The members of Béla Fleck & The Flecktones have stayed so busy during their hiatus that it’s easy to forget that it’s already been four years since their final concert. It’s also easy to forget how finite that final show felt: After more than a decade away from the band he helped co-found, Flecktones harmonica/piano ace Howard Levy rejoined the band he helped mentor for an exquisite reunion record, Rocket Science, and victory lap that ended at the very venue, where The Flecktones played their first show. According to Fleck, drummer Futureman was the one who initially considered that show the perfect full-circle finale, yet it was his brother, Flecktones bassist Victor Wooten, who ultimately decided to put the breaks on The Flecktones in order to build an impressive musical camp system and raise his four children. Though The Flecktones entertained a few reunion offers during the past few years—and originally eyed 2017 as a “major Flecktones year” it eventually proved too difficult to get align Fleck and the Wootens schedules for a true album-cycle tour. So when The Flecktones were offered a spot at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival this June—a crown jewel of their past spring treks—they decided to put their individual projects aside for a brief-but-proper reunion run. With saxophonist Jeff Coffin, who replaced Levy after a series of guest artists rotated in and out of The Flecktones for a period in the mid-‘90s, committed to Dave Matthews Band through their 25th anniversary tour, Fleck also decided to use the opportunity to extend The Original Flecktones’ run a bit further. And while the group will likely focus on back catalog material and live favorites during their June sprint, all four members of the band are hopeful that this run is the beginning of a new paradigm that will allow The Flecktones to tour more regularly, for shorter periods of time, in the coming years. Fleck is also optimistic that the group will also record another studio album in the coming years and even hints that one day he’d like to see a version of The Flecktones features Levy and Coffin playing side by side.
Let’s pick up where The Flecktones left off in 2011. Howard, before rejoining the band and recording Rocket Science you had been away from The Flecktones for a decade. What did you notice about the band when you returned?
Howard Levy: Everyone plays better. We sounded really good. There are more sides to everyone’s playing than there used to be, especially with Roy, I guess I could just call him Futureman. He is also doing quite a bit of acoustic percussion which I love, he’s a wonderful drummer. Plus, the sounds he’s using are different than the ones he was using when I was in the band. The actual sound he generates from the guitar is much better and much more real sounding. That makes a really huge difference in the sound of the band and the feel of the band.
The Flecktones upcoming run started with an offer from the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Béla, when you agreed organize a tour with the Wootens leading up to that annual event, did you immediately call Howard or did you consider bringing Jeff Coffin back into the mix?
Béla Fleck: I like the idea that The Flecktones can be whatever it wants to be. It can be with Howard. It can be with Jeff. It can be with other people or it can be a trio. Jeff wasn’t even on the table because, being in Dave Matthews, we knew we couldn’t count on him being available. So, we didn’t have to make a decision, it was made for us. We love playing with Howard, he is in the fundamental starting lineup of The Flecktones. There is nobody like him, playing with him is a thrill. Considering the great years with Jeff and the great years with Howard, it would be fun to do stuff with the two of them. It would be fun to do a new record with that lineup, but we’re not there yet. The Flecktones have always thrived on having cool new people to play with and there’s a lot of new talent out there. This time we’re just going to play and have some fun. I’m hoping after we’re done we’ll say, “Hey, that was fun. Let’s do it some more.”
HL: After the album, we did about 120 shows in 11 months. We got along great the whole time, nobody hated each other at the end. Everyone is really busy with things and this so happened to be the time where Béla had some free time. We managed to carve out a little niche between Béla and Victors schedules especially—and mine too. We’re all really into this, I wish it were a little bit longer to tell you the truth.
Telluride has obviously been an event that is really important to you guys and to the bluegrass world in general. Do you remember the first time you played Telluride Bluegrass?
Victor Wooten: I do remember and it wasn’t with Béla Fleck, it was with a singer named Jonell Mosser. Jonell is pretty much the reason I moved to Nashville. I came to visit first, I ended up meeting her and she asked me to come back and sub in her band for a month. This was in ‘88 and I’ve been here ever since, that month has turned into a long time. I visited Nashville first in ‘87, met Béla and a bunch of people. We ended up doing this television show in Louisville, Kentucky called the Lonesome Pine Special. It was supposed to be a one-time show, but when I was here for that month with Jonell, I really connected with Béla, hanging out at his house, sleeping on his couch and jamming a lot. That really solidified the relationship. That was when we just started deciding to do more and more. Béla was still with New Grass Revival up until the end of 1990. I think it was the end of ‘89. I think they did a New Year’s show and opened for The Dead. The next year, maybe ‘90-‘91, the Flecktones opened for The Dead in Oakland at the Oakland Coliseum. That was the only time we opened for The Dead, but we did do a couple more shows with Jerry Garcia Band.
