Interview With Béla Fleck
As published in Banjo Newsletter, February, 2014
Béla Fleck is still at the top of his game. Look at his recent album releases — My Bluegrass Heart, As We Speak, Rhapsody in Blue, and Remembrance with Chick Corea — an astoundingly creative and technical output. During the pandemic, I assisted Béla in publishing a transcription book of the compositions from My Bluegrass Heart. Becasue of that process, along with co-editor and transcriber Adam Larrabee, I peeked into the drive, level of detail, and depth of technique in his music. I am all the more impressed by this musician. I plan to write more about Béla’s music in upcoming missives, and I start with this interview with Béla for Banjo Newsletter (BNL) ten years ago.
(I’d write some of the intro below differently today, but my analogy below with Jiro Dreams of Sushi is still apt).
Béla Fleck’s new album “The Imposter” offers a beautiful window into what he has been up to since we last checked in with him at Banjo Newsletter in 2009. Obviously Béla has been working hard, as that has been true since he first picked up the banjo at 15 years old. At this point with over a dozen Flecktone albums, and ventures into classical, jazz (with the Marcus Roberts Trio), a duet with Chick Corea, and numerous collaborations with artists from around the world, Béla has accumulated Grammies in more categories than any other artist in history. Béla’s contributions to the 5-string banjo are countless, and truthfully his contributions to the musical world are unending. There are few arenas in music that he has not touched upon with verve, ambition, and high-minded artistic goals. As you will read, Béla always keeps the music front and center, and will opt for playing, collaborating, and keeping things musically fresh for him rather than following a path to a larger paycheck. This interview offers a window into Béla’s dedication and astounding work ethic.
I recently saw the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” which is a beautiful portrayal of a master sushi chef’s dedication and his passion to be the best every day. It shows the constant work, the constant struggle, and the sheer energy and devotion involved to stay on one’s A-game. In our world, many people throw around the term ‘talent’ as if it is something you just inherit, or some people get the luck of the draw. As has been shown, truthfully, talent is overrated, and the reality is that top musicians work harder. Despite all life’s challenges, the special individuals are able to stay focused on that one goal, to eschew distractions, and to continue to create. A favorite Chris Thile quote of mine is, “Lightning strikes lighting rods,” meaning being in the position to capture those moments, to constantly hone one’s craft to be receptive to
For those unfamiliar, a “concerto” is a musical work usually composed in three movements, in which (typically) one solo instrument (for instance, a piano, violin, cello, flute, mandolin or banjo) is accompanied by an orchestra. Traditionally, the three movements are fast-slow-fast, yet Béla describes these three as, “peppy, moody and hyper.”
In August, Béla and I had a chance to discuss this new project, life as a father, and what’s next for the First Family of Banjo.
Jake Schepps: First of all, congratulations. Both on the concerto and the new baby!
Béla Fleck: It is a beautiful time. Juno is almost 4 months.
BNL: And the new album “The Impostor” is a fantastic work. I have been fortunate enough to see the Concerto twice, once at the premiere and then again when you came to Denver. It was then great to hear it on album and dig into it a little deeper.
BF: So you are getting to know it, and on the album you can relax into it, and really get to know it. There are lots of tricky and subtle thematic developments in parts of the piece. You might not even know that one theme might be a bass line in another section, or slowed way down in another part. I tried to do some of that, but I didn’t go as crazy with it as I don’t have the skills.
BNL: Starting with the string quartet, “Night Flight Over Water,” I have seen Brooklyn Rider a couple times, and was floored by their rendition of the Debussy Quartet. They are a stunning ensemble, and your piece with them is exceptional. What did you listen to in order to find inspiration?
BF: I listened to a bunch of string quartet music, and I can remember jogging on a trail in Telluride listening to some Shostakovich, which I did not know very well, but what I found was that whenever I was getting ready to write something, I should listen to something that I didn’t know very well. Not necessarily to get the influence of the music, but to open my mind up creatively. There were times when I was writing the concerto I would go jogging on the beach and listen to stuff that I knew was great, but I didn’t have familiarity with, like a lot of Béla Bartók’s music, or some of the Brahm’s material. It is all such fantastic stuff. Since I didn’t know it, it would just generally open my mind up, and I would often stop and give myself voice messages with ideas. Some that had nothing to do with the music I just heard, but had to do with being open. I always tell people that if they want to write music, they need to write when they are inspired. And a great time to write is right after listening to someone you love. For a long time I really loved Sting, and when he had a new album out I would wait to listen to that album when I knew I was going to have some time to write afterwards, because I knew it would open up my mind to some new music. I wouldn’t copy it; it would just inspire new ideas in me. It is like a window, and it closes quickly, so if you go hear something and you are knocked out by it, you’ve got juice for maybe a few hours, a day at the most, then you go back to your normal closed up space. So the flower opens up for a little while, and there is all this juice that comes out of it, but it is going to close back up if you don’t perpetually listen to new things. It is not so much that you have to love them all, they just have to be things that you are not so familiar with that you are just going to your same place all the time.
