Word: fleck
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...Paganini, or maybe the Jimi Hendrix, of the five-string banjo recalls the first time he heard that instrument. "I was four or five years old," says Bela Fleck. "My brother and I were on my grandparents' bed watching TV when The Beverly Hillbillies came on. The theme music started, and I had no idea it was the banjo. It was Earl Scruggs in his prime. I only remember hearing something beautiful. It called...
...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...
After graduating in 1968, North skipped summer leave and cruised down to Basic School at Quantico, Va., in his new, fleck-metal green sports car, a Shelby Cobra. North stood out right away, recalls Fellow Officer Scott Matthews. "He was hot, extremely hot . . . He was a very action-oriented individual, eager to get on with it." While at Quantico, North married Betsy Stuart in a traditional military ceremony, complete with an arch of crossed swords. He had met her on a blind date set up by his cousin when he was in his last year at Annapolis...
...melodramatic or cheaply "humanistic" artist, this rabbit would have been a pretext for the pathetic fallacy. But in Lopez's hands its death is its own and no one else's; and its minutely observant reconstruction under the brush, each nuance of its shrunken flesh reconstituted by a mark, fleck or scribble of paint that carries its wiry vitality as a sign, gives the inspection of this still and single object the power of narrative...