Interview: Béla Fleck, banjo player

The return of the mutant weirdo musicians as one of the world’s greatest banjo players is back with his Flecktones for this year’s Celtic Connections

“IT WAS a new experience for me, a bit of a high jump, but I like high jumps.” Banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck is talking about his first concerto for banjo and orchestra, commissioned from him by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, with whom he premiered it in September.

Fleck is certainly not one to forgo a challenge, whether it be taking his instrument out of the bluegrass territory where he first embraced it as a teenager (after hearing Flatt and Scruggs’ music on The Beverly Hillbillies) and into the realms of contemporary jazz or classical music, or indeed taking it back to its African roots. That last venture resulted in an acclaimed documentary film, Throw Down Your Heart and a touring project with west African musicians and singers such as Bassekou Kouyate and Oumou Sangare, which he brought to Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival two years ago.

Next week the man often regarded as the world’s premiere exponent of the banjo returns to play the opening concert of Celtic Connections in the perhaps less challenging but hugely entertaining company of his band, the Flecktones, which reassembled in its original form last year after a gap of 17 years, during which co-founder, harmonica player and pianist Howard Levy went his own way. The line-up is completed by the funky sibling electric bass and percussion duo of Victor and Roy “Futureman” Wooten and if the album they released last year, Rocket Science, is anything to go by, the audience at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall can expect gloriously unclassifiable but hugely enjoyable music, by turns mellifluous and funky.

The Flecktones came about in 1989 when Fleck, already making a name for himself as a soloist and with the progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival, was increasingly incorporating eclectic influences into his bluegrass-rooted playing.

“Even when I wrote tunes in that style, there were always jazz or classical elements popping into them, and none of the bluegrass guys I was playing with really wanted to play them. Although they were wonderful musicians it wasn’t the most natural thing for them.

“I’d kind of given up on the idea of playing the music I wanted until I met Victor and started playing these things with him and he learned them instantly and played them really great, and I met Howard and the same thing happened and I realised that my crazy ideas weren’t so crazy after all.”

The Flecktones continued after Levy’s departure, replacing him with saxophonist Jeff Coffin, who left a few years ago to join the Dave Matthews Band. Then Levy rejoined.

“The band was really designed with Howard in mind,” says Fleck, who regards the group as four unique players – or, as he puts it, “these mutant weirdo musicians who have somehow found a way to make music together.”

The Flecktones’ guests in Glasgow will include flautist and Celtic Connections regular Michael McGoldrick, the Irish singer and former Solas star Karan Casey and Scots Gaelic singer Kathleen MacInnes, on whose forthcoming album Fleck plays. Another guest will be Fleck’s singer-songwriter and fellow-banjo-playing wife, Abigail Washburn (who also appears at the O2 ABC on 5 February).

Fleck, now 53, reckons he’ll be more relaxed this time round than he was on his last Celtic Connections gig, which was the first concert of his Throw Down Your Heart tour. “It came together pretty well considering how last-minute it was. Everyone arrived the day before and we just sat in a room and worked on a few things. So I was kind of petrified.”

The venture which engendered Throw Down Your Heart, however, Fleck’s musical safari to trace the African roots of his instrument, was something he wouldn’t have missed for the world, he says. The subsequent documentary shows Fleck clearly finding himself in seventh heaven, beaming widely while playing with local musicians, his banjo whirring alongside such west African lute-like instruments as the ngoni and the akonting – the latter particularly found in Gambia, whence many slaves were shipped to America.

The African trip, he says, prompted some of the most meaningful music-making of his career – “It was a huge learning experience on a musical and on a personal level.”

Fleck’s further genre-defying activities have included collaborations with the similarly eclectically minded classical bassist Edgar Meyer, jazz pianist Chick Corea and Indian percussionist and world music star Zakir Hussein, while the coming year will see him playing with jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and his trio, with an album duo out shortly.

Bluegrass, however, remains a touchstone, although with his other musical adventures he rarely gets time to play it, he says, apart from the odd jam session and his annual appearances at the Telluride festival in Colorado – last summer he chalked up his 30th. One of these days, he says, he’ll get back to playing a lot more of his first love.

The Flecktones’ appearance is just one among a wealth of visiting American roots acts at this year’s Celtic Connections. The annual Transatlantic Sessions (2 and 5 February, Concert Hall), with musical directors Shetland fiddle ambassador Aly Bain and dobro wizard Jerry Douglas, this year hosts such sterling US names as Bruce Molsky, Tim O’Brien and US-Latino singer Raul Malo, as well as Ruth Moody of Canada’s Wailin’ Jennys.

Elsewhere, the festival makes a Louisiana Connection, (24 January, Royal Concert Hall), starring New Orleans soul singer and Neville Brothers founder Aaron Neville with young Zydeco singer-songwriter and accordionist Cedric Watson, and the Grammy-winning Virginia singer songwriter Bruce Hornsby plays the Concert Hall on 30 January. Woody at 100 (25 January, Royal Concert Hall) celebrates the centenary of the giant of US folk song, with his granddaughter, Sarah Lee Guthrie, and husband Johnny Irion joined by contemporary interpreters including Jay Farrar and Yim Yames.

At the Old Fruitmarket, New Orleans singer and former circus performer Meschiya Lake and her Little Bighorns band join the Wiyos with their supercharged blend of old-time and vaudeville (4 February), and expect fireworks, too, at the O2 ABC on 20 January, when the African-American string band the Caroline Chocolate Drops joins the Punch Brothers, led by mandolin maestro Chris Thile. For a more intimate but guaranteed soulful performance, catch the nu-old-time duo Cahalen Morrison and Eli West in the City Halls Recital Rooms (24 January).

• An Evening with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones is at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 19 January. For further details see www.belafleck.com and www.celticconnections.com