One of the world’s greatest banjo players, Bela Fleck, talks to City Scoops about his sensational new African project, and how his love for his instrument developed in, of all places, New York City
By Larry Getlen
After learning that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a much-talked about (until recently, anyway) possible future candidate for president, took his first name from “The Brady Bunch,” it’s hard to be shocked when throw-away pop culture influences more significant endeavors, from politics to the arts.
But there’s still a tinge of bafflement in learning that Bela Fleck — one of the world’s greatest banjo players, and a musician of such diversity that he’s earned Grammy nominations in more categories (nine) than anyone in Grammy history — came to his instrument thanks to the most frivolous of pop culture endeavors.
“I was introduced to the banjo by hearing ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ on television, at my grandparents’ house in Queens,” says Fleck, of a moment that took place when he was just six or seven years old. “I still remember that day, and the experience of hearing it for the first time, and how it turned me on. It wasn’t the sort of thing where you go, ‘wow, I could do that.’ It was intimidating.”
Since then, Fleck has become perhaps the most prominent banjo player in music, breaking ground with his skillful integration of banjo and jazz in Bela Fleck and the Flecktones while continually exploring countless other styles and genres both with the Flecktones and on his own.
Now, Fleck, who amazingly came to love the banjo on the rough and tumble streets of 1970s Manhattan (more on that in a moment), has released his most ambitious project to date. The documentary “Throw Down Your Heart,” which screens at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue) April 24-30, recounts Fleck’s five-week trip to four African countries — Uganda, Tanzania, The Gambia, and Mali — in an effort to explore his instrument in its native land, and create music with some of those countries’ greatest talents. The result is a wondrous series of spirited and heartfelt collaborations, an in-depth look at the warmth and depth of the people he encounters, and an accompanying CD of the same name that was released in March.
Fleck was inspired to the project by the slow realization that the roots of his cherished instrument were being slowly lost in time.
“I knew that the banjo was from Africa,” he says, “and I noticed that people didn’t seem to know it anymore. People thought it was an American instrument, and that it came from Kentucky or North Carolina or something.”
Fleck had also been hearing fascinating snippets of African music over the years, but had trouble locating the best of it. “I kept hearing these little bits of music that would blow me away. Someone would play me a whole town playing music together, and the rhythm was so convoluted and interesting that you couldn’t figure out where the ‘1’ was, and I just loved it,” he says. “But it was hard to find the good stuff. It was easy to find pop music from Africa, but it was very hard to find great, pure acoustic stuff.”
One artist in particular that inspired Bela was Oumou Sangaré, a singer from the Wassoulou region of Mali known in her home country as “The Songbird of Wassoulou.”
“When I heard her record, something really clicked with me,” says Fleck of the singer whose soaring “Djorolen” is an especially gorgeous moment on both the film and the CD. “I was so compelled by her music. It was like hearing the banjo or hearing bluegrass for the first time. I wanted to be in it.”
With The Flecktones on an extended break after fifteen years of constant touring and recording, Fleck began prepping for Africa. He recruited his younger half-brother, filmmaker and television writer Sascha Paladino, to document the trip, and Sony signed on to finance the project. Flights were booked, dates were set. Then, two complications almost killed the entire thing.
First, Sony pulled out a month before, leaving Fleck with two choices — finance it out of pocket, or bail.
Despite a personal cost that ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars (“a very nice house,” he notes), it was never really a choice. “I never, ever thought we would not do it,” he says. “For one thing, we had already bought the plane tickets, so we were emotionally committed to it. We didn’t want a way out.”
Then, once that decision was made, Fleck was named as a prosecution witness for the IRS in a case against a friend. The court date was scheduled to take place at the same time he was in Africa, and lawyers advised him that if he missed the court date, he could face jail time.
“I actually have footage of these lawyers telling me not to screw around, and that if the trial went on that day, I shouldn’t go to Africa,” he says. “I was like, wow. I have how many thousands of dollars invested in this thing, we’re ready to go, and this would destroy the whole project.”
But fate was smiling on Bela and Africa. After he decided that he would risk jail to keep the trip alive, the trial date was moved to after his return, and it was all-systems-go for a journey that would prove every bit as musically enriching as he’d hoped, as each country he visited brought a new musical adventure.
“They’re really different,” he says. “Tanzanian music was very trippy. You can almost imagine it being played in jam band music, like in the Grateful Dead or the sixties. There are these mesmerizing, simple grooves that just go and go and go, and a certain tonality of a minor 7 flat 5 chord all the time. It’s very different from the raw folkiness of the Gambian music, or the blues/jazz qualities of Malian music.”
One of Fleck’s more intriguing collaborators was a Maasai group from Tanzania: a collection of young men in tribal garb, with the bearings of a 1950s street gang, who sing what Fleck refers to in the film as “weird guttural stuff.”
Given the enormity of the project, his time in Africa provided Fleck with some valuable lessons.
“In five weeks, we were in four countries; we recorded forty different songs; and we came back with 250 hours of film. So I couldn’t really stay too long with any one musical moment,” he says. “It taught me that I could rely on my instincts, and that I would get by with not as much preparation as I like. I’d had a little bit too much control for too long — too much time to practice and study things before I played them.”
At this point, of course, total control or none at all, the odds of Fleck failing musically in any scenario are pretty slim.
Fleck, 50, began his musical education while growing up on West 100th Street and West End, and then at Riverside Drive and West 76th Street, where he moved when he was fifteen. At the time — the sixties and early seventies — the Upper West Side was starkly different than it is today.
“I had, like, five bicycles stolen in my childhood,” he says. “We had a rent-controlled apartment for $125 a month. I remember air conditioners falling out of the window next to me, walking down to Broadway from West End one time, and beer bottles, often. It was a crazy time.”
While his Beatle-loving older brother and cello-playing, classical-music-loving step-father helped nurture his introduction to music, it was his grandfather’s gift of a banjo — well after that fateful episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” — that began his musical path in earnest.
“He saw it at a flea market and thought, maybe that would be a fun thing for Bela,” he says. “It was there when I went up to visit him in Peekskill the weekend before high school started. Then, by a fluke, there was a guy on the train home who knew how to play the banjo, and he tuned it for me. So when I brought it home, it was in tune.”
Fleck soon discovered that some of the best banjo teachers in the world lived in New York City. “The truth is, the people who were my best teachers are still there,” he says, “and if somebody needed to learn how to play the banjo and wanted to do it right, you could do it in New York. I started out studying with Erik Darling, who used to play with The Weavers when Pete Seeger left. He moved me onto Buck Horowitz, an incredible banjo player who lived in Staten Island, and then eventually everybody pointed me toward Tony Trischka, the reigning kind of modern banjo, who was in Brooklyn at that time. Those were some good finds. They would have been harder to find in rural Kentucky.”
Fleck would play open jam sessions at Greenwich Village folk clubs during the “dying embers” of the folk boom, and learned about jazz at The High School of Music & Art (now LaGuardia High School), alongside other classmates-turned-jazz-luminaries such as Marcus Miller, Omar Hakim, and Don Byron.
But the greatest education came not just from his amazing teachers and the city’s diverse clubs and concert venues, but also from the bustling energy of the streets of New York.
“I remember seeing Pat Martino play at Folk City and The Bottom Line,” he says. “We would go to the Beacon Theater, a few blocks from where we lived, and we got to see Return to Forever there, and Pete Seeger. But in New York, you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing salsa music and jazz and rock. You heard music everywhere.”
See “Throw Down Your Heart” at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue) April 24-30. And for more information on Bela Fleck and “Throw Down Your Heart,” check out belafleck.com and throwdownyourheart.com.
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