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for understanding and partly for finding new
ways to express ourselves.”
“It was appealing to be in an acoustic group
again,” Fleck said, “without having it be a
bluegrass band. I liked the sound of the oldtime
banjo and three-finger banjo together. I
liked the Chinese aspect of it. Abby’s music is
great and I love her singing, and I’d always
wanted to work with a great singer. I liked the
challenge of developing the music like a chamber
music group.
“It was going to be a side project, but once
we got into it, we got into it and everyone wanted
to make each piece perfect like a gem,” Fleck
continued. “It ended up being a lot of work, and
once we’d invested all that time and energy in it,
we wanted to protect it. It became a cause, like
the Flecktones in the early days.”
This is how it goes for Fleck: He dips his
toe in the ocean and before he knows it,
he’s swimming in deep waters. He
agrees to help out his girlfriend, and then spends
most of 2008 with her band. A Return To
Forever concert changes his life as a teenager,
and he ends up making a duo album with Chick
Corea (2007’s Enchantment) and wrangling an
opening slot on RTF’s tour last summer for the
Flecktones. Why is he driven to pursue so many
different projects
“I’m probably dissatisfied with myself on
some level,” he confessed, “and I have to prove I
have value. It probably comes from growing up
in a broken home. That has a lot to do with my
drive. It’s also that I’m drawing from all these
things so I can do my own thing with them. A
lot of times I try to justify what I do for business
reasons, but that’s a defense mechanism; the real
reasons are different.”
When he toured India with New Grass
Revival in the ’80s, for example, he found himself
entranced by the tabla drums. Convinced
that the tabla could inject new rhythmic patterns
into his banjo playing, he bought as many
recordings and instruction books as he could.
Then he ran into a tabla expert named Sandip
Burman at a festival in Virginia. Fleck began
taking lessons from Burman, and that grew into
a series of duo concerts.
His interactions with Hussain emerged from
his work with Meyer. In 2006, the Nashville
Symphony asked Fleck and Meyer to write a
concerto for the opening of the city’s
Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Three years
earlier, the Symphony had commissioned Fleck
and Meyer to write a double concerto for banjo
and bass, so this time they wanted a concerto for
banjo, bass and a third instrument. They saw this
as the chance they’d been seeking, so they got in
touch with Hussain.
“I had the album Making Music, which
[Hussain] did with John McLaughlin and Jan
Garbarek,” Fleck said. “Neither Edgar nor I
knew him, but we used the commission as an
opportunity to get to know him. There was a lot
we wanted to learn from him, and now we had
something to offer him in return.
“One of the many amazing things about
Indian music is the rhythmic complexity,” he
continued. “There’s more math in Indian music
than any music I’ve ever heard. At the same
time, it felt natural to play with Zakir. He
described it as ‘getting together with some
brothers he hadn’t seen in a long time.’”
This is the type of spark for which Fleck constantly
searches. This is why he crams projects
into his schedule. He can cope with the stress
and fatigue as long as he’s learning and growing.
“I’m always looking for situations like the
Africa trip,” he said, “where I throw myself into
deep water, where I put myself in situations
where I can’t possibly be fully prepared and see
if I can rise to the occasion. I’d like to do this
again, to go to other countries and play with new
musicians.
“As the Flecktones’ audience grows, I feel a
duty to turn our audience onto other great
music,” he continued. “With success comes
responsibility. The Africa project will be good
for the audience, good for the musicians from
Africa and good for me. I like it where everybody
wins.”
DB
June 2009 DOWNBEAT 33