He's Finger-Pickin' Good

By John Elson

The 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 out to me."

And 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 so far.

To 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," Fleck says.) Yet on his ballad Sunset Road, Fleck creates an illusion of satiny, legato plangency. If you want one word for the album, call it mellow. Says Tony Trischka, his former teacher: "Bela Fleck is making the banjo safe for mass consumption."

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."

The 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 Chick Corea's Spain -- for Bela, another revelation. "It was just so immediate. It was a light going on and a door opening for me."

In 1979 Fleck moved to Lexington, Ky., to help start a group called Spectrum. Exposure to bluegrass -- the real thing -- was a "big culture shock," he admits. "I was a little cocky, but down South, they didn't think I sounded so great because I lacked tone and I didn't have a great sense of rhythm. They were right." In 1981 Fleck moved to Nashville and joined the group that would be his musical home for the next eight years: the New Grass Revival, which played what Bela calls "high-tech bluegrass with a lot of heart and intensity; the singing was like R.-and-B. soul, like Motown."

Television provided Fleck with the chance to escape what he eventually felt were the Revival's constraints. Two years ago, producers of the Lonesome Pine Specials asked him to do a solo show. Bela Fleck and Guests began with the tux-clad banjoist joining the Blair String Quartet in a four-movement classical work by Fleck and composer Edgar Meyer. It ended with a jazz section riffed by Bela and the trio that became the Flecktones: Howard Levy on keyboards and harmonica, the brothers Victor and Roy ("Future Man") Wooten on bass guitar and Drumitar (a guitar wired to electric drums). Bela Fleck and Guests was one of the series' most popular programs and led to the record album. "I want to give people stuff they can move to and that is melodic, and that is also complex and satisfying for us to play."

Fleck can be as eloquent talking banjo as he is playing it. "There are things I want to play that I haven't been able to yet," he offers. "Like improvising. That can be a very spiritual experience. Stuff you don't even know pours out. I want to become more tuned into pulling off the notes I hear in my head at the exact moment I hear them. It's a lifelong goal." Stay tuned.

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles