Béla Fleck Albums (25)
'Melody of Rhythm: Triple Concerto & Music for Trio'
Release Date 8/25/2009
Tracks 9
Label Koch
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Béla Fleck wasn't done after his world music extravaganza Throw Down Your Heart, Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3: The Africa Sessions. Those groundbreaking explorations led to the forming of this group and yet another collaboration, The Melody of Rhythm: Triple Concerto & Music for Trio, which teams him with cellist/bassist Edgar Meyer and the mighty Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain. The trio collaborates here with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra directed by maestro Leonard Slatkin. Fleck and Meyer had been playing together on and off for 26 years at the time of this recording, and had previously composed a double concerto for banjo and cello for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in 2004. They were commissioned by the same orchestra to create a triple concerto in 2006. They decided on Hussain as a collaborator for this set, and performed "The Melody of Rhythm" with the NSO conducted by Slatkin. This is the debut recording of the work and it is augmented by other incidental music either inspired by the original piece or derived directly from it. The DSO, Slatkin's new home, recorded it in 2009. As for the music? What's not to like? Its three movements over 28 minutes are a spacious, wide-ranging, beautifully paced concerto with the trio interacting on its own quite intently and with the DSO not as individual instrumentalists, but as a group in dialogue with the orchestra. Jazz, Indian folk forms, classical music, Appalachian folk, progressive instrumental music, and something utterly new emerge for the listener. "The Melody of Rhythm" is preceded by three compositions. "Babar," which opens the set, is a wandering Eastern European folk song meeting near Asian folk forms. "Out of the Blue" is a work that combines elements of Gypsy swing, Indian classical music, and mountain blues. There are three pieces that follow the concerto as well; most notable among them is the haunting closer, "Then Again," with its high-neck modal explorations by Fleck answered contrapuntally by Meyer and covered in differing textures and tempos by Hussain. This CD is a stellar buy, because it showcases two entirely different faces of this group: one that plays a scripted work in the context of interacting with a much larger ensemble, and as what can only be called a new kind of improvising jazz trio that can work from a set composition and travel far and wide in sound, texture, and color. Bravo. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Grammy-winning banjo "fusionist" Béla Fleck and his Flecktones may be the most qualified collective to inject some life into the notoriously monotonous "holiday music" scene, and Jingle All the Way (one would think that an innovator like Fleck could come up with a more creative "Christmas" album title, or at least one that doesn't directly reference a 1996 Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy), doesn't disappoint. All of the standards are here ("Sleigh Ride," "Silent Night," "Twelve Days of Christmas"), but they're filtered through the skewed prism of an outfit capable of just about anything from klezmer, to classical to Tuvan throat singing -- the latter is provided by the internationally acclaimed Alash Ensemble. It's not all wacky though, as Fleck, Victor Wooten, Jeff Coffin, and Future Man prove reverent when needed, especially on a cover of Joni Mitchell's "River" and the Vince Guaraldi classics "Linus and Lucy" and "Christmas Time Is Here." Jingle All the Way, despite its groaner of a title and questionable "frontman in Santa hat with eggnog" photo, is anything but predictable. ~ James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Nearly three years since the outrageous exercise in self-indulgence that was the three-disc Little Worlds, Béla Fleck & the Flecktones come back to the marketplace with The Hidden Land. The former outing was so excessive that Sony issued a single-disc sampler from the set hoping it would sell. Thankfully, the new set is a single disc, and for fans of the band there is plenty here to delight. The fusion of instrumental musics here -- jazz, bluegrass, funk, classical, and some global sounds is called by Fleck "serious Flecktones." It feels serious. For starters, the quartet dig into Bach's Preludes and Fugues (No. 20 in A Minor) to kick things off. It's a classic piece of the Flecktones wearing the original enough to make it their own. It's entertaining only for the sound of Fleck's 1937 Gibson Mastertone banjo. Much more compelling is "Labyrinth," a winding, knotty journey through jazz and improvisation -- the funk undertones of the piece are