through this music, is making inroads into the jazz world.' But now, it seems like if there's a field left for you to conquer, it's the mainstream market.

BF: Yeah, that's what it sort of seems to be leading to. They call it alternative, but we're really talking about some rock bands with roots elements that improvise. On some level, we've been looked at as one of those bands. Because we don't fit in anywhere, in some weird way we can fit in everywhere. We can go play a jazz festival and we're firmly a part of that world but we can also play the Horde Festival with bands like Blues Traveller, Spin Doctors, Aquarium Rescue Unit and we're like this weird instrumental band. Being unusual has worked for us where at times that was a real problem with other bands I've been in. I felt it worked against New Grass Revival because people kept trying to make us be less different, in terms of the record label and pressures like that. Your motivation becomes about having a hit, not about the kind of music that you should be playing. If New Grass Revival had stayed together, the climate today is so different, I imagine that it would have gone to a whole other level. When I left to start the Flecktones, I was thinking, ‘I'm going to take a dive here. I'm going to play the music that I love and maybe fifteen years from now I'll be doing well again.' I didn't expect that it would be as commercially viable as it was. It made me rethink things a little bit.

BNL: Do you think that the interracial aspect of the band has helped?

BF: Yeah, sure. The music is really about communication musically and about blending things and tearing down walls. On one level, you might think, 'Okay, it's really complicated music. How can anybody relate to that?' but on another level, there's something very simple about the music, in a symbolic way. You don't have to understand technically what's happening. There might be a spirit to the music. The important thing is whether it hits you in some way. A lot of regular people from all over seem to be moved by it somehow. Just the fact that we're doing this is like an impossible dream kind of thing. In a way, it's symbolic of their crazy dreams. That's some of the positive ways I've come to look at it over the years, you know, trying to understand it.