BNL: Can you give me an example? If you were listening to a concerto, what kind of voice memo would you leave yourself?
BF: For example, I was listening to a Bartók violin concerto—I think the first one. And there was all this crazy stuff, then a beautiful melody popped out for just a few bars, but then it went back to all this crazy stuff. I thought it was such a great idea. It is like a flower growing in the city in between the cracks in the cement. So then I realized that you can write all this jarring music, and it can be used only to make the beautiful melody more beautiful. So I didn’t have to go steal Bartók’s melody, but use the concept. I could make believe it was a city block, with dirt in between, and as the blocks go along, the blocks are smaller and there is more and more dirt, and have the melody get bigger and bigger as the measures go along. And then there was one day I was in a coffee shop near the beach where I was writing, and they were playing some Professor Longhair, and I got this New Orleans thing in my head and started writing that day, but I was writing orchestral music. I wasn’t trying to take his music; I was just inspired by it. I thought, “What could I do with that riff?” and tried to think about chords and harmony that is not normally in the music he does, but I could do with an orchestra. Many times if you are writing things out, you can conceive of things that are much more complicated. If you put the piece of paper in front of those classical musicians, they are just going to play it. It is not going to be any big deal. They are just going to work, and they pick up their instruments and play it. So I found it is about how much I can set up that is meaningful to the listener ahead of time. Because once I get there, there is nothing you can do except try to get them to learn it, and play the piece as well as they can play it. One of the Brahms pieces started with this very moody, ethereal and weird sound and it gave me a lot of ideas for the second movement. The alternating solo banjo with a very spooky and ethereal string part.
BNL: Did you spend time transcribing at all? Or look at scores?
BF: I can’t read the stuff, and I was not going to have time to suddenly learn how to read music, so I had to everything in a ‘figure it out for yourself’ -type method. I did not have time to study harmony, form or structure. I really didn’t want to do it like other people do it anyways. I wanted to base it on my natural sense of how I like music to be—how I like my music to be. So the same sorts of things that might make a Flecktones record come out well, or a bluegrass record like “Drive” or “Bluegrass Sessions,” I wanted to apply that sort of musicality (which is basically what I have to offer) to this music, rather than to suddenly act like I was one of them. Which leads you to the title. I am not a classical composer. And if I am, it is that you bend the rules to allow it to happen however it needs to happen for each writer.
BNL: Back to the Concerto, I have read that you would write out a line in banjo tablature in Sibelius, and then transpose it into an oboe staff, or a bassoon staff. Is that accurate?
BF: That was a way to do direct melodies that were fast, as I could write them out very quickly before I forgot them. Another thing I would do is to sing melodies onto my phone, which would take a couple minutes, and then I would spend 4 hours trying to transcribe them, especially if they were complicated. And then once I had them in banjo tablature or notation on the screen, then I could start moving them around, changing tempo, changing pitches, looking for harmonies, etc. But I am pretty good at working in Sibelius now. The banjo tablature is great, and I know how to deal with its problems and its flaws. Honestly, you don’t want an orchestra to play fast banjo lines very often. In fact it is very rare you would want them to play stuff like that. But I know the banjo, and I have my musical thoughts on the banjo, and know that I want these notes. I can put them on a banjo stave, or a melody that I write out on a banjo stave, that is not banjo sounding at all, but it is on a banjo. Like a simple song idea, write the melody on the banjo tablature stave, then copy that and paste it on the violin stave, and boom I have it there. I can then duplicate it and copy it onto another instrument, change the pitches to come up with a harmony, or I can drag the pitches around and make them into counterpoints. Each time I’d listen to it I might think, “That sucks” and go back and change it. I have gotten good at throwing whatever note anywhere on the stave, and just pull it up and down until I heard a dissonance or a harmony that I liked and then build a part out of that dissonance. And I didn’t have to know what any of the notes were, because of how the software works. It is like sitting down at the piano and playing along with a record if you don’t know how to play the piano. You move your hand around till you find the right notes you like. Any little kid could do that. Basically I was composing as if I was a little kid, but using my years of being a musician and my musical point of view to sculpt the parts. Honestly I would say that it is quite a bit like producing an album, like I used to do for Maura O’Connell. We would record a track and she would sing. Then someone would come if to play another part, and they would try some stuff. I would say, “Well that’s pretty good, but why don’t you try this?” And I would start singing them lines that I wanted