Béla, since The Flecktones went on hiatus, you’ve returned to acoustic music with your wife Abigail Washburn, but also brought the banjo into the classical world thanks to your work with orchestras, symphonies and smaller combos. Can you talk a little bit about your association with that side of the spectrum, which has definitely become one of your calling cards in recent years?
BF: I love it, I have friends that are doing concertos and that’s what inspired me. It’s tough, you’re out of your comfort zone again. You’re writing for people and for instruments that you don’t exactly know how they work, you’re writing for 90 instruments. You make a lot of mistakes, but gradually I keep fixing it and figuring out how to make it better, orchestration wise. I really feel like it’s some of my hardest work, my best work. When you work on a record, you write songs for a season or you co-write with people, you put in a fraction of the amount of time you put into writing a concerto. I spent a year on one of those pieces, and when it finally came out—there was a real sense of accomplishment. That doesn’t mean it’s going to get good reviews. You do all that and you have it get slammed. You have people say, “We’re not interested in trying to bring a banjo into an orchestra. We don’t really buy the idea of the banjo fitting into the classical world.” It doesn’t matter how hard you work, you’re still going to get that. It’s a challenge I really enjoy, and I’m going to keep doing it. Part of it came out of the idea that I get to play with musicians all over the spectrum. I get to play with Indian musicians, African musicians, Scottish musicians, Irish musicians and jazz musicians. I don’t get to play with classical musicians because there is no répertoire, they can’t improvise. The real thing is, I hate the idea that there are thousands of musicians that I can’t play with because there is nothing written for us to get together and play, so that was the impetus of that idea. I’m starting to write more classical, I’m writing orchestra pieces and I’ve also written few string quartets. I’d like to just keep on putting ideas down for the rest of my life.
Your first effort as an acoustic duo with Abigail Washburn won a Grammy in the folk category. What has the process of returning to the jam/jazz world as you prepare for The Flecktones’ upcoming run been like?
BF: I wasn’t absent because I didn’t love it, other paths drew me into different territories and I felt like I was a person that could do those. I always enjoyed going out there and fighting a good fight for the banjo, trying my best to prove the banjo is a legitimate instrument outside of the bluegrass context. It’s not that I don’t love bluegrass, it’s just that it’s been unfairly quarantined. I wouldn’t play the banjo at all if it weren’t for hearing Earl Scruggs play and falling in love with that music. That hasn’t gone away, in fact, it’s probably the music I’m most comfortable in. It’s why I know exactly what to do. Starting on tour with our duo again, I’m in uncharted waters trying to make a banjo fit in there, it’s exhilarating. I’m not starting from scratch, the music that we’ve already been doing is stuff that the banjo does work in. It’s my second home, being back in bluegrass is really fun.
Have you considered using the material you wrote for some of your other projects and reworking it for the Flecktones?
BF: Occasionally we pull things in, “Big Country” was the tune I recorded with Edgar Meyer and Mike Marshall on the record Uncommon Ritual, and it ended up becoming a Flecktones standard. When I go play with The Flecktones, I don’t want to play the same music, I want to play something different. When you consider all the albums with Jeff and Howard combined, we have such a rich body of work in the Flecktones, there are eight, maybe twelve albums. We can start pulling tunes you haven’t heard or we’re interested in again and put together a great setlist. If something new pops up that feels really fun to everybody, I’m game for that too, of course we won’t have a lot of time to rehearse it. If we’re together again for a longer period, anything can happen.
Phish reissued Hoist on vinyl for the first time this spring as a Record Store Day special. Béla, could you talk about how you got involved with that record and if you have any memories with the sessions since they’re reissuing it on vinyl for the first time?
BF: The Flecktones opened for Phish at Saltair, out in Utah near Salt Lake City, which is an incredible venue that smells really bad, but it’s really fun. They invited me to sit in with them, it was really sweet. I didn’t really know them and I didn’t know their music that well, but they wanted to play bluegrass tunes. We stayed in touch, and occasionally I’d get a call, “Hey we’re coming to Nashville. Do you want to play with us?” I’d listen to them filling up these arenas with sound— this kaleidoscope music they were playing that I found to be very inspiring. They had all of these slowly unfolding rhythmic ideas that would change over the course of 10 minutes until, “How did we get from here to here?” They also have a lot of balls like, “Hey we’re going to do an opera next for this gig. We’re going to learn all of the White Album. Let’s be in front of the stage and be a bluegrass band.” They’re just really neat guys, I just became a real fan of the group and eventually they asked me to play on that record.
