by Bob Makin

    With their Columbia debut album, "Outbound," Bela Fleck & the Flecktones went on an extensive musical journey that they hadn't really taken before. By enlisting several guest musicians and doing more overdubs, they were able to expand upon their already extremely eclectic fusion of jazz, funk, bluegrass, world music, rock and pop.  

   The guests include folk-pop singer Shawn Colvin, Yes vocalist Jon Anderson, King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew, oboe player Paul McCandless, Medeski, Martin and Wood keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Edgar Meyer, bassoon player Paul Hanson, steel drummer Andy Narrell, Indian tabla player  Sandip Burman, Indian classical singer Rita Sahai and Tuvan throat singer Ondar.

    The Flecktones just finished a brief festival tour co-headlined by Medeski and his bandmates, bassist Chris Wood and drummer Billy Martin. Next up is "The Flecktones Big Band," live performances featuring "Outbound" guests Narrell, Hanson, Burman and McCandless, plus original Flecktones pianist/harmonica player Howard Levy (see www.flecktones.com for exact details).   

  Besides two Flecktones albums, Fleck's five-album deal with Sony Music makes him the first banjo player signed to a classical label. He'll do two albums for Sony Classical, which will involve longtime friend and collaborator and now labelmate Edgar Meyer. Fleck also will make a straightahead solo jazz album for Columbia.    

I recently spoke with Fleck, the only musician nominated for Grammys in jazz, bluegrass, pop, country, spoken word, Christian, composition and world music categories, about his all-star live and recorded gatherings. We also discussed his new deal with Sony and the musical adventure it will provide him and his bandmates: bassist Victor Wooten, synth-axe drumitar player Future Man and saxophonist Jeff Coffin.

Comment on how you made an effort with 'Outbound' to turn your fans onto some of the world's music.

    Fleck: The band has done a lot of international touring. One of the things we really like to do is play with musicians from different parts of the world. In this case with this album, we had a couple of people actually perform with the band. One was Sandip Burman, who plays the tabla. One was Ondar, a Tuvian throat singer.

    This was a record where we kind of opened up the floodgates in terms of having a community of musicians be involved with the record instead of just playing everything ourselves. So there are people all across the musical spectrum. From India, there's a great Indian vocalist, a lady by the name of Rita Sahai who was performing in Nashville when we got her involved with the record. Now we had a like a pretty serious Indian influence with all of our guests being Indian. But really it's all the kind of stuff we love. There's Irish stuff, old-time jazz in there, there's fusion.

The other interesting thing about the global sound of 'Outbound' is that it blends well with the Flecktones' eclectic sound.

    Fleck: Yeah. It's funny but it's very natural for us to play with musicians from different countries. It seems to work. And it's really fun. It's just one of those things we love to do. So at some point, we'll make a record that's really about collaborating with people from around the world.

This isn't even it yet? There's still more coming?

    Fleck: Yeah, this has some world influences, but really most of the musicians are from America. So it's mostly an Indian influence, but I also hear some Irish in one spot and there's some Latin stuff. Some things start out kind of African and move onto an Irish thing. That's the fun of it.

Irish and African are the roots of American music if you trace it all the way back.

    Fleck: Absolutely. I think it's kind of neat that the band can pull of so many different kinds of music at a pretty high level.

Comment on what each Flecktone brought to the album that was a departure for them.

    Fleck: In certain ways, what the band did was very, very natural. It came out of performing shows. We recorded the tracks like we always would, just the four of us playing together. And then we brought all the guests in and added them or collaborated with them apart from that. That was the overdubs, but we recorded the basic thing with just the four of us.    

And this time we came in a little less prepared than we often do. There was a lot of interaction with the arrangement on the spot, where normally we would have done all that on tour. We'd come home knowning exactly how much each part was going to be played and what the structure was. But this time everybody felt comfortable enough to wing it a little bit and it really made it feel fresh.

    So you have a combination here of very spontaneous tracks that came together on the spot with very thought-out overdubs and in some places, writing a string section to go with it afterwards or fleshing out a horn section based on what we did live, adding to the live thing in a produced fashion. You've got a combination of production and live playing. It's actually kind of unusual.

    The rhythm section, the banjo and the saxophone are all played like it's a live show, but all the overdubs are highly produced with parts that everybody liked. There was still a lot of improvisation, but we went into it and used the best parts. It was a long process actually, about four months. The recording of the tracks just took a couple of weeks, but then the period of mixing, editing, writing extra stuff to go with it took quite a long time, the longest we ever took.