them to play. I didn’t know what the notes were, but I knew what I had in my head. I did that with myself, as though I was producing myself on different parts. I have the melody already written, so I would sing along till I found something I liked, and then I’d try to write it down. Then I would listen to it, and if I didn’t like it I would start messing with it until I finally liked it. And when I liked it, it was done. But the other thing to keep in mind is that if you add one part, it is going to affect all the other parts. It became a process that I’d add something, and then I would have to adjust everything else to fit it. Or it might even become the melody, and then I would have to turn the other parts that might be busy into simpler parts. It was a constant shuffling and reshuffling every time I added something. That’s not the way composers do it, but I felt that it doesn’t matter how I do it, it matters how it ends up. It goes back to the great Peter Wernick quote, “If it sounds good it is good.” I thought about that a lot as I was on this process. Because I don’t have the process down, I was hoping to make my weaknesses at composing into strengths by going for a lot of what I hear in my head versus what I should be writing or any of the rules of harmony.
BNL: Were there specific instruments in the symphony that were hard to write for? Maybe ones you had no experience with.
BF: I wrote some challenging parts for some of the instruments, not knowing if they could do them. In general they could, but it took some work for them. And I have also noticed that playing with different orchestras that one may have an astonishing bass clarinet player, but the next orchestra might not have one. And so all those featured bass clarinet parts might really suffer on those days. Also, since I am a soloist, sometimes the principle players will skip the concertos, and a lot of the strongest players will sit them out and wait to play the material that will have more challenging material. But they don’t realize that I actually wrote some pretty challenging stuff.
BNL: Is there a section that is most challenging for symphonies?
BF: Yes, there is a set of them. In fact now that I have done the piece 12 times, I have a set of notes that I give the conductor with specific measures to work on, knowing they are always a problem, no matter who the orchestra is. Knowing where the problems are means we can really maximize our rehearsal time, which is such a huge premium. The other day I played the piece with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and they are one of the top orchestras in the world. I only had an hour-long rehearsal with them so it is very important I knew where that rehearsal time needed to be spent. We could get the first movement sounding great and use up the hour, and then hit the third movement and hit a brick wall. Even the best orchestra in the world couldn’t sight read that movement. They would have to spend that time to work on it. What works really well is to have a full rehearsal, which is 2.5 hours, then a dress rehearsal the next day. The piece can be played pretty well by most orchestras, even student orchestras, with that amount of time.
BNL: What are the hard parts?
BF: There is a very fast riff on the violins at the beginning of the second movement that they always struggle with. They need to play it a few times before. There is a section in the second movement that are groups of 5 notes in the space of 4 (or 2), and they always get that juxtaposition of how those 5’s go against the measure wrong. There has to be some rehearsal time so they understand it, because it fits into a beat. It is not that hard, it is just that they don’t know it. If they knew it like the classic works they have played a million times and they grew up listening to, it would be child’s play for them. But they don’t know it, and they are hearing it for the first time at rehearsal. I actually have to inspire them at rehearsal to care about the piece. It is 80 people that could give a crap about it in general. Maybe 20 of them might know my music, if I am lucky, and to the rest of them it is just some banjo player and something the orchestra decided to do that they had no say in. When it is time for me to play all my parts, and I am flawless and sounding great, that gets their attention. Then they start to care about sounding great themselves and then we have a good rehearsal and the piece sounds really good. I consider the rehearsals to be performances, they are as important to me as the performance. Because without a good rehearsal, at least on my part, it is not going to be a good performance. So I have to be on my game. It is a 36-minute piece, and it is all memorized, and it is hard stuff.
BNL: It is super hard! The cadenza in the 3rd Movement is some of the most astounding banjo music I have ever heard. It is just incredible.
BF: Well that cadenza had to be incredible. It had to be. If you listen to the great concertos, they all feature unbelievable cadenzas by the violinists or pianists, or whatever instrument is featured. The ones that people still talk about, and the ones that still get performed have unbelievable playing in them. So the bar is very high. It could not be half-assed. I had to be sure that it was really solid and strong; it had to be eye opening. That is the moment when a concerto succeeds or not. But when finally the orchestra stops and the soloist shows what he’s got. I felt it was as important as anything I have ever tried to compose or perform.
