Word: bela
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...Bela answered. At 31, Fleck has surpassed the semiretired Scruggs -- who, with guitarist Lester Flatt, fronted the nation's best-known bluegrass band from 1948 until 1969 -- as a banjo virtuoso, taking this jangling folk instrument into jazz, classical music and beyond. Three times a Grammy nominee and a perennial winner of the Frets magazine poll as banjoist of the year, Fleck now has a potential crossover hit: a jazz-inflected album called Bela Fleck and the Flecktones (Warner Bros.). Released in March, the album has been bulleted on the jazz charts and has sold a respectable 55,000 units...
...anyone who still thinks of the banjo as suitable only for rippling accompaniment to high-pitched country harmonies, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones is pure revelation. As a technician, Fleck is hummingbird-fast, whether picking with three fingers, Scruggs-style, or with the back-and-forth, thumb- and-forefinger method pioneered by Don Reno. Yet his technique is always at the service of a sophisticated musical imagination that can make the instrument sound as if it were born to play jazz. Unlike a guitar, a banjo cannot sustain a note for very long. ("Pop, ping, and then it's gone...
Musically speaking, jazz banjo is a long way from where Bela began. He was born in New York City. His mother was a public school teacher. "I never met my father," Fleck says. "He taught German for a living but was crazy about classical music. He named me after Bela Bartok, the Hungarian composer. He named my brother Ludwig after Beethoven. It was rough. The torture started in kindergarten...
Growing up, Bela fell in love with the Beatles, fooled around with guitar and took up the banjo at 14, after seeing the movie Deliverance, with its Dueling Banjos bluegrass theme. "The sound of the banjo just killed me," he says. "It's like hearing mercury...
...jazz. "I bought a Charlie Parker record, and I thought, "Wow! This is incredible." I tried to learn Parker's licks on the banjo, but I couldn't find the notes." One day, in a high school jazz-appreciation class, the teacher played pianist Chick Corea's Spain -- for Bela, another revelation. "It was just so immediate. It was a light going on and a door opening...