    We used to record our records in seven days and then mix them in seven. We did that up until I guess "Live Art." But the whole point of rushing through a record doesn't make any sense anymore because now you can have a studio in your home in a garage or something. You can take your time. You don't have to rush through it because of the budget. You can just work on it until you're happy. So it can change how you make a record.

How'd you like working with Medeski in his studio in Brooklyn?

    Fleck: That was getting back to having to get to it in a hurry. I flew in that morning and he laid all that stuff down, 'Boom, boom, boom, boom.' And I flew back out. At that point there was a lot of overdubs on there already, but we really wanted to find a place for him.

In addition to Medeski and his band being on a festival tour with you, a bunch of the guests on the album are going to be playing with you live. Comment on what they'll bring to the live setting.

    Fleck: Nobody's going to play what they did on the record. We don't even want to. Everybody who we're going to have as guests on this trip has sat in with the band before. The only difference is that we're going to play this music and we've never had so many people. It'll be an eight-piece band of great musicians. We'll soak each other up. It's very exciting. I'm really looking forward to the Flecktones Big Band. It'll be a six-day run. We'll see what happens after that. We may want to bring people back in during the year. But it's very expensive to bring out that many people. The expenses shoot through the roof so this is a special event.

You'll have done about five or six festivals with Medeski, Martin and Wood. What's it been like jamming with them in the past?

    Fleck: It's really been great. One time we played with them, they all got on stage with us for the encore and we really took it out. I hope we'll do that on this trip. That's the fun thing about co-bills, not you do your show, they do their show and then everybody leaves. It's to get together. So I'm hoping that will happen. You can't make assumptions about what people will want to do, but we're certainly open to it.

At the very least, I would think that Medeski would share the stage with you on 'Hall of Mirrors' and 'Ovombo Summit.'

    Fleck: He can do anything he wants. We'll certainly make him aware that he's welcome.

You've got the Waterloo Music Festival, the Berkfest, the Grassroots Music Festival all coming after you played the Telluride, which had you on a stage packed with people.

    Fleck: Yeah, that was crazy. At Telluride, we'll always try to do something different than we did the year before. One year will pretty much be the band and then the next year we'll pretty much invite everybody and their mother on stage with us. We just want it to be different. We don't want them to know that it's going to the same thing, 'OK, here they come again' because we play there every year. We want to always be special, but this year, it was really wild because we had Bruce Hornsby, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, John Medeski, Mike Marshall and Darol Anger.

Do you think there might be a jam like that at any of these festivals with the Medeski, Martin and Wood co-bill?

    Fleck: It's definitely possible. A lot of times it's whether we feel comfortable inviting them to play, whether they invite you to play, but usually, there's some interaction. We always like that.

The co-bill with Medeski, Martin and Wood makes so much sense because you share a similar audience.

Fleck: It's nice because they have a young audience, which is unusual for someone in the jazz world. And so do we. With both, it's always a question whether we're jazz or not. That's irrelevant. The music is whatever it is. As long as the people like it. They may be even deeper into being like the Grateful Dead of jazz. They're very committed to an improvised kind of music, and they'll get out on stage and just start from scratch, which I think is very brave. We're a much more structured band. We have built a lot of musical structures that we carry around with us. There's an incredible amount of improvisation within them, but we definitely know what we're going to do when we get on stage.

    So I think there is a difference in our audience somewhat because of that, but a lot of the spirit is the same. I'm also looking forward to hearing a lot of the bands at these festivals that I haven't heard and being on the bill with them.

One of the bands that will be playing a few of the same festivals is Jazz Mandolin Project, which, like the Flecktones, expands the boundaries of jazz and bluegrass. What do you think of them?

    Fleck: I think Jamie (Masefield) is talented. He's got a lot of desire and a willingness to do what it takes to survive as a group. He's still doing it. It takes a lot of stick-tuitiveness to get an instrumental group off the ground. He's shown that kind of passion for it and it makes you take him seriously. Whenever I hear him, he's got a good band together. I respect that a lot.

Will your deal with Sony, particularly Sony Classical, enable you to collaborate more with your friends Edgar Meyer and Mark O'Connor?

    Fleck: It's always been easy to play with Edgar. Edgar and I are really kind of best friends. I haven't seen a lot of Mark in the last eight years.

Really? Because they play together a lot too.

    Fleck: Yeah, they play together. But we haven't done anything together in a quite a while.

That would be neat if the Strength in Numbers guys (also Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas) could all get together again.

    Fleck: Mark and I just haven't gravitated to anything. It has to feel right. But it definitely feels natural with Edgar and Sam and Jerry Douglas. I interact with them pretty regularly. The cool thing about this record deal is that I'm being pushed to do classical records as well as straightahead jazz stuff, not just Flecktones, as solo projects. I'll be collaborating with people in the classical world and the jazz world who I normally wouldn't get to play with. That's a real push. It's going to force me to work hard musically, to learn classical music and to find a place for the banjo in the music of the classical world and the jazz world. In the Flecktones, everything's fused and built around what I'm already playing with the kind of innovation that I'm comfortable with. But this is a different ball of wax because now it's like, 'OK, play the Bach cello piece or play Paganini's 'Perpetual Motion' or Scarlotti's sonata, play it on a banjo and play it exactly right.' That's very different.

    Edgar and I are talking about doing some things that we'll do together. And he's helping me on the classical end.

Do you think you might do a third 'Acoustic Planet' solo album?

    Fleck: Somehow I'm imagining since I may be the first banjo player signed to a classical label and a straightahead jazz label, I might try to make the banjo fit into their music more than to do the kinds of things I've already done. I'm trying to find different ways to make different kinds of records and not make the same record again.

What was the best part about your recent show with Phish in Lyons, France?

    Fleck: Definitely the way we came on. They brought us out on trampolines. They brought us all out one a time. We had a  great time. We just had the day off and showed up. We just played along.

You'll tour with Dave Matthews Band in September. What are you most looking forward to about that?

    Fleck: Well, that's always a great time for us. We've done so many shows with them now that it just feels like one big band. I love playing with those guys. Everyone in the crew is friends. It feels like coming home pretty much.

I love the way you guys work off each other with the two saxophones going at times.

    Fleck: Yeah, that's really special.

I'm really looking forward to hearing 'Earth Jam' live. What is that like with the simultaneous banjo and synth banjo and Coffin playing the double sax?

    Fleck: A lot of times we'll start the show with that. No one will be expecting him to pick up a second horn and just jam. We've been doing that about six months. That's one that took a while to come together. That's a lot of fun.

    When  you build a structure like that, there's something very impressive about it ... that it all makes sense and it all goes somewhere. That's the thing with that tune. There's lots of little places that you can do things so it's a challenge.

Are you still doing 'The Beverly Hillbillies' theme?

    Fleck: I'll do it pretty regularly as the ending of a solo piece. If we're doing two sets, we'll each do solo pieces, but if we're playing one long set, we won't. So I will improvise a great part of the solo and then come back into the ending.

Every time I see 'The Beverly Hillbillies' on Nick at Nite, I think of you and how Flatt & Scruggs' inspired you.

    Fleck: The banjo playing is so cool. That's a good example of following your muse, something that turns you on.

Having opened for the Dead with New Grass Revival and for the Jerry Garcia Band with the Flecktones, comment on what you thought of Jerry as a banjo picker.

    Fleck: I had several experiences with Jerry. The first time as with New Grass Revival on New Year's Eve, 1989. He was very sweet. Backstage, he introduced himself to me as a banjo player. I had to figure he was the reason the New Grass Revival was on that show. And that was really cool. And then the following year, the Flecktones were on tour and he invited us to open for the Jerry Garcia Band. He invited me out to play with him. His comment to me was, 'You think of things to do on the banjo that I never would have thought of.' I thought that was a nice thing to say.     Now in terms of influence, I did listen to Old and in the Way. I checked it out. It wasn't a fundamental part of my growing up.

You were more into John Hartford and, of course, Flatt & Scruggs.

    Fleck: I was into John Hartford, J.D. Crowe. But I have to say when I heard Old and in the Way, I was surprised by how good a banjo player Jerry Garcia was. I had never heard him before on banjo. And then there were certain albums where his guitar playing impressed me a lot and the writing. One was 'Blues for Allah,' where there was a lot of fusiony stuff going on. He was exploring a lot of different rhythms and so forth. So I think I was influenced by the Dead a lot of times not even knowing it, just growing up with them being a big influence. But he was very good to me and invited me to play.

Do you think he learned anything from you?

    Fleck: He wasn't really playing much banjo at the time. I encouraged him to, but he said no. The last time I saw him was with (David) Grisman and he was very shaky.

Bob Makin is an entertainment writer for Gannett NJ. Jam bands are welcome to send him material at Courier News, P.O. Box 6600, Bridgewater, NJ 08807 and email information to makinclan@aol.com