BNL: I was very impressed that you had so much more to show and bring to the table in that setting. You have written so much music, performed and improvised a lot. Here was a whole new deck of cards that you showed.
BF: This is the great thing about composing. When you write a nice banjo tune, and it has some nice parts to it, and that takes a certain amount of time. And then when you improvise a solo, you do that in real time, and you are going to do certain kinds of things, and if you are lucky you are going to find some stuff you have never played before. Or in the modern age, you might overdub a bunch of times and get some stuff you have never played before. But here, spending months and months looking over this stuff with a magnifying glass, and thinking, “Okay, I came up with this, what could I do with it? How can I do this backwards? What if I turn it upside down? Can these themes go with each other? Can I alternate melodies? One measure of one then another? What other creative things can I do?” Normally, if I wasn’t spending 6 months on the same piece, every day I might come up with a new banjo tune, or a new little idea. Instead, on this piece, every day I would spend a few hours putting more time into the same piece. So the yield was like piling energy on top of energy on top of energy, all in the same piece. Some music can’t bear that, and some music doesn’t need that and would be hurt by thinking intently about every note. And then some music can handle it, and actually needs it. And people usually take this kind of time to write music like this. From beginning to end of the first draft, which was most of the writing, was under 6 months. I was also on a full touring schedule with the Flecktones. Most people were surprised at how fast I did it, while I feel like it was the most time I ever spent on anything. I was talking to Steve Martin and he said, “Sometimes you don’t know how much is already in your head until you start writing.” He has written books and screenplays and things that he didn’t know what he was going to do, but when he sat down to write it and all of a sudden a week later and it was done. And he hadn’t ever even moved from the table. I think there for me are a lot of pent up ideas and intensity that I wanted to do this really well, ever since I saw Edgar Meyer play his first concerto in the early 90’s I have been thinking, “I’m going to have to do this one day.” And then watching Mark O’Connor, Chris Thile, and Zakir Hussain all do their first ones. I might think, “Oh, that wasn’t a very good ending,” or “You should have done this.” It is something very different when I am in the hot seat. I felt like I had to prove that I could do it, and it had to be really good. So I was fighting for my life the whole time.
BNL: What I hear a lot of in there are these minor seconds and major seconds using open strings. Is that accurate?
BF: Yeah, I like that sound. It is in a lot of my music, and the reason I like it so much it that it is one of the things that is very easy for the banjo to do, and very hard for most other instruments to do. Minor and major seconds and clusters are in the basic DNA of the banjo. Anywhere you put your hand down you can find them. That is not true of the guitar; the tuning is wider. And the tuning of the 5th string, and the fact that the 1st and 2nd strings are only a minor third apart mans you have 3 half steps right under your hand. It is very hard to get three half steps on a guitar or violin or cello. There might only be one or two positions where you can get that. But piano is different. Anywhere on a piano you can get that, but banjo is more like a piano that way than any of the other fretted instruments, So to me, a that is one of the strengths of the banjo tuning, and you should use it, because not every instrument can do it.
BNL: Do you have more classical writing planned?
BF: I am doing a tour with Brooklyn Rider, and all I have is this 25-minute piece from the album, but we are going to do two hour long sets. So I am writing feverishly now—actually a fairly major piece that I am about 10 minutes into. But it is not with the same intensity because we are going to perform it, but it is not going to be recorded anytime that I know of. I am doing some arranging of some Flecktone tunes for them, and the I dug out an old piece that I wrote with Edgar Meyer for banjo and string quartet. We might do some of that. And we are going to do some of their material (which is great material) and I am going to have to learn how to play that. I want to write now, and am excited about writing. When I finished up writing those two big pieces and went back to coming up with little ideas and putting them on my voicemail, or writing little banjo tunes and taping them, I felt like I was wasting a lot of my time because I wanted to have a big piece to put all that energy into instead of coming up with a thousand little fragments of things, and each one of them I could build into a tune. But I already have a lot of tunes. So why not go build something, and put all that energy into growing something, and I have been waiting for the impetus to get that started and this tour is starting that again. And it a lot of fun, at least for me.
I wanted to say something else about the Brooklyn Rider process that fascinated me. I was writing for Brooklyn Rider second so I had all the experience with the orchestra. One of the difficult things about an orchestra is that some of them are 100 feet apart so they are all following the conductor, who is the arbiter of the time. He shows everyone where the beat is, because you can’t hear each other out there in the orchestra. You have to watch him. In my opinion that is a dysfunctional way of playing music, especially given what I am used to with the Flecktones or any bluegrass band. Or even a string quartet where you are so close you can hear each other really well, and if you are really listening you can do really precise moves together. With an orchestra, it is a lot more guess work and a lot more watching the conductor and playing the way he tells you to, rather than using your ear. But when you write for a string quartet, it goes back to like being in a bluegrass band where you all listen to each other. And if someone is rushing, you can say, “Hey, you are rushing.” Or if somebody misses something you can say, “Hey, lets fix that part.” And you don’t have the same rehearsal time issues, as you don’t have time to fix everything with an orchestra because there are so many people to manage, so little time, and it costs so much to have that rehearsal. So with a string quartet I thought I could right much more rhythmic stuff and much more complicated stuff and they would be able to adjust as there is no conductor. So I wrote a bunch of sketches, I had maybe 13 different sketches with each a couple minutes long. Stuff I thought might be good banjo/string quartet music. And I took it up to Brooklyn, New York, and I showed it to them. We sat and played through all these sketches one afternoon and they made them all sound great! I thought I might find 3 sketches that work and I would build my piece out of those, and instead I discovered that they could make almost anything sound good. They are so good, they read so well, they have a sensibility that is very open and they listen to a lot of music. If I said, “Well, I want this to have an African feel, they know what I mean.” Or if I want a little bit of a bluegrass feel they know what I mean. So then I took the parts of those 13 sketches and did the same sort of process I did with the concerto and started to stitch things together. I monkeyed with everything until I found the shape, and then fleshed things out and kept on trying stuff until I thought I had a good structure. Then we went up and performed it at a workshop in Stillwater, Minnesota and got a run-through which I recorded. I took it home and did some rewriting, and looked for flaws and some reworking, and then the next time we met we recorded it.
BNL: Are the Brooklyn Rider guys improvisers?
BF: I think they are. I didn’t give them a place to improvise with this piece. Having the orchestra or a string quartet improvise was not the point of writing these classical pieces. It was for me to try and write for classical musicians. When we are playing live, I would think that would be a lot of fun to have some open sections that happen different every night. And I think they are very capable of that.
BNL: The premiere is coming up?
BF: Yes, in October 2013 for Butler University. They commissioned it. And it is cool because they paid me a big chunk of money (it has happened twice now for the string quartet and concerto), and it seems like a lot of money to go write a piece that I wanted to write anyways. But truthfully I could make that same amount of money in 3-4 nights of touring, and it takes me months to write these pieces. It is a lot of money for them to spend, but it is not a lot of money for me to make, yet it is a symbolic thing. Someone is paying me to create a piece, and it feels more serious and it inspires me. Not unlike knowing I was going to make a record; I would know I’d have to have the tunes together, the right band, my whole trip together. So it is not about the money, but it feels good when someone values you enough to write a piece.
BNL: You have mentioned in some other interviews something about solo banjo sonatas. What is the status on those?
BF: I did some of my fist solo concerts this year and I have a lot of solo repertoire that I want to develop. Some of it like these solo classical pieces, or the Bach pieces I recorded, and some of it is more melodic, simple and improvised. Some are simple songs written for the banjo. I’d like to play a concert that is entirely improvised, to walk on stage and improvise for an hour and half. And those are three completely different solo concepts. About two years ago I started to get hot on the idea of banjo sonatas. I wrote several things, and I probably have eight of them, that now I would go back and rewrite, touch up, or study from the perspective of having written these other pieces and what I learned. Some I might tear apart and put back together with more materials and those would not be too hard to finish them. But again, I almost want someone to commission me to do them so that I just go do it. It is one of those things that I will do, and I want to do, but life keeps getting in the way. It is that galvanizing element of some saying “Here is the due date and here is the money.” And once again, it is not the money, I am fortunate that I have made good money and I have saved it. Money is not my motivation as a musician, and it has never been, but sometimes it is a galvanizer. With creative stuff, it has always been nice when a record company says, “Here is your budget. Go make a record.” And we don’t have to scratch together the money ourselves, and I kind of got used to that. But the funny thing is I would do this stuff for free, but it is more about motivating me to do it now.
BNL: I heard there is a documentary associated with the Concerto. Can you tell me about that?
BF: Yes! I am just finishing it up. I figured after going to Africa and making a film that that would be some of the toughest conditions I would ever make a film under, and this would be very easy to film. Mostly it would be just me sitting in front of my computer, and I thought I could try and capture the moments when I was inspired and stuff was happening, see what it looked like, and see if I could turn it into something. So I bought a camera and just started filming. Even before I started writing, I would film when I was talking to people, talking to friends about ideas, about writing. Getting advice from people like Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile, people I respect a lot, and then I started turning it on when I was writing. Also when things started happening and I was meeting with the principle musicians in the orchestra. Since they are here in Nashville, I figured I would meet with them and film those meetings. And pretty soon I was getting some interesting footage, so I continued and was even able to get a 10-camera shoot of the performance. Basically I have a film that starts when I have written nothing, and then getting advice, and me starting to write, and then meeting with orchestra musicians, and continuing to write, and then I have the first rehearsal on film. I have a lot of really cool footage with Earl Scruggs. The piece was dedicated to him, and he came over and I played it for him, and then he also came to the performance. I got him to stand up for the audience, and captured the whole audience going crazy. I understand that was the last public concert he attended. I also have some footage of Earl and I playing together, and Noam is in the picture a lot, as he was around when I was writing it. The film turned out better than I expected and I am hoping I can get a festival run, and then get it out there. It will help the record, but also it tells the story of someone who has never done anything like this trying to figure out how to write a concerto, and also I think the film makes the orchestra into a more understandable entity to someone who has never listened to orchestra music. I have each of the instruments explaining to me their instruments and answering questions like, “What does the bass clarinet do? What does a contrabassoon do? What do you love about the violin? Why do you play the bass?” So even some kids may find it interesting, and know it is made up of all these people and personalities. So the film is all of those things.
BNL: When will it come out?
BF: It is pretty much done. I am working on some sync problems, but the actual creative work is done and now we submit it to film festivals, and then if someone like Sundance wants to premiere it then that means it will premiere in January, and if a major film festival doesn’t get behind it I will just put it out. You spend the money, you roll the dice, and hope. Ironically I have spent so much more on this film out of my own pocket than four commissions would have paid me. That is the funny thing about the money part of it. The numbers and things often don’t add up, but it makes me feel better about doing it. Like the African project; it cost over $400,000 of my own money, and certainly some percentage of that has come back in record sales and touring (maybe half), but the worth of it is much greater than not doing it. Luckily I was in a position where I have been a successful musician for so long, and I just put away money. Then I started to wonder what I was going to spend it on. What is the point of my life anyways? It is doing this stuff, so if I find a project I am really excited about I’ll do everything I can (within reason) to support it. And that is what the film is. Me putting my money where my mouth is as well, and ironically it is the way I can make a big successful thing like this into a loss. But if you look at this less as a money making endeavor and more getting it out into peoples consciousness and I get to go out a perform it a lot, then I get paid for those gigs, it all comes out that I am doing what I should be doing, and I am continuing to grow as a musician, and continuing to keep my standards where I want to keep them (in terms of always wanting to take on things that are special and meaningful to me, and that represent growth). I figure in the long term I always end up okay, so there is no reason why I should change my trajectory in terms of what I should and shouldn’t do. It has always got to be something that I think will push me, and where I think I am going to learn things.
BNL: Along those lines, what is next?
BF: What is next is me and Abby. We have finally put together a show and on one level it is the most relaxing fun music I have played in years (because it is not like brain surgery), but on another level it is so deep and soulful and beautiful. I am as happy with this as anything I have done. We decided we would start going out and playing together once we had our baby Juno. We are used to touring separately and coming home and meeting at the end, and some times we would miss each other and not see each other for long periods of time, so we decided that was not going to work with the baby. In figuring out the best way to spend more time together would be to finally start playing together. It was something we wanted to do, but needed the impetus. And in this case it was the baby which made us do what we have been wanting to do all along which was to get together and make some music together and do a duo tour. We just finished the first five dates and we were both so thrilled with it. We had such a great time. Some people said bringing your baby on tour would be a nightmare, but it wasn’t at all. He would just sit and watch the show at 3 months old. He doesn’t cry at all till the show is over. It is really something.
BNL: Any changes in your banjo setup?
BF: A couple of big changes. Well they are not big, but they are significant. I am using the Zero Glide fret that Wayne of Gold Tone is promoting. I tried it and agreed that it was an improvement on my banjo. So right in front of the nut there is a fret. Instead of the strings sitting in the nut, they sit on the fret, and the nut just guides them to the pegs. Whenever you have a good luthier working on your banjo nut, they try to make the nut as if it was the same height as a fret, so it is a continuation of the frets to the beginning. I used to see this on a lot of banjos in the 70’s and 80’s from Korea, and I assumed it was a cheaper way to do the nut. It actually means the nut sounds exactly like the open frets. So if you are doing music like I do, where you are going back and forth from open to closed strings in different places up and down the neck, having them sound exactly the same is an improvement. I found that it was a fuller sound. I am a fan of that. There are claims that it improves tuning, as it is less likely to get caught in the nut. And the other thing I changed was the thumb pick. I finally switched to a Blue Chip. I tried before and did not like when I used a banjo pick. When I was in Telluride a couple years ago, and saw the Jerry Douglas model and tried that one and thought it sounded really good. A great sound. And I have been using that pick for well over a year and there is no wear on that pick. So for me, it sounds fuller and I don’t have to acclimate to a new pick every few months. For me with the new thumb pick and the Zero Glide nut, when I saw Zakir Hussain after not seeing him for a while he said, “Your banjo sounds really different, and really good.” I thought so too, but I had gotten used to it. I didn’t realize what a difference it made. And one other change that I have done: I went through this period where I was taking everything off my banjo one at a time to see what it sounded like. I took off the pickup (I had some classical gigs where I wasn’t plugging in), and having those things attached to the coordinator rods actually dampens the banjo. I thought it sounded better without it. And then I thought, “What else can I take off here?” I had the Nechville armrest on there, and it was touching the head and I took it off and it sounded so good without it that I thought I would try playing without the armrest. And when I took it off the banjo was significantly louder and darker. But then my arm was getting ripped to shreds, so I started wearing a tennis sweatband. I then realized it was too dark, and too open. I found an old-time banjo wooden armrest called the Banjo Mate Thinline Armrest from Little Mountain Music. To me when I put this on I thought my banjo sounded better. It is not about having an armrest, but how it attaches and how open the banjo can be. Something about the weight of it, and how it attaches it allows that part of the banjo to be freer. I think these are a few of those things that adds 5 to 7% improvement, and those add up.
BNL: Any technical hurdles, right or left hand, or single string techniques you are working on?
BF: Not really. I am mostly thinking of music I can play, and not actually trying to think technically on the banjo. I am always writing, even if most of the things just end up in the recorder on my phone, and never see the light of day. I have literally over a thousand musical ideas that I could go flesh out. Each one of them would take a few weeks to build out into a tune, so that is one of the reason I like writing these bigger pieces, putting that energy into something bigger.
BNL: I have a question in terms of learning hard material, and then pulling it off on stage. For me, there is often a disconnect between working things up and pulling things off in the practice room, to then getting on stage or being in a jam and it can fall to pieces.
BF: I discovered that when I first started playing the Concerto. I had actually discovered this with Edgar when we were playing those other concertos. We would practice and get it together and I would get in stage and I felt like I couldn’t even find the strings. So basically I had to study and figure out what am I doing when I get on stage with the orchestra that I am doing differently in my room. I realized one of the things was I was trying to play a lot harder because I am in this big room, and for anyone to hear me I had to bang on it. And then everything I had practiced was off. Basically you have to be very self critical and you have to study yourself calmly and try to figure out what is different. And you have to put yourself in those situations enough that you can figure it out. In the end it always comes down to calming down. If you can relax, and breath, and be yourself. So now I don’t freak out when I get on stage with the orchestra, and I don’t play twice as hard and screw everything up. And if I make a mistake, I figure out how to adjust it the next time. And with a piece like that I figure I am going to be making mistakes for life, and it will be a constant pushing it back into shape. If the front gets really good, then the back may not sound as good. And then the middle will need work. For the life of this piece I will be doing that. It will never be done, and I will never have it perfect. It is just going to be like that. You have to be comfortable that you are going to have to learn a piece from a lot of different angles. And here is another tip is to practice the piece at a lot of different tempos. You know you can do it at the tempo where you want it, and then the conductor doesn’t set the beat right. But that is okay because I have played it with the metronome 10% slower and 10% faster, and now I am okay. And then you have to be okay that you are not going to play it perfectly in front of an orchestra or in a stressed situation. So maybe the right thing should not be at the edge of what you can do but maybe ¾ of what you can do rather than 100. Because 100% you are rarely going to hit. I intended this piece to be a lot simpler. I don’t know how it got so hard. I intended it to be more playable, and then it ended up a lot closer to my edge than I thought. Writing something simpler for yourself to play is always a good idea.
