It’s certainly been a good year for live concerts with Santana at Woodstock, Billy Joel at the Garden and David Bryne on Broadway. But for pure musical genius, it would be hard to top last Friday night’s performance of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones at the humble State Theater of New Jersey in New Brunswick. To begin, there are few concert venues in the world where you can get a seat 7th row center at a premier concert for a mere 75 bucks. Gotta love that part alone!
Bela Fleck is a musician of extraordinary abilities. He crosses boundaries as easily as birds fly. Bluegrass and jazz are his mainstays, but he is so equally conversant in international, African, blues and folk that you can’t pigeonhole his style. And when he plays with his namesake band of “Flecktones”, as he has been doing for 30 years, the magic that results from a meeting of these musical minds is utterly indescribable and unique. Although each virtuoso musician has played with other groups to explore their musical ideas, they have not toured together for many years, so their current tour is a reunion tour of sorts. What is clear is that “Flecktone” music only occurs when the the musical creativity and genius of these four individuals come together.
For those not familiar with the individuals, Bela plays the banjo, Howard Levy plays harmonica and keyboards, Victor Wooten is on the bass and his brother Ray is the percussionist who plays conventional drums plus some weird “drumitar” instrument he invented 30 years ago (hence his nickname “Future Man”). To call their music jazz is not adequate, except that the hallmark of jazz is improvision, which they all do with exceptional ability. They certainly rock out, but one almost never keeps time with them on the downbeat. They more typically use the syncopation time signature of jazz although, as I have said, they are stylistically all over the map. They even dabbled in seasonal Christmas music, but not surprisingly, in their cerebral Flecktone kind of way. For example, they did the “Twelve Days of Christmas” but with a Flecktone twist. Each day was done in a different key
and a different time signature. As Bela said from the stage, “even the Rolling Stones would never attempt this, Springsteen would never do this” and then had some fun with it as he named 6 other groups who not only wouldn’t do it, but wouldn’t even think of it. Of course, the Flecktones did it as easily as we would sing Jingle Bells (which they also played- but in a more pure jazz version).
Each musician individually is a standard bearer for the art of their respective instruments. Levy is not just an incredibly talented jazz pianist, but the finest jazz harmonica player I have ever heard (that includes the great Toots Thielman, Antoinio Serrano and others). Victor Wooten is (along with Dave Holland) arguably the greatest jazz bassist on the planet. Future Man is an obscenely talented percussionist who I still can’t figure out how he gets the sounds he makes on his strange drumitar. And Bela is Bela. Listen and weep.
These guys not only made great music, but they had fun doing it. (Bela took out his iPhone, placed it on his amp, and Facetimed his son at home in Nashville so he could watch him perform. (Cute, although my guess is that it was not the first time they pulled off that trick).
The audience loved all of it, and of course wouldn’t let him leave the stage without an encore that included his most famous piece “Flight of the Cosmic Hippo” where Victor’s solo almost melted the stage. They’re mostly on the East coast for the last few months of their tour, but if at all possible, don’t miss them. Music making like this doesn’t come around very often.