carried by Victor Wooten's gnarly bass line. But even here, Future Man's "Synth-Axe Drumitar" and his vocals -- poorly aping Naná Vasconcelos' glorious wordless singing from Pat Metheny's earlier recordings -- are more than what's really necessary. What moves this cut is Jeff Coffin's wondrous tenor playing. "Kaleidoscope"'s knotty blend of bluegrass riffing between Fleck and Coffin is stomping and beautiful, though it gets bogged down in fusiony nonsense on the choruses. But the moving playing in the bridge between the aforementioned pair over the skittering acoustic drums and programmed Drumitar keeps it grounded even when the piece becomes more abstract toward the end. The lyrical abstraction on the ballad "Who's Got Three" is amorphous but eerie and beautiful. It slips directly into the nearly straight-ahead swinging jazz of the horribly titled "Weed Whacker." The musical ideas here are, as usual, endless, which doesn't make it a great record. There are simply so many things vying for attention, seeking to make themselves known here, that a few less would have made individual compositions stand out more. The wandering, perhaps meandering, minor-key Middle Eastern flavor of "Chennai" works well because it's not cluttered and has distinctly different phases. The funky "Subterfuge" is just plain boring, and "Misunderstood" is just a mess, a mishmash of half-baked ideas couched in a ballad. As the "Whistle Tune," closes the album with Fleck just wrangling his Celtic-styled banjo playing transcendentally with Coffin's whistles and Wooten's pared bassing atop a simple drum track, we are rooted once more into the basis of the Flecktones' musical universes, not their metaverse. It's not that complexity and a multiplicity of ideas is a bad thing; quite the opposite, but knowing when to reign them in and make the music sing is another thing. This record sings only in a couple of places. The rest is "serious Flecktones." Perhaps this determination is simply not for most of us. It's easy to accept that, especially when those serious Flecktones fans will be debating individual musical passages until the next album is released. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Banjo player supreme Béla Fleck and bassist Edgar Meyer make for a fascinating and daring duo, and they appear to be at their best live, as this esoteric disc shows. While there are plenty of original compositions from both pens, they also tackle several pieces by Bach, a wonderful Henry Eccles sonata, and some Miles Davis -- gadding about all over the shop. It works primarily because they put no restrictions on the possibilities of the instruments, but sheer skill certainly helps, from the wicked alacrity of "Bug Tussle" to the near competition of "Woolly Mamouth." There's even a delicious sense of humor, as "Wrong Number" is interrupted by what seems to be an errant cell phone -- but which turns out to be a sample that returns and returns to act like a punctuation in the piece. Meyer takes to the piano for part of "Palmyra," proving surprisingly adept, while Fleck shows his chops to full effect on "The One I Left Behind." For this album he depends more on virtuosity than any electric trickery, and he's good enough to pull it off with no problem, as on "The Lake Effect." Meyer is more than a foil, though; he looms large throughout, whether plucking or bowing the bass. However you want to categorize this disc, it's music of the highest order. ~ Chris Nickson, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Super-jazz freakout bluegrass picker Béla Fleck's broad three-CD concept album has ambitious intentions, but ultimately ends up feeling a bit scattered. The idea seems to have been to record an album that sounds like sitting in a car and flipping through radio stations -- hearing snippets of hip-hop, Chinese opera, Irish folk, Hawaiian ukulele, mid-'80s funk, and, of course, bluegrass and jazz, then expanding that experience out to three entire discs. If any group on the planet could pull this off, it could only be Fleck and his Flecktones, but the concept (being as convoluted as it is) makes for a rather uneven listen. The bright and jazzy "Puffy" neatly bridges the gap between contemporary jazz and new acoustic music, and tabla, Irish harp, and even theremin meld nicely on the genre-spanning "Sleeper." On the flip side, the bizarro hip-hop version of Flatt & Scruggs' "Ballad of Jed Clampett" never needed to be recorded, and many of the songs seem cluttered and over-tweaked, almost as if during production the band reasoned that the addition of more instruments and more synthesized sounds could only enhance the music. The addition of nearly everyone they knew -- including Bobby McFerrin, several of the Chieftains, Nickel Creek, and even the lady from the Chinese restaurant down the street -- only adds to the confusion.It seems as though Fleck will never run out of ideas, and taken one at a time, the majority of the songs have obvious merit, but as each of the songs drift from centuries-old Indian percussion into one of Future Man's synth-axe drumitar jams, it sounds a little too disjointed and almost "quirky for quirky's sake." "Say, what if we mixed digeridoo with an electric synth banjo?" "Well, OK...but only as long as I can have a gong solo!" Sorry fellas, but just because the instruments exist doesn't mean they all need to show up in the same song. Still, every note is impeccably played and pristinely recorded, and those Flecktones fans who like to pull apart their extremely technical pieces of music, analyze them, and put them back together will find hours of rabid discussion on Little Worlds. [Sony also released a stripped-down, ten-song version of the project called Ten From Little Worlds.] ~ Zac Johnson, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Ten From Little Worlds is a sort of a sampler of Béla Fleck & the Flecktones' three-CD-long concept album, Little Worlds. While the full work seems a little disjointed and too expansive, the ten-song collection is a little more digestible. The idea for the project seems to have been to record an album that sounds like sitting in a car and flipping through radio stations -- hearing snippets of hip-hop, Chinese opera, Irish folk, Hawaiian ukulele, mid-'80s funk, and, of course, bluegrass and jazz, then expanding that experience out to three entire discs. If any group on the planet could pull this off, it could only be Fleck and his Flecktones, but the concept (being as convoluted as it is) makes for a rather uneven listen. The bright and jazzy "Puffy" neatly bridges the gap between contemporary jazz and new acoustic music, but the unfortunate hip-hop version of Flatt & Scruggs' "Ballad of Jed Clampett" never needed to be recorded. It seems as though Fleck will never run out of ideas, and on this more accessible ten-track sampler the majority of the songs seem to work well together. This could be because Sony selected more tuneful tracks for the sampler, or simply because ten songs of experimental, genre-bending jazz/world fusion is easier to handle than the nearly 30 on the full-length. Every note is impeccably played and pristinely recorded, and for those Flecktones fans who like to pull apart their extremely technical pieces of music, analyze them, and put them back together, ten tracks will probably not be enough. For the rest of the music-buying populace, ten songs may even be too much. ~ Zac Johnson, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Anyone who saw the Flecktones in their early days probably told you that it was an amazing experience, and a big part of that praise undoubtedly focused on the group's improvised jams. With Victor Wooten sometimes playing two basses simultaneously and Fleck wandering through the audience picking cosmic banjo lines, their shows were spectacles to be enjoyed for the simple thrill of hearing virtuosos play music that was mind-boggling but somehow utterly accessible. It's sad, then, that the group's live albums, while preserving the energy, have never quite captured the humor of those early shows. Many fans could relay stories of Fleck and Wooten's astounding call-and-response duels, which could incorporate anything from Tchaikovsky to full-throttle bluegrass breakdowns. The rapport was hilarious, and it endeared people to a group who might otherwise go down as whimsical showoffs. However, while the old shows may be legendary, the new ones aren't bad either, and the above isn't meant to say that Live at the Quick is a bad album; actually, there's plenty of stuff that Flecktones fans love, including Wooten's now-trademark arrangement of "Amazing Grace" and a Bach "Prelude" from Fleck's classical music projects. The concert was recorded with the Flecktone Big Band and features guest appearances from Paul McCandless, Andy Narell, Paul Hansen, tabla player Sandip Burman, and Tuvan throat singer Congar ol'Ondar. All that makes Live at the Quick the band's most diverse record yet, and fans of Fleck's post-Acoustic Planet work will be amply rewarded. ~ Jim Smith, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck has certainly broken more boundaries than any other picker in recent memory, from his early days performing bluegrass-inspired folk compositions on Rounder in the late '70s to his quirky jazz freak-outs with the Flecktones throughout the '90s. In late 2001, this peculiar innovator released an album of banjo interpretations of classical works by Bach, Chopin, and Scarlatti. Before classical purists roll their eyes, they must remember that the banjo hasn't always been seen as the instrument of choice of backwoods musicians in the Appalachian mountains, but as recently as the 1940s was used as a primary rhythm instrument in all manner of parlor music. That being said, Perpetual Motion is a bright and unique take on several well-known classical pieces (Moonlight Sonata, Bach's Cello Suite No. 1) as well as a number of interpretations of Bach's two-part and three-part inventions. These light and brief inventions act as buffers between the longer, more dramatic pieces, but end up serving as some of the highlights of the album. With Fleck often accompanied by Evelyn Glennie on marimba and Appalachia Waltz musicians Joshua Bell and Edgar Meyer on violin and bass, these short, delicate pieces weave in and out of the album, proving that the banjo can be seen in a different light altogether. Fleck's picking is uniquely unparalleled in that he can so easily dip his feet into so many different genres with an instrument that is so quickly pigeonholed. The album drifts easily into the background, which is not necessarily a detraction but, knowing the fire that Fleck can unleash from his fingertips, it would have been nice to have a few more impassioned numbers on the album. The closest the ensemble comes to really making some noise is the final track, Paganini's Moto Perpetuo (arranged in a bluegrass style), which is not necessarily more forceful, but is certainly faster and louder. ~ Zac Johnson, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
After a decade with Warner Bros., Béla Fleck jumped to Sony's Columbia Records, signing a five-record deal that called for two releases on Sony Classical, a solo album, and two discs with his band the Flecktones of which Outbound is the first. It is a typically eclectic effort. For example, the Fleck original "Shuba Yatra" (its title, he explains in the press materials, "is an Indian term that means taking a journey with a safe return") features a tabla player and Fleck on a "sitar banjo," an electrified instrument with a banjo head and a sitar bridge. Such instruments give the tune something of an Indian flavor, except that much of it is borrowed from traditional Irish music with a touch of South African rhythm. Such odd juxtapositions of instrumentation and style are typical not only from track to track but also within tracks. Fleck and his bandmates seem to view all styles of music as readily and randomly interchangeable, but sometimes, as with a colorblind person picking out clothes, the results clash or otherwise disturb, and the rest of the time they come off as flashy and insubstantial. Fleck really offers no defense to the charge of being a musical dilettante, he simply celebrates the surface pleasures of different varieties of music, offering an overlapping series of appetizers. A fan of any particular style is liable to feel that it has been trivialized, but Fleck doesn't mean any harm. His music represents the pursuit of facileness as a musical goal, one that he and his band achieve with alacrity. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
'The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 2'
Release Date 6/22/1999
Tracks 18
Label Warner Bros.
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
As it turns out, the Tales From the Acoustic Planet albums are where Béla Fleck sounds the most comfortable in the '90s. As his jazz fusion records begin to sound played out, his acoustic experimentation and returns to straight-ahead bluegrass sound lively, vibrant, and fresh. As a matter of fact, The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales From the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 2 feels like one of his finest albums, due in no small part to the caliber of supporting musicians. The core band consists of Fleck, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Tony Rice, and Mark Schatz, while Vassar Clements, John Hartford, and Earl Scruggs all guest; it's a veritable who's-who of bluegrass. Fleck's idea was to record everything from the purest bluegrass to modern newgrass, giving his talented musicians the opportunity to explore every facet of their musical personality. Much of the album is devoted to Fleck originals, complimented by a handful of covers, none of which are predictable. The same can be said for the music: Even seasoned newgrass listeners will probably be surprised by some of the twists and turns here, while the sheer commitment and astonishing musicianship will win over traditionalists. But the true key to The Bluegrass Sessions is that even when it gets technical, it feels heartfelt, and the textures keep changing from song to song, enough to keep it interesting, even captivating, throughout 18 songs and 70 minutes. It had been easy to take Fleck for granted, but this record is a welcome reminder of what a talented and unique musician he is. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
