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The<br />
News & Views From Around The Music World<br />
Inside <br />
14 I Riffs<br />
14 I AFO Records<br />
15 I Vinyl Freak<br />
15 I Night In Harlem<br />
16 I Caught<br />
18 I Players<br />
Béla Fleck’s<br />
Unfinished<br />
Business<br />
Original Flecktones Lineup<br />
Reunites for 2011 Release<br />
When the four original Flecktones stepped into Béla Fleck’s<br />
Nashville, Tenn., home studio to test-drive songs for 2011’s<br />
Rocket Science (eOne Music), Fleck said it was the most natural<br />
thing in the world. The reunion of the Flecktones marks the first<br />
time in almost 20 years that the quartet has released an album.<br />
“Things are very different now than they used to be,” said<br />
pianist/harmonica player Howard Levy, who departed from the<br />
group in 1992.<br />
Levy had joined the remaining Flecktones for a three-week<br />
stint in 2009. It was what percussionist Roy “Futureman” Wooten<br />
called the group’s “aha!” moment. “The opportunity came to talk<br />
about revisiting back to the beginning, going full-circle,” he said.<br />
With former Flecktone saxophonist Jeff Coffin enlisted with<br />
the Dave Matthews Band since 2008, the reconvention was a<br />
“right place, right time” situation that also stemmed from Fleck’s<br />
desire to tackle some two-decades-old “unfinished business.”<br />
“I really wanted [the music] to fit my vision of what the group should<br />
be,” Fleck said. “I don’t think that was the key thing, but it was definitely<br />
an undercurrent. It stayed with me as something that I wished I’d handled<br />
better. There was just some kind of mismatch going on at the time.”<br />
After visiting Levy at his home in Evanston, Ill., in early 2010 to<br />
hash out song ideas, Fleck noted a “warmer, sunnier vibe.”<br />
“Everybody has grown,” said bassist Victor Wooten. “Béla’s been<br />
doing his Africa project with [Zakir] Hussain and Edgar [Meyer]. I’ve<br />
been playing a lot with my own band, as well as playing with Chick<br />
Corea and Mike Stern. And my brother, Futureman, has been writing<br />
a bunch of orchestral [material] and working on his new instrument,<br />
things like that. We’ve all been off in our own world. Coming back<br />
together, it’s like we had a whole lot to offer, as well as just being excited<br />
to put something together. The ingredients are there. They’ve just<br />
matured a lot.”<br />
Rocket Science is an undefinable hybrid that Wooten calls a freeflowing<br />
“continuation of what could have been” and Fleck describes<br />
From left: Victor<br />
Wooten, Béla Fleck,<br />
Howard Levy and Roy<br />
“Futureman” Wooten<br />
as “simple, yet complex.” It’s garnered mass onstage appeal from<br />
Bonnaroo crowds of 80,000-plus, but reflects little of the Coffin era that<br />
many listeners are already familiar with.<br />
According to Levy, the record’s lack of road testing made it far more<br />
improvisational and impulsive—a “true collaboration” reflective of a<br />
more group-oriented writing style.<br />
“There were some things that we had on the table that we always<br />
wanted to do,” Fleck said. The album explores odd time meters, Indian<br />
scales, Bulgarian rhythms and African beats driven by the Max Roach<br />
and Elvin Jones-inspired acoustics of Futureman’s SynthAxe Drumitar,<br />
a guitar-shaped, electronic percussion-sampling device.<br />
“The dynamics, the cymbal sounds, they were all there,” Futureman<br />
said. “The influences from all the drummers you know, the toms that we<br />
sampled, the snares, they were all inspired by a history of drumming.”<br />
The band will take the album on the road throughout October and<br />
November, where Wooten said the 20-year absence raises big questions.<br />
“Our personalities haven’t been together for a long time,” he said. “Are<br />
we going to be able to live together” <br />
—Hilary Brown<br />
Jeremy Cowart<br />
SEPTEMBER 2011 DOWNBEAT 13