It’s amazing, especially when you guys first started, just the fact that you guys had a harmonica and a keyboard and you were jumping between them—let alone the banjo and what Futureman was doing was so different than so many bands out there. Now some of those instruments are a little bit more commonplace, but back then it just seemed worlds away.
HL: No one had really ever played banjo like Béla and no one played harmonica like me. Of course, not to mention, Victor, especially at the time, nobody had ever heard anyone play bass like Victor. Now there’s like 20,000 people trying to play like Victor. There are a few thousand people topping me too now. The techniques that I pioneered on the instrument are now more in the mainstream of harmonica playing that when I started. I don’t have any secrets. Victor is the same way, Béla too. That was what was so unusual about the band, we had four people who were each pioneers in different ways on their instruments and also extremely open to any kind of musical style. Between the four of us, I don’t think there is any kind of music that one of us doesn’t like. There’s no such thing as bad music, just bad musicians. People ask me what kind of music I play, I say good music.
Victor, before you joined The Flecktones, you came from an R&B background. What was your gateway into what became known as the jamband scene? Was it just playing with The Flecktones and getting these opportunities to open for The Dead or was that something that was in your orbit growing up and learning about music?
VW: In my mind there was no such thing as what we called the jamband scene although there were bands we were allowed to jam, even songs on the radio would have long intros and long instrumental sections and solos. My introduction into it was definitely through The Dead and through post Dead, meaning after Jerry died, the scene kept going. The scene emerged and the fans were looking for other bands to follow, in my awareness that is when the jamband scene really started. All of a sudden we’re allowed to jam again and the fans love it, they’re dancing to it, they’re dancing to the solos, it was nice. That was when The Flecktones were birthed pretty much, it was a nice era for The Flecktones to emerge. The jamband scene and the jamband bands allowed The Flecktones to work. H.O.R.D.E. was another big one for us, to get to do that early on, maybe even the first H.O.R.D.E. festival or tour, being around in that early scene with John Popper, Colonel Bruce Hampton, Spin Doctors, it was very, very cool to be a part of all that.
Speaking of being a mixture of sounds, you guys were one of the first bands in the modern jamband scene that really break through to a national audience. You had the opportunity to open for the Grateful Dead.
HL: We opened for the Dead on New Year’s Eve the last year they did it. It was before the Live/Dead album and that was when they were just starting to play like that I think. I used to love listening to that album when I was in my college dorm in 1969, I was listening to “Dark Star” for God sake. I was a really big fan of all that stuff. That was what’s so funny about it. When we opened for the Jerry Garcia Band— we opened for them at the Berkeley Amphitheater. The Dead was only that one New Year’s show. Jerry, maybe we opened for him twice. It was kind of a thrill for me to do it because I always loved his playing— very special. He had something kind of like Louis Armstrong in a weird way. It was just very vocal and expressive and it really spoke to people, that came out directly through his guitar. Then when he was singing, it came through his voice too. I got a kick out of meeting him and doing that album with him at the studio.
Are you planning to introduce any new material into The Flecktones’ setlist for this June run or even write new material for the reunion shows? Howard, I know you were recently in Costa Rica working on some new songs shortly before this round of June dates.
HL: The material I was working on in Costa Rica probably won’t be for The Flecktones. This run is so short that I don’t think we are doing to have any new songs, but we’re not doing all the same stuff as we did last time either. We did a ton of stuff on the Rocket Science tour, and Béla wants to do more tunes from the period of time from when I wasn’t in the band. He has a list of tunes, I picked out the ones I like the most and I’m going to have to learn them as well as relearn everything else. Some of the stuff is really complicated. Even the tunes that seem simpler have a lot of little details and twists and turns in the arrangements.
I’m also working on composing another harmonica concerto. I’m planning on doing a duo album with guitarist Chris Siebold. We’ve played together for years, he’s really great. We have a great duo as well as my band, Acoustic Express, that he’s in. Also, maybe a new CD from the Latin jazz band I’m in called Chévere de Chicago, I’ve been in that band for 37 years. We’re not that old yet, but it’s an absolute killer Latin jazz band with a lot more than Latin and jazz in it. The last album that I did put out, which came out two years ago, it’s an album of free jazz improvisations with my son on drums and an amazing bass player named Larry Grey, it’s called First Takes. It’s on my label which is Balkan Samba Records. I got a lot of projects I want to put out an album—I have four tunes arranged for big bands and harmonica and also some piano as well. It just books up. What makes The Flecktones so interesting is we have these four creative people coming together. It’s more than four very independent thinkers who like working together. That’s one of the reasons the band has a very unique sound and chemistry. The fact that we really get along well with one another, it can go in so many different directions based on who we all are as individuals.
