Bela Fleck
Bela Fleck
Béla Anton Leoš Fleckis an American banjo player. Widely acknowledged as one of the world's most innovative and technically proficient banjo players, he is best known for his work with the bands New Grass Revival and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBanjo Player
Date of Birth10 July 1958
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
knew research specific trying
I did so much research that I knew what I was getting into. I was trying to find specific musicians.
coming cool experience guys looked personal playing since together
We've been playing together since June. It's a cool experience on a personal level. They're the guys that I looked up to when I was coming up.
band gotten
I've gotten back with the band so I could get some rest!
band cd deserves recorded
The band deserves to be recorded. And we also recorded a live CD on the tour. Some day that will come out, for sure.
bluegrass created music people since study talk
It's like music theory, which was created to study what already was. Bluegrass exists, and since it's been around long enough there are people who want to talk about it,
amazingly ambitious edited far hoped might musicians nine qualities record recorded refined rough songs sort stuff unusual
It was a very ambitious trip. I have to say, to my surprise, all of our ambitions were fulfilled. All of the musicians we were going down there to record with, we recorded with?I've edited about nine or 10 songs down from the trip, and the stuff is really, really unusual and special. It far exceeds what I hoped for in sort of the refined qualities of it. I thought it might just sort of be rough stuff out in the woods. But ? some of this stuff is just amazingly fine, fine stuff.
crazy opened
They went crazy over that, and then they just opened up.
hip-hop together jam
I don't know enough about hip-hop, though I've heard some great hip-hop. I just did a thing with Qwest Love - we did a performance together in Memphis at the Folk Alliance Festival, and we had a great jam and a conversation.
thinking musical gone
I think the musical evolution I've gone through has come from all the work with the material.
should-have documentaries made
Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It's amazing what you see and what you learn.
opportunity people missing
I learned that I'm so busy with what I'm doing, so focused on what I'm doing, that I miss a lot of opportunities for interacting with people.
fighting thinking get-better
I think I'm getting better at being verbal. I used to have a lot of problems with it. I had my own little demons that I was fighting, and I used the banjo as an escape.
running land rivers
I was a big fan of a writer named Jack Vance, a science fiction writer. He always wrote about these guys who were either going down a river in a strange world or would be in this one land where people acted really strange, and he'd have these interactions with them that were strange - he'd usually get run out of town or something. Then he'd end up in the next town over where the rules were totally different. And I love this stuff.
mistake home guitar
I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn't actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake. He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.