Player with pluck

Jun. 9—details

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones

7:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 14

Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.

Check for ticket availability.

505-988-1234; lensic.org or belafleck.com

Béla Fleck heard the banjo at an early age but never believed he could play one.

Fleck, a 15-time Grammy Award-winning virtuoso, says he fell in love with music at about age five when he first heard Earl Scruggs play on the 1960s TV sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. But Scruggs' talent was more intimidating than inspiring, so when Fleck first picked up an instrument, he chose the guitar. That's when fate intervened: His grandfather bought him a $40 banjo at a garage sale.

"It was the day before I started high school," Fleck says nearly 50 years later. "I went from a kid who was interested in the guitar and could play some Beatles songs or blues scales to somebody who was a Type A practicing freak. I was just so excited about the sound of the banjo and having it in my lap that I played all the time and got good at it pretty quick."

The rest is music history. Fleck, who will be playing with his longtime band, the Flecktones, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, June 14, has worked to break the banjo out of its bluegrass box.

He made a documentary in 2008, Throw Down Your Heart, that researches the African origins of the instrument, and the music from the film earned Grammys for Best Pop instrumental Performance and Best Contemporary World Music Album. Fleck recently released his second album with Edgar Meyer, Zakir Hussain, and Rakesh Chaurasia, and Fleck says that album "mixes Indian music with whatever it is you call it that I do."

He is as busy and versatile as he is prolific, touring at times with the Flecktones and at others with Hussain and company, and he even fits in bills with his wife, fellow banjo player Abigail Washburn. Last month, Fleck completed a residency with the Asheville Amadeus Festival, in Asheville, North Carolina, that allowed him to explore the ways his music could interact with a symphony orchestra.

"I'm very fortunate," he says of his touring schedule. "I get to play with wonderful musicians and wonderful people but also a very diverse gang of people who are inspiring to play with. I love what I get to do — and not everybody gets to say that — and it keeps me invigorated because I'm always playing with different people. I don't get into a rut as much because I've got to get ready for the next gig. I've got to stay on my game because I'm playing with a lot of the best musicians I could possibly hope to play with."

Fleck, it seems, was born to be a musician. Béla Anton Leoš Fleck was born in New York City and named after "three esoteric composers" — Béla Bartók, Anton Webern, and Leoš Janácˇek — but says he didn't inherit his musical talent from his parents. His mom first taught him her "camp counselor" guitar chords but didn't consider herself a musician.

His father, meanwhile, was an aspiring opera singer who was never able to break through, and Fleck says his dad named him but didn't play a major role in his formative years.

"I didn't know him until I was in my 40s ... I got the names, but I didn't have the father," he says. "I think that connects to maybe why somebody is willing to sit in a room and practice so much. Sometimes they have problems in their life, and they find a solution by finding something that calls out to them that they can pour their energy into. I think the banjo kind of took me through high school and deposited me on the other side feeling a lot better about life."

Fleck moved to Boston after high school and tried to join the best bands he could find. He formed Spectrum in 1981, the same year he was invited to join a progressive bluegrass band called New Grass Revival. In the beginning, he says, the bluegrass world was the only one he could work in, but he always harbored ambitions to start a jazz fusion group. Those dreams reached fruition in 1988 when he formed the Flecktones, which, he says, had immediate musical chemistry.

He first met multi-instrumentalist Howard Levy at a folk festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, where friends convinced them that they should jam together. Shortly after, another friend introduced him to bassist Victor Wooten over the phone. Wooten's brother, Roy "Futureman" Wooten, came on as percussionist, and suddenly, they had a band.

Levy, he says, was "the brains" of the operation and would frequently help Fleck figure out where a banjo part could work into a larger composition.

But most importantly, Fleck says the quartet had undeniable chemistry both on stage as well as in the studio.

"When I started playing with Victor and a little bit later on with Futureman, all my jazz ideas suddenly sounded right," Fleck says of the Flecktones. "Before then, I was trying to force them to happen in bluegrass situations with people who didn't really play that kind of music. But once you put that funk jazz underneath my tunes, all of a sudden it was like they'd been written and were waiting for that before they could really be alive. Those guys set me free and made my stuff sound right without me really changing anything about it."

The original lineup of the band lasted for four years through three highly acclaimed albums before Levy left to spend more time with his family. The Flecktones added saxophone player Jeff Coffin, and the group went on hiatus after their 10th album in 2012.

Pull Quote

By that point, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones had won Grammys for Best Contemporary Jazz Album and Best Pop Instrumental Album. Levy returned to make their final album, Rocket Science, in 2011, which was lauded as a return to form. When the group decided to go their own ways, Fleck says, he was disappointed only to later realize it was a blessing in disguise.

"These guys have given so much of their lives to me and the band, and Victor was one of the people who really needed to go do his own thing," he says. "He was struggling with having enough time to do some of the things he was eager to do and be home for his kids. With the Flecktones, it was nonstop.

"It was running from a Flecktones tour to his own tour, and he didn't feel good about it. I was frustrated because it was my whole life making the band happen and doing everything I could to make sure I deserved to have these guys working with me. At the moment that we decided to stop playing for a while, I think there was some hurt for me — but it ended up being a great gift."

Fleck went on tour with jazz pianist Chick Corea and was able to play with Meyer and Hussain for the first time. He even released an album with Washburn, his wife, that won a Grammy for Best Folk Album in 2016.

The Flecktones reunited for a mini-tour in 2016 and 2017, and Fleck says the pandemic wiped out their plans for a bigger tour.

All the while, Fleck kept making music, and his most recent solo album brought him full circle. That album, My Bluegrass Heart, was the third in a cycle that included his 1988 album Drive and his 1999 offering The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 2.

To his astonishment, his new album was greeted with acclaim, and the work he'd put into diversifying the sounds of the banjo was accepted in a way he never knew was possible.

"I think I had this thing in my head that bluegrass guys didn't like me because I'm progressive. And yeah, there are a few," he says. "But last year, I was up for four awards for this bluegrass reunion record, and it won all the awards. I have to say it re-skewed my thinking about how bluegrass people felt about me. I had built a case that I was reviled or hated because I was out of that world; I put all my energy elsewhere. But the truth is they just like bluegrass and were waiting for me to do some bluegrass they could get behind."

Fleck and Washburn have two sons, Juno and Theo, and he says they are allowing them to come to music on their own terms. And the awards? They reflect the 64-year-old's musical journey. He was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association's Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2020 for his work with New Grass Revival. Two years earlier, he was honored as an inductee in the American Banjo Museum's Hall of Fame, which is based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Teenaged Fleck would've had a hard time imagining those accolades — Fleck says the awards still give him a thrill, even at this point in his career. In fact, he continues to strive for recognition in the annual DownBeat Magazine Annual Readers Poll, which has named him Miscellaneous Instrumentalist of the Year several times for his banjo playing.

"I've won that a dozen times or more. I won it again [in 2022] and for some reason, that has a lot of meaning to me," he says. "Nobody in the family notices when one of those awards shows up and I put it on a shelf, but I notice and it means a lot. Having this career where I go in between different musical worlds makes everything precious that happens. But it's all about the music."