Word: instrument
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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," Fleck says.) Yet on his ballad Sunset Road, Fleck creates an illusion of satiny, legato plangency. If you want one word...
...instrument offered more than aesthetic satisfaction. "My brother and I were overweight as kids," Fleck recalls. "So I didn't have a great self- image, but I found this thing I could do that made me feel good. I played banjo all the time and stopped eating for satisfaction. I almost feel that I have a deal with the banjo, that if I put the time in and take care of it, I'll be thin and have something. And if I don't, part of me is afraid it will all fall apart...
Fleck attended Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, where banjo was not considered a serious instrument. So he studied privately, first with Erik Darling, onetime member of the Weavers folk quartet, and eventually with Trischka, an urban bluegrass whiz. Even then, Fleck was an eclectic, trying to absorb everything from salsa to jazz. Especially 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...
...kind of potential is the business of Ned Herrmann, whose North Carolina-based Applied Creative Services runs workshops on "whole-brain theory." Herrmann, who spent 35 years at General Electric, a dozen of them as head of management education, has cooked up a test called the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, which includes such queries as "Have you ever experienced motion sickness . . . in response to vehicular motion?" Herrmann maintains that people who are right-quadrant dominant, or more "artistic," "emotional" and "spiritual," are also more motion- sensitive...