BNL: Any plans for instructional materials?
BF: Not really. Again it is one of those things that I really want to do, but I haven’t got the impetus so far to make me do it. It is not going to be money. There has to be a reason, something compelling that makes me want to go do it now. It is the same thing as going to teaching camps. I get a lot of requests, but if it is a choice between that and playing music or composing, or getting some time off. So far I have not made that a priority, though at some point I would really like to. I tend to things all or nothing, and not where I might teach 10% of the time, and 20% with the orchestra, and 30% with the Flecktones. I don’t think that way, and I tend to do one thing all the time till I go onto the next thing, and do that all the time. So in terms of my commitment and my energy, I like to do things really fully. So the teaching thing has not come front and center, but I have always liked teaching and I love doing workshops. At some point I will.
BNL: Looking at your tour schedule, within a two-week period you are playing the concerto, playing with Chick Corea, and with the string quartet. Is it challenging to switch between those things?
BF: Well, that is funny relative to my last answer saying I like to do things 100%. That is certainly not true the last few weeks where I had to have the piece prepared to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which was one of the two most stressful gigs I have had. That and Cleveland. Well maybe three, because the opening was awfully stressful because it was the first time. And then going straight from Philadelphia to perform with Chick Corea as a duo for a one off show. When you get to do something for a few weeks you really fall into a groove, but when you only do it for one day, you do all that work to prepare that music, and the next day you do a whole different set of music. That is intense. And I took the whole summer off to be with Abby and Juno which I haven’t done in….. maybe ever. And all of a sudden I had two of the most stressful gigs of completely different music separated by one day, and that day was a travel day where I was flying most of the day. I was doing a lot of practicing to get ready for it. And it was stressful. But they both worked out great, so I know I can do it. Especially with things I had done quite a bit in the past. I had already played with Chick this year, so I just had to get back into a frame of mind that I was in a few months earlier. And I had played the piece, I had edited the record, and I worked on the film of the piece, so that music was constantly in my face. I knew how it went; I just had to get my skills up to where I could play it my very best. Then the next thing was figuring out the music with Abby. Although it is fun, and natural as can be, it still takes work to get a night of music together. We have some new tunes we are writing, and some of them are intricate. But I like it. This is what I do. As I get older, I can get overwhelmed by looking at the schedule and all I have to do, and all I need to do is settle down and just do it. And I do know how to do it.
BNL: I have been working with some classically trained composers over the last year, and struggling to explain to them how to write for banjo. What might you tell and communicate as the banjo’s strengths to someone from that world?
BF: The banjo is a great way to put a front end on a chord, or anything you want rhythmic precision. In terms of getting them to write intelligently for the banjo is not easy for people if they do not have the familiarity. And ironically, if you are too familiar with it they are just going to write stuff that is so inside, and what is the point if you are trying to get an outside perspective. Chick Corea was asked a number of times on our duo tour how he wrote for banjo. And he said, “ Frankly I didn’t write for banjo, I wrote for Béla. I wrote music and let him worry about how to play it.” You can give them the range, and warn them about certain keys, explain how the tuning works, and how if you are in open G tuning, it can work great against other keys. For instance, if you are in B, having an open D string on the top of it can give a great dissonance. So being aware of the dissonances with the open strings. And letting them know that if you have too many notes without an open string, you may have a hard time navigating it if it fast.
BNL: I have heard that the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto lays out perfectly on the violin, with no awkward string crossings, and while challenging to play well, it is a violin piece. Where is that ease and grace on banjo?
BF: Well that is why the banjo player has to become the composer. That is why I want to write the Banjo Sonatas. I don’t want a piano player to write them for me, I want someone that has familiarity with the banjo. Someone like Edgar could do it. He has a really good feel for the banjo now. He had it almost immediately. But I think it has got to come from one of us. I think Jens Kruger has the technique and the head for writing good material for banjo. It will be interesting to see what banjo players bring. Paganini wrote so much great stuff for violin, but Bach is the one people talk about with his Partitas and Sonatas. They talked about on a whole different level than the Paganini stuff, which is more show-offy and like a fiddle player. Bach wasn’t a fiddle player but he wrote some of the best stuff for fiddle, because he just wrote beautiful music. He had been around it enough to know what sounded good, what was the range, and he just knew what to do. Not everyone is going to know what to do. You might get 10 composers and only two will come up with something you are really going to like, if your are lucky.