Béla Fleck

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey y'all, today we're featuring a conversation with the world's preeminent banjo player, Baila Fleck. Over the course of his four decade career, Bila's won numerous Grammys in a variety of surprising genres, including jazz, Latin, pop, and classical. Just last year, his latest release, My Bluegrass Heart, scored the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. In addition to Beila's innovative style and expert technique, he is also an advocate for keeping the banjo's rich historical tradition alive. In two thousand and eight, Baila made a pilgrimage to Africa to trace the origins of the banjo in the brilliant documentary Throw Down Your Heart. On today's episode, Bruce Helen talks to Beila about growing up in New York City, where he first fell in love with the banjo while watching, of all things, the Beverly Hillbillies. Baila also talks about how jazz giants like Chick Korea and Charlie Parker influenced his highly technical style, and Baila explains why he believes the banjo is far superior to the guitar. This is broken record line of notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Michman. Here's Bruce Headlam with Baila Fleck. Now you've won I think fifteen Grammys something like. That's a lot of Grammys. Yeah. I was gonna say, you've been nominated in more Grammy categories than anybody else in the world, which is kind of incredible. You've done pops, yeah, and apparently Latin. I didn't know you've done that. Yeah, it's with Chick Korea. We got we wanted Latin Grammy. So I asked him about how you know, de count count the grant Latin Grammy as one of your Grammys and said, yeah, it's a Grammy, right. Yeah. So whenever people ask me how many I have, I don't you know. They said, well, we checked and he said you only have fifteen. I said, well, that doesn't matter. I mean, but Chicks said it was the Latin one counted, so I say, sixteen, Kuria said it, But I don't It's fine. One would have been fine, none would have been fine. You've got a lot, but in more categories, classical, all these other things. That's the fun thing. World music and classical and things like that in places that the band isn't typically heard. That's those are the ones that I get excited about usually, although just now winning the one for the bluegrass album, I've never won one from bluegrass albums after all of this time, So there was something really sweet about returning to the music and putting together like a very community album that brought together a lot of different age groups of excellent players, and doing my own music and winning a Grammate with it was sweet. I'd like to say I'm too cool to care, but it meant a lot to me. It was when you put the bluegrass in the title, it's my bluegrass heart. Yeah, a lot of great players. It's it's kind of a shred fest for our guitarists out there. There's some there's some ferocious playing, and there's some ferocious playing. I don't like the term shred because to me, it's like, oh, all you're doing is playing fast. When you think of shredding, it doesn't usually mean it's necessarily musical. So if it's musical shredding, I don't mind. But yeah, I mean, I wanted to be music. Now. If it's fast, you know, it's still got to be really good. There's a lot I mean a lot of variety, and the songs on this new album, something like hug Point sounds very irish. The other song that jumped out at me was the Psalm one thirty six. Yeah, can you tell me about that? Yeah? Okay. So I was I was planning to go to Africa to do this documentary called Throat on Your Heart, which I did get to do, and I was researching before I went over, like what kind of you know, where am I going and what music is going on there? And I was going to Uganda as part of the trip. Even though Banter doesn't come from Uganda. I had an inn to get you into Uganda and Tanzania, so I decided to go there as well. And I found this recording called Jewish Uganda, and there was this the song started with these boys. I think it's all boys singing this psalm, this beautiful song, probably in a church or a little chapel somewhere in Uganda. And one of the guys from the church was in the States and I got in touch with them and I asked him if I could come to Uganda and record with these boys. He said, absolutely not. We don't want to have anything to do with anything commercial, so I couldn't go. But the tune stuck with me, and so I made it into a solo piece that I would play once in a while, but I never quite got it happening. And then when Chris Thealy was coming to town to record these a couple of songs with billy strings, I think, well, I've got him here. I want to get more than two songs out of the day, and so I asked him if he would do this due at with me. I send him the music. He said, great, you know, and I think we started recording it at midnight or something, and we worked on it till three in the morning. And at the other end of it, we had this bottle of them are salt that we were going to open and drink, and that's what that's what we did. But we sat and we just worked it through. We worked up this very complex duet arrangement of it and just had a blast. And then we had this great bottle of wine. When you conceive of this project, I know you said, when you sit down and play with people, you'll know if it's going to work or not. Or these all people you'd played with before. Some were and some weren't. I've made a couple of records back in the old days. I guess eighty eight I made a record called Drive and it had kind of the who's who of that time. Who was Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Tony Rice on guitar, Mark O'Connor, Stuart Duncan, Mark Chats on bass. Those were the fiddle players, Stewart, Duncan and Mark And it was like a position statement of like pushing the music forward for that time. I guess I can say that at this point. And then I went off and did my own thing for a long time with the Flectones and tried to get out of the bluegrass world completely. And then around the end of the nineties I made another record called Bluegrass Sessions that was with the same guys, but I was able to include Earl Scruggs and John Hartford and Vassar Clements who were you know on the elder side. And then I hadn't done anything since then, and it's been like twenty something years since I'd done bluegrass, and I was playing with Chick Korea very happily explore or I'm playing with Sakier Hussein and trying to write orchestra music and trying to break out, you know, break out of the shackles of what people think banjo should be. And just because I'm curious. I like music, I want to know it, but I want to know it through the banjo. People used to say when I was in high school, why didn't you learn to play the saxophone or the piano? Was like, wow, I like the banjo. Why do I have to play the saxophone? If I like jazz, why do I have to do that? So it's always through the banjo that I learned about music. So did you do you think people were pigeonholing you or pigeon holing bluegrass music? Everything? I mean, banjo was a laughing stock when I started playing it, and I always thought it was serious business, you know. I was never never thought it was a funny a bit. I thought it was serious, deadly serious. But people would laugh at you. And it was because at that time the banjo was the Heehaw show, right, you know, which had Roy Clark playing on it. I can't tell you how many people have come up to me, great jazz musicians. Oh, I like the banjo. I used to like Roy Clark you know, and like, well, Roy Clark is not really the top tier of banjo players. Honestly, he was just a great showman. He was good. But at any rate, there was a Heehaw which was was Roy Clark. And then there was Deliverance, which you know, involved everything we know about the movie Deliverance, but it had this incredible banjo scene which you know, also stamped the nail in the coffin of you know, what people thought about who played the banjo and who shouldn't and you know now it was, you know, clearly a white Southern instrument rather than a black you know, an instrument that the slaves brought over. And between that and even the Beverly Hillbillies, you know, which was very although the Hillbillies were the smarty were the smarty pants in that show, sure that it was still it locked in that feeling that that's what the banto was. But at least it was Earl Scruggs, you know, at least it was great music. Yeah, so that was something. There was also Cat Blue if you remember that. Yeah, yeah, and I can't remember who played. I think the banjo was for string banjo in that because there's the whole jazz banto age. Of course, you know, band was part of jazz even before bluegrass. Banjo was the what later the guitar took over its position in jazz, but we forget about that. Occasionally you run into somebody and they say, oh, banjo, we a banjo jazz. Sure, banto was in jazz from the beginning. What's the problem with that, you know, was that before they had amplification, because the banjo just you could do it, You could do a rhythm. Well, I'll tell you one thing. When you strum a banjo, it's loud, and you can walk down the street in New Orleans and strum a banjo next to a trumpet and be heard just fine, where if you strummed a guitar you might not hear it so well. But I think it had more to do with that sense that banjo was a symbol of slavery, you know, for a lot of black people, you know, and people made fun of the banjo and its role, and people put on black face and imitated slaves, did songs. This was like the thing to do in the early nineteen hundreds. Put on black white folks, put on black face, get banjos and sing songs about how great it was on the old plantation. So by the time the music started to move along and yeah, banjo was around, and so it was in the music. But as soon as the guitar showed up and it was a possibility, they dropped it like a hot potato, and all of a sudden it was like excise from the black world. It was like, we don't want to have anything to do with that. And in fact, there was a banjo player named Danny Barker, and Danny Barker I met him. He was playing with Wynton Marsalis and he was one of the guys who was playing banjo and had to switch to guitar when banjo went out of fashion. He was playing with Cab Callaway and he told me that he told, hey, Cab, the Deering Banjo Company will give me a free top of the line banjo if you let me play it in one song on the Cab Calloway Show. And Cab said absolutely not. Which had been trying to get away from that whole thing for a long long time. He wanted nothing to do with the banjo in that period, and so all the banjo players were out of work. They all had to learn to play guitar if they wanted to have a career playing string instrument in jazz. And then you got Charlie Christian then yeah, And it wasn't based on the electrification as much as it was one particular recording, a first recording of where guitar was played instead of banjo that had this huge impact. And apparently it was like a year later banto was dead in that world. But then meanwhile Earl Scruggs was trying to figure out how to get that third finger, and you know, out in the mountains in North Carolina, along with another you know, other people in his region. We're trying to figure that out, and they were stepping up. And then as the years have gone by, Earl Scruggs, you know, he spawned all these other banjo players who had to do something different from him. And eventually people like We're started bringing jazz into bluegrass, playing in a hole differ with a whole different technique. So you had you know, Don Reno playing jazz licks, and Eddie Adcock and then Bill Keith doing all this jazz stuff with a whole different style on the banjo, and Tony Trishka here in New York, and these New York guys brought a lot of ideas to the banjo, and so it started to approach your jazz kind of knowledge in a jazz sort of language, but from a whole other direction, on a whole different banjo than what they played in jazz, a five string banjo which is tuned to an open chord rather than tuned in fourths, you know, so it's a very different voicing. I've never seen this described, but anytime I hear banjo's in other contexts, they seem to add a lot of pace to a song. Yeah, the last verse of of taking by the Eagles, Like, I think there's something that music has been trying to do for a long time, and you hear it in pop music. You certainly hear it in things like Steve Reich and a lot of that music, which is this kind of perpetual motion. Yeah, it's because the banjo doesn't have sustained So the way that we create the illusion of sustain is to do continuous arpeggios and you know, licks, and we we don't stop till the end of the song, and it's hard for banjo players to stop. It's one of the hardest things to do is to start playing out or nothing in time from from a dead stop. So we'd keep playing, and we have these different techniques we do to keep our hands moving during songs. But one of the hardest again, it's it's rare to find a banjo player who will stop and lay out for part of this song and come back in. But that's one of the most effective things you can do, is like and take it easy. The effectiveness is it came in out of nowhere in double time, and so it provides all this drive, but it also provides a sonic change which you don't get if you're playing constantly. But guitar players do Travis picking for example, right, but it doesn't have the same effect. Why is that so strong a on a banjo's because banjos are better than guitars, so anything that they do is going to be better. So there's that. But I can't think of another instrument that really All the other instruments you're very conscious of the attack. You know, some fiddling, for example, they try and get a certain kind of rhythm going like if you get but it doesn't have I think it's a percussion instrument. Banjo is half percussion instrument and a half melodic instrument. So it's um you could play that way on a piano. If you came in playing the same thing you did on a on a banjo in the same register and played it extremely with a lot of clarity, it could have a similar effect. There are other instruments that could do that, but banjo just does that naturally. It's what it does. You know it comes in and so your sense of time is incredibly critical as a banjo player because you really can feel it when it's out of the pocket. It's so clear. So if you're not solid when you come in into a track or into a spot, you know it can it can mess it up. But if it comes in good and solid, it's like wow, like the light's coming on. Do you want to play a bit? I'm sure it's the best. If you're playing all the time, that's when you play good. And then sometimes when you don't practice every day, sometimes I let it go because I've got kids. I've got a four year old and a nine year old, So when I come off the road like I just did, all of a sudden, it's like time to do my share. Yeah, you know, So then the banjo stays in the in the case till a few days before the tour, and then I and then I cram okay and my but I'm not high on my mind. That's Baila Fleck playing hug Point from his new album My blue Grass Heart. We'll be right back after a short break with more from Baila Fleck and Bruce Headlam. We're back with more from Baila Fleck and Bruce Headlam. Did you grew up in a musical family. Well, music was a big part of our family, but there weren't any musicians when I was young. My father was. It's a complicated story. My father was musical, but he wasn't around. He and my mother split up when I was about one or two, and he was completely absent, not even in contact. I didn't meet him till I was in my forties. But he was a big fan of, you know, classical music, which is why he named me Baila Anton Leosh Fleck, and he named me after these composers. But there was no influence from him. But then my mother married a wonderful guy who was a cellist named Joe Palladino, who was a guy from Brooklyn who played the cello in the Army and then went into the school systems, the Guidance Council, guidance systems at Brooklyn, and so he was playing a classical stuff around the house when I got into my you know, from maybe ten years or so on. But again I didn't I didn't relate to it. It wasn't my thing, but I liked it. It was cool, but it seeped in. So by the time I've got my first banjo, which was pretty late when I was fifteen, you know, I had a pretty broad musical interest and I heard the banjo when I was maybe four or five, but I never thought I could ever play it, so I never tried to get one, but I was a fan from then on. What was your first banjo? It was a K just a black no name on it, but it looked a lot like a K fifty dollars banjo. My grandfather got me the day before I started high school. Did Sears cell came probably, I think so. Yeah. Sears also sold Gibson as They had knockoff banjos called cal Croydon's that were like just like this whole banjo of mine. It was pre war flathead from the thirties, but they put them under different names and sold with different ways. The great banjos really came in the thirties. That's when the great banjos came. Why was that it had something to do with the metal and had something to do with the war effort trying to figure out how to make it cheaper, and they started making certain parts with pot metal instead of expensive brass and making them with less parts, and something about it sounded better. And so when Earl Scrugg was trying to figure out what he wanted to play, he picked the best banjo he could find, you know, around, which was a Gibson Mastertone at the time, and honestly, banjo was music was starting to go down at that point, but a lot of these instruments were around and uh, you know, again easy to find at that time, relatively cheap, but they had this great sound that has not really been equalled. So there's no modern banjo you would play that you would you know, there are some pretty good ones, but they and I'm even involved with a model, the Gold Tone is making that sort of modeled after this and they've you know, they've done the best they can and everyone's doing the best they can, but nobody has cracked the code of what makes a pre war banjo what it is. I would never claim that these new banjos are in the class of the Gibsons from the thirties, and that's the one I play every day still. How many of those do you have? I probably have a dozen something around of those, but I have, you know, more than a hundred banjos around the house. They sort of collect they and I don't. I'm not good at getting rid of them. I have an infestation. You could say. Yeah, I like having them, though, and people say invest in something, you know, you know, And so over the years, like I bought them, I started buying them, and like when I first got this one, they were very hard to find. They were just not not around. But over the years, sometimes suddenly they're available. Maybe some you know, older folks are passing and they get back on the market or something. And so I started buying them, and they kept going up and up. So everything that I bought early on was worth way more than I cost, you know, than I'd paid. And then as the years went on, I started paying more for them, and then they weren't worth as much, you know, as In other words, the investment wasn't as good, but they still you know, appreciated. I'm still ahead of the game if if money matters, which a still a good question, that he's buying gold and crypto, Now, yeah, they're I would have thought that this investment would have been you know, gold for life, and that I could pass it on. But I think that at a certain point, people that really know about these instruments are passing, so they don't actually, you know, unless younger players can afford to get them. And you know, and this one, you know, to get an instrument like this, we're talking about one hundred thousand dollars or eighty thousand dollars something in that that mode, and if it's all original from the thirties, you know, maybe one hundred and fifty thousand dollars was the price a few years back, but now it's dropping a bit. Do you tour with this one as well? Yeah, so's kind of one of those guys that saves it for the studio. No, No, I mean in the studio, what I get to do is I get to like go through my closet and go, I wonder which ancient instrument would sound good? On this song, you know, and I get to do that. But the truth is they don't all handle to travel that well. But this one I've traveled with since nineteen eighty one and I always keep it set up, you know, to play and flying with it. They're very heavy to carry around and if it goes under the plane, you're sunk, you know, So I often buy tickets for it or find you know, I have to have strategies when I'm traveling for how I'm gonna get the banjo on. Wow. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass, very serious. It's a pain, but it's worth it when I get there and I'm playing this instrument. They call them flatheads because they're banjos that have raised heads where the top raises up and there's a smaller resonating surface of the skin. But a flathead has a larger resonating surface and that creates a deeper tone in earl scrugs. Even though you might have it in your head that banjos are bright, he had a pretty rich sound, especially in certain periods of his life. Why are all banjo players obsessed with earl scrugs. Earl scruggs is the trigger that turns banjo players on. You know, if you're if you're a dormant banjo player that could be a banjo player, you have to hear Earl Scruggs to suddenly become a banjo seeking zombie. And that was that was for me. I grew up here in New York City and one hundredth Street, West End, and then I heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies and it flipped a trigger and me and I, you know, and no interest in country music, folk music, anything like that. I was a Beatles kid, you know, a New York City Beatles kid, Upper West Side. But I heard the banjo and it just I was like, what is that? I gotta know what that is? And it's interesting that from most of the people that become bluegrass banjo like professionals or just you know, people that love that instrument get good at it, it's always Earl Scruggs itself. Almost never anybody else that flips the switch. Did he do new things with the banjo or did he just perfect what it was already there? Did he started this whole He didn't start it, but he perfected this way of playing. There are other people that did it around this time. This would have been you know, nineteen maybe twenties when he was coming up with it on the farm in Flint Hill, North Carolina. There were other people experimenting with adding a third finger, because nobody played with three fingers plucking much before that time period, and so there were other people who were, you know, also working at it, and you could find people that did it even before in earlier banjo ages, before the whole period of the banjo. So anyway, this three finger style that Earl Scruggs came up with was adding a finger to a two finger style, and it created the opportunity for all this rippling. You know, you get three fingers on five strings playing in four to four. You've got all these threes and twos opening over the beat, and all of a sudden you get syncopation like crazy and this drive that he played with, And it wouldn't have mattered except he was so good. You know, anyone could have taken the claim that of you know, inventing three finger playing around that time, but he was the best. You know, he was so good if he had this galvanizing sound and it made you stop in your tracks and you had to hear it and talking about the Beatles. He joined Bill Monroe's band, and Bill Monroe was kind of a big deal on the Grand Old Opry, and so he got to come on the Grand Old Opry and play with Bill Monroe. And that was like the first time people heard bluegrass. That was the moment bluegrass happened to the world, as when they heard Earl Scruggs playing with Bill Monroe. For Lester Flatt was also in the band, people talk about it being a Beatles reaction. The room erupted. No one had ever heard anything like this style of banjo playing before. It was nothing there, Nothing had ever been done like that, and it made them into superstars in the South and anywhere where you could hear that show. And then it just spread. So not only was he the most well known because of his you know, his time with Bill Monroe and then starting Flatt and Scrugs, he was the best. Everybody still stops in their tracks if you're a banjo player to hear hear him play things. We've heard him play our whole lives. You know, it's just got that magic. If you still hear that magic in his play, I do I do, I can listen to the Beverly Hillbill. He's the first thing I heard and just go wow. And I you know, I know it's a joke, and I know it's part of the stereotypes that gets you know that I hate. I always seem to be fighting against. But I just it's the magic. He had the magic. And I got to know him in his late years. He lived about two miles from where I lived in Nashville, and we got to be pretty close in his late later time, you know, And he's just sitting on the couch. He's very funny too, isn't he? Guy? Could he still play? Yeah? He played. He'd get out of his banjo, we'd sit and play. He always take my banjo and play it because I have a weird setup, like I have an arched fingerboard like a violin, you know, or something. And he really liked it. And I also keep my bandjo real fat and his was kind of bright, and so he would take it from me. He wouldn't give it back to me and play and he would sound amazing and play. You know. He rushed. He was always always ahead, and that was part of the bluegrass drive. But he is rushing, got a little out of control later on, but it was still he played things. He's surprised you all the time with things he played. I've never heard that about bluegrass. You're always you're always pushing the beat a little bit. Yeah. The thing about bluegrass time we call it, which is also this big deal to us bluegrass musicians, is the way it feels and it's like a magic carpet ride where everyone's pushing the rhythm but hopefully you're not actually speeding up, but you're playing on the front end of the of the beat. And you know, we talk about that with drummers all the time. You know, he's a back of the beat kind of guy, or he's in front of the beat kind of guy. In a perfect world, you wouldn't pick up, but you'd still have that feeling that it was, you know, moving forward. And we call that drive and blue grass music and as applied to everything I do. You know, if I'm playing, when I was playing with Chick Korea or Zaki Hussein, I always try to play with that forward lean, but again without speeding up. A little speeding up's okay, but if it goes past a certain amount, it's not okay. You know, I remember, and I didn't really understand at the time, but the Stacks beat, the Stacks record label. I think how Jackson was the drummer, he was always a little particularly the I guess the fourth beat was always a little behind. So blue gust is always always pushing a little bit. Blue grass is always pushing, yeah, and the soloist leads the charge. In that way, it's similar to jazz and that the soloist dictates how that the other players play. So the way the way that you would play as a banjo player behind the fiddle is one way, and the way you'd play behind the mental end player is a different way, and the way you play behind the vocalist is another way. And whoever's closest to the microphone has the power, you know, because it was a music that was like a one mic music, you would he was for performance. It was live. It wasn't you know, roots music and people played around the house. It was performance music was built up before performed on radio in theaters on one microphone. So the person who's up front is louder, so automatically everyone follows the lead. If the banjo's up front, you're gonna play to his groove, and maybe he's got a little more straight eights, maybe he's got a little more bounced since swinging is playing. Fiddle player comes up, he's got a whole different groove. The band changes. A good bluegrass band knows how to do this dance, every verse, every chorus, every instrumental has a different feel, and they know how to make each thing happen. And it's like, I don't know, I think it's like a great sports team, you know, a great basketball team, passing to each other and following the lead of the person who's got the ball. Yeah. But the thing about it is the bango is facing away from you, So if you're standing up playing the banjo, you can't hear yourself, but you're bludgeoning everyone around you, and the fiddle player who's got the fiddle right by his ear. If you're standing next to a fiddle player, you can't hear yourself at all. All you can hear as a fiddle because your ears are near the fiddle. Yeah, so's it's an odd thing. Banjo players, you know, playing too loud is partly because they can't hear themselves even though they've got the loudest instrument in the room. So you you didn't study at college. You went straight to playing, didn't you. Just yeah, I think if Berkeley at that point had been taking, you know, banjo majors like they are now, I would have gone somewhere like that, or East Appalachian State, or there's one in Texas where you could major own banjo in the last decades, but not back. And so I just went and joined a band out of high school. And I got lucky because my mom and my stepdad had an unexpected child when I was a senior in high school. And keep remembering my mother's a teacher as well, and my stepfather he was actually the head of guidance for the Brooklyn school systems. And I got through high school and they never noticed that I didn't apply to college because they were just so dazed by having a child, a baby in the house, and I got so at the end. All of a sudden, they realized, wait, where are you going? And I was like, it's too late, sorry, you know, and you knew you wanted to be a musician. I didn't want to go to college and spend my time. I wanted to go play, you know. I wanted to play the banjo. We have to take one last break, and then we're back with more from Baila Fleck. We're back with the remainder of Bruce Hedlam's conversation with Baila Flack. I mean, I knew you heard the banjo when you were four or five, you loved it, you got when when you were Yeah, at what point did you say, well, the banjo is going to be my life? Was there moment? It wasn't a voluntary thing. It was an involuntary thing. It was like, from the moment the banjo was in my hands, I didn't care about anything else. I would go to school and I'd be in a cold sweat waiting to get home to my banjo. I think it did a lot of things for me. I guess psychologically it gave me something to focus on, something to care about, an escape. I don't know. I mean, not like my life was all that terrible. It wasn't. It was a perfectly good, middle class life on the Upper West Side. But something about it was just so compelling, and I couldn't put it down. You know, after school there'd be a hang with kids, and I could go for a few minutes before I just had to leave I just had to go home and play, and I started taking the banjo to school, playing between classes, cutting classes and hanging out in city college. I went to Music and Art High School when it was up in Harlem, so there's a lot of music surrounded by music, you know, and the folks that I went to high school with, you know, like Omarha Kim was there with me, and Kenny Washington and Marcus Miller, we were all there together, and Don Byer and all these guys that have had these great careers playing jazz and rock and so forth. Were you starting to play jazz then on the band? Yeah, I was trying. I had my teacher, my last teacher, Tony Trishka, was doing a lot of exploring with the banjo. He was really the guy who said, hey, you can do anything. You don't have to do that. I noticed when I went to high school, if I could play led Zeppelin lick, everybody thought that was cool, much cooler than if I'd played them a flatt and scrugs tune. Right. So I noticed that that got me more attention, and so that was interesting or a grateful dad riff or something that was more cool. But I was just interested in the musical ideas that were in all these different musics and trying to figure out how to learn them on the banjo was fun. And then I mean, you've started doing your own albums pretty early. Yeah. I moved to Boston right out of high school seventy six, and I think seventy nine I made my first albums. I think I was still twenty when I made the first record, maybe twenty one. Wow, I mean, you must have had great chops at that point. It was kind of weird, like, Okay, so Tony who was arguably the greatest banjo player of the period. I only say arguably because he was such a progressive. So some people might debate me, but I don't really think you can debate me on the talent and the quality of his music. But he was my teacher, And after a couple of years of playing, people said they couldn't tell the difference between him and me, like if we were somewhere and we were both playing. That was their compliment. They said, Hey, I was listening to you guys play at close my eyes, I couldn't tell who was who. I was such a I copied him so intently that I could do most I mean not the years of life and humanity and practice and creativity that he had, but I could. I learned quite a lot of what he could do, and so that made me an unusual banjo player, because nobody could really do that back then but him. So now I had all of his toolkit to draw from. I'm not saying I was Tony, but I was darned I'd really learned a lot of it, you know. So then the thing was I suddenly realized, though there already is a Tony Trishka, I got to find my thing. And then I started very consciously exploring things that he didn't do and looking for the things that I could do that would be my unique stamp on it. And then I immediately went into bands and started touring. And I'm anunit ever since. What was it you found in your playing? What distinguishes you're playing from other banjo? Well, Tony and I'm jealous of these qualities in his playing. He's a primitive, like he can draw on some theoretical knowledge, but he figures out things in a very primitive kind of way, and it's like a high tech primitive thing that he does. I am more of the kind of guy who wants to know every scale like I have to. If I learned a scale, I have to learn it in every key, major and minor, all the way up and down the banjo, from the bottom open string to the last thread of a high string. I wanted to do all that. He hadn't done that. So when I started to do that and started learning luck legit jazz repertoire and language and classical things, suddenly I had some knowledge on the banjo that was different, you know, that was new to the instrument Somewhere. I don't know. I don't know how to say what's new, because I mean, you know, in the twenties there are people playing jazz stuff on the banjo that still hasn't been equaled. But it was a different banjo. It was a different tuning. As we were talking about before, who were the jazz players you were listening to at that point that informed jo playing? Well? When I started playing, I mean I certainly I listened to Joe Pass and Oscar Peterson and people like that. I was a real big fan of Charlie Parker. I loved Charlie Parker's playing, and for me, Charlie Parker had the same rhythmic intensity of earl scrugs. And then one day at jazz appreciation class in high school, the teacher his names Justin d. Chocho. He's a great jazz teacher. He played Chick Corea's recording of Spain and that blew my mind because like the sound of that electric piano, there was something about it, all the short stabby notes. I was like, I don't think I could play like stan Gets, but I might be able to play like that on the banjo, you know, And I don't think he was lost stacato so staccato, yeah, and he was all about time. And also he you know, they're a pianists who, you know, run up and down the piano, you know, constantly, and you know you can't do that on the banjo. I don't have the range. But if you go act we you know, like he would do these back and forth things with his two hands, that I could do short phrases that were very rhythmic, like a lot of Monk influence, and that he was very rhythmically focused on playing these unique rhythmic ideas with a lot of intensity. I could see how that might work. And then you did it on your first album. I did record that song that I want to see him when I was in high school, like at the Beacon Theater with Return to Forever, and that blew my mind. You know. Hearing him play with Stanley Clark and Lenny White and Aldamola was like to imagine, you know, like some people say, oh, that's not the greatest music or whatever, but like imagine being a seventeen year old never hearing anything like that and walking and sitting down at the Beacon Theater and hearing that. I mean, it was unbelievable, and I never it's the same. It had that impact that Earl Scruggs had, like the three people from Me or Earl Scruggs, Charlie Parker and Ship Korea. And then there were guys like Pat Martino playing around the city two around that time, and I got to see him in person a few times. And he also played these long lines, long, very rhythmic, you know, rhythmically solid lines. Also reminded me of banjo playing. I was like, I think I could play like that too, not that I had the ability, but that that would be possible on the banjo, long that long lines that jazz players play the jazz guitar players play in particular because they don't have to take a breath, and you don't have to take a breath on the banjo. So again you're going back to the perpetual motion idea that you were bringing up before. That's what the banjo does really well, and you do hear that a lot in jazz and classical music. Music with a lot of space because you're not used to hearing the banjo have that kind of space, and it can be very plaintive and beautiful when you figure out how to leave that space. So when you did your classical record, that was an example you did. You did the chopin, you did is Cello Sweet I did. Yeah, Yeah, that's right. Yeah, but you don't have sustain and you don't have that great a dynamic range. Is that Is that fair to say? That's very true, very disappointing, but very true. So the thing about that record is, you know, down in Nashville you have this thing called songwriter demos, Like if you're making a vocal record, you get a pile of tapes from different songwriters and you pop them in your cassette till you hear one you like, and then you write down, oh I like that one. And so I kind of did that. When I was doing Perpetual Motion. I got all of these recordings of classical music and I would put pop them on in my car CDs and flip through until I heard something. And every time I heard something I liked, i'd write it down. I had a little pad in my car, and almost inevitably I was drawn to these moto perpetuos, long lines, long cascading things that went on and on and on, and that kept unfolding and unfolding and unfolding, like back you know, or Paganini or you know, a showpen things. And so that's part of why we named the album a Moto perpetual because to me, most of the pieces on there are moto perpeturos of one kind or another, whether it's you, you know, Children's Corner by Dead buc or you know, or boch things, they just keep on unfolding. The story's not over and then it stops. I don't like life. Yeah, yeah, well I can't get a banjo player to stop. Maybe that's maybe it's maybe it's your ticket to immortality till the end. They never when they stop, when they die, so tell me going back again. You played with Tony Rice on the s the Shoulder, which is this album People in All Kinds of World Love. But it's a great I guess would you call it blue grass? He was a well, I think it's pretty. It's definitely extended blue grass, you know. And so he was a hero to me because he also had that incredible rhythm of rhythmic ability on the guitar, and he was had an interest in jazz and all these different things and he would bring them into his blue grass. But he also had a very musical vocal kind of quality. He like, he was a great singer, but he chose songs that were kind of deep sometimes and had harmony to them, you know, which was very unusual for blue grass, which tends to be very harmonically. He liked things that were more explorative. And so when I got to play on that record, it was a dream come true. It was like I was finally playing with the A team. Sam Bush was playing, Vassar Clements was there, Jerry Douglas was there, Tony Rice was there, and we all just cut it in a circle and he sang and played everything live. We all played live and it was unbelievable how good that music felt. I played. Guy played on four tracks that day, either three or four, and every one of them had this dance like it was so easy to play banjo with him because of the way he played rhythm. His rhythm guitar playing was like a magic carpet ride that you get on and all of a sudden you could do things that you couldn't do anywhere else. So after that session, I was like, if I could do a record with this guy and Sam Bush, because he Sam has this way of chopping the rhythm on the mantelin and Tony is so free floating with his rhythm playing. The combination of those two guys playing together, you have all of the freedom and the imagination of Tony Rice, but it's it's put into a rhythmic context by Sam Bush's chop. So once those guys start playing together, it's magic. And feathering the banzo into that is like the easiest thing in the world. So when I made that first record, we're talking about Drive. That's the band that I wanted and was lucky enough to get, and I had those two guys playing together, and Jerry Douglas, the greatest ogro player and these great fiddle players. You described it a little bit, but you know, one of my favorite albums of yours is the album you did with Check Korea, The Enchantment. Yeah, how did you make that work? It's a very unusual sounding album. It's a puzzle what happened there, because you know, as you know, he's a formative influence. Like even more so than you know Scrugs or Tony Trishka or Charlie Parker who weren't part of my life. He was a guy that I revered, as you know, so good. I would never you know, could never imagine playing with him, but you know, an inspiration for life. I was five, followed everything he did and I always wished I could play like him, you know, learn from him and stuff. So at a certain point the flectones got going, you know, some decades later, after falling in love with his music, and got a Grammy nomination, right, and got to go to the Grammys where Chick Korea one of the reigning Grammy count kings it was, and got to meet him and talk to him and said, oh, yeah, I saw you guys. I saw your video, sinister minister, I like I like that, you know. So I got the nerve to ask him if he would play on a track for me, and he did, to my surprise, agree and I got to do something with him, and I thought, well, okay, now my life has made you know. That's I'll never bother you again, was what I thought. You know. It was an album called Tales from the Acoustic Planet, the first one I made, and Branford Marsalis also played on that, and I got them together. They never played together on the track. It's a neat thing, yeah, And they just sat around him did old jazz in the corner till it was time to close the studio down. They were having so much fun. So some years later I was playing at Newport Jazz Festival with Stanley Clark and John Luke Ponni. We had this trio for a little while and Ted Curlin came over to me. He's the agent that booked all these guys, you know, And he came over to me and he said, um, baila, chick, Korea is thinking about doing some duet projects next year, and you're on the list of people. Would you have any interest in something like that? It's like, would you have any interest? And I was like, yes, sign me up. Enough. So I was the first person who said yes, you know, and so he said, okay, well let's do something. So we booked this session. I'm going to come out there, and he's sending meeting this music which I'm trying to decipher from mini files and trying to figure out how to play. And we have a week to do it. You know, we're going to do it, and I think, well five days. I was used to making records with the flect Tones, where we had months, you know, we could just take our time, and just when we were done, we're done. And then I get there and what about rehearsing. Well, we'll meet up the night before. So we meet up in a hotel room and we play for an hour and he says, I think that's good. I'm like, oh my god, how are we going to do this? And then as he's leaving, he says, oh, by the way, I think we can record and mix this record in those four or five days. And now it's getting down to four, you know, four or five days. I'm like, oh, but somehow we did it. You know. We just went in and just tune after tune, got the arrangements together, just did them and one after another they turned out really good, and we did the whole thing we I mean, Drive was made in three days, but that was with a bunch of guys, like a bunch of music. I knew how to do, you know, so I'm always surprised. I want to hear it back because I have that feeling of fear every time it comes up. I'm gonna listen to and be really disappointed. But it's it's the moment, you know. That's what