Bela Fleck, banjo
Michael Cleveland, fiddle
Dom Leslie, mandolin
Jake Stargil, guitar
Mark Schatz, bass
Jeff Partin, dobro
“They nearly always come back,” said Béla Fleck. “All the people that leave bluegrass. I had a strong feeling that I’d be coming back as well.”
Fleck’s album My Bluegrass Heart, was released on Renew Records in 2021 and is the return the 15-time Grammy winner is talking about – the third chapter in a decades-spanning trilogy which, by his counting, started with 1988’s Drive and continued with The Bluegrass Sessions, released eleven years later. Over the long and lauded course of his unique creative run, Fleck – the world’s premier banjo virtuoso and a celebrated musical adventurer – has both dug deep into his instrument’s complex global history and unlocked the breadth of its possibilities. My Bluegrass Heart is a homecoming in sound, to be sure.
When the endlessly curious Fleck prepared to make The Bluegrass Sessions he contemplated some other musical wanderers: “It was ten years after the Drive album, and I had been doing the Flecktones for all that time; I was coming back thinking hmm… what have I learned that I can bring back to bluegrass?” he said. “It resonated with me how Coltrane and Charlie Parker, after studying a lot of music from outside of the jazz world, brought some truly great things back to it from the outside.”
In some ways, Béla Fleck has always thought of himself as coming from the outside of bluegrass. “I don’t come from the South, and I always felt like there were people who were more truly focused on doing that bluegrass thing really well. What I tended to want to do more was expand the banjo’s role and look for new things to do with it. Despite that, I was always a bluegrass guy first and foremost. That was certainly the root of my musical soul.”
My Bluegrass Heart is vividly collaborative, and part of Fleck’s talent as a leader is encouraging his bandmates to shine. “Bela’s been a hero of mine for years now,” Sierra Hull said. “He took such a collaborative spirit with this,” she said. “He has an ability to bring out the best in people, to allow them to bring what they’re good at and let themshine.”
“In my opinion, Béla Fleck is one of the most important musicians of all time,” said Billy Strings. “He bridges the gap between bluegrass, classical, jazz, world music, and everything in between. It seems like there’s no limit to what he can achieve on the banjo.”
If the band is an amalgamation of generations, ideas and style, the songs are maybe even more so. What else would you expect from Béla Fleck?
