To your mind are you envisioning yourself in conversation with yourself or do you try to put your personal history aside when writing or performing new music?

I try to find something that I’m excited about because I know when I’m excited about something, if there’s something that intrigues me, I cannot put the banjo down. I cannot step away from writing the music, I lay awake thinking about it. I love those times when I’ve got a nice, a nice vein of something that I’m really excited about and I can see the potential. It usually ends up expanding and being a whole new kind of tune that I’ve come up with or new set of language on the banjo or that sort of thing. I’m looking for that buzz. If I’m not getting that buzz from it, I don’t think I should put it out. I don’t think I should complete it. I shouldn’t create pieces just to create pieces so I’ve created more pieces. That’s pointless.

I have to find things that really turn me on and that’s what the artist is supposed to do. You can’t satisfy the audience if you can’t satisfy yourself. Eventually you become kind of a taste maker and if people like the taste they’ll continue with you, and if they don’t like the direction you’ve gone they’ll listen your old stuff and go, “Oh, you know, I used to like their stuff I don’t like their new stuff anymore.” But if you can get them to follow you as your taste evolves, then you’ve really got something you know that will last. Some of my audience follows me and sticks with me and tries all the different things I do and some of them say, “Man, I wish you’d do bluegrass again. You’ve never done anything good since 1980, why did you stop doing that?” Or. “Why did you leave New Grass Revival?” And then there are the people who are like, “Why did you stop doing the Flecktones, what’s all this crap you’re doing now with the symphony?” So there are all these different phases, I can’t let that be what what fuels my decisions, I have to go by what is exciting to me. As long as I do that, there are a lot of people I run into who are like, “Man, I loved going to Africa with you in your film, I love the Flecktones, I love the New Grass, I’d love to see what you do next.” That’s kind of a nice place to be.

In terms of new opportunities, can you talk about your banjo camp that’s coming up in August?

It’s an opportunity for me to dig in to the teaching part of things. I haven’t taught for the last 30 years, I just got too busy between the Flecktones and all the bands that I was in. I didn’t make time for teaching and it’s been bothering me. So an opportunity came for me to put on a camp and curate a camp and be the leader of the camp in a great venue in Brevard, North Carolina where they do classical music. So I took it and I put together a great team of banjo players and hopefully it’ll be a yearly thing, and then that part of my pie chart that says teaching will expand a little bit. I’m really happy that it’s happening and a little scared because I haven’t done it in so long. But I really love to teach and I love just workshops but this will be a much more in-depth kind of thing. The camp is full but there will be a concert called the Blue Ridge Banjo Concert, in which you can expect a lot of great banjo players to be taking turns and I’ll be playing a lot too.

In November, you’re returning to the stage with Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyer. What can you say about that project?

Zakir is another hero, for me, I think Corea and Zakir are like the superheroes I get to play with. They’re mentors because they’re from an earlier generation, they’re older than me, and when I get to play with them I go into kind of the fanboy zone and I have to be careful about that because they’re not looking for that from me, they want somebody fun to play with. Zakir is one of the most amazing percussionists in the world. He’s he can do anything with the tabla. He’s one of the most accomplished musicians in the world, and certainly the most beloved living Indian musician of our time, known all over the world.

Edgar is one of the most incredible upright bass players with a big part of him in classical composition but also just funky as all get-out hell and in a lot of a different ways a virtuoso of unparalleled degree. So what we’ve come up together is really an interesting musical combination, we hadn’t done it in several years but this time we’re bringing in an Indian flutist, so that there will be kind of more balanced cross cultural collaboration between Indian and American music, and his name is Rakesh Chaurasia and he’s another fantastic musician. We’re going to be building some new music and play some of the music that we’ve recorded a while back from a record called The Melody of Rhythm.

Finally, I know you have a new baby in your house, but I noticed that you’re doing some dates again with your wife, Abby [Washburn] at the end of the year. Can you talk about what might be in the works for 2019?

When we had our first child, Juno, about five years ago, I came off the road with all of these big touring type situations and started playing concerts with Abigail, who’s an incredible singer and a wonderful clawhammer banjo player, which is an older style than what I play. We put together a very banjo-centric duo show that was intended to play folk and bluegrass festivals and small theaters. It went really, really well, and we took our son with us everywhere on tour and that’s been the main musical project for me. I would go off and write a banjo concerto and go play with a symphony every once in a while, or go do a short trip with the Flecktones once a year, that sort of thing, occasional little side jaunts. If Chick Corea ever calls, I try to drop everything and do that, and I have every year, but generally it’s me and Abby doing the lion’s share of the year. And so now that we have a new baby, Theodore Wilder Washburn-Fleck, we’re off the road now. And I’m doing some of these other things, like the camp and the tour with Edgar and Zakir and the Flecktones, and solo concerts, and so forth. Little odd things, things that don’t take me away for too long.

But we’re not done with the duo and our plan is to go back on the road in December on the West Coast first, and start doing the music from our latest record called Echo in the Valley. We kind of stopped in the middle of the record cycle, when the baby came. We cut off the touring around the due date, so we were kind of halfway through that album cycle and we’re going to pick it back up. We won’t be doing as much as we had been doing because it’s hard with two kids on the road, but were not going to drop that part of our lives. We’re gonna keep it going. And that gives me an entree back into the folk world, I wouldn’t say bluegrass because Abby’s not a bluegrass player, but it’s closer to that world than any of these other concerts that I do, and I’ve enjoyed that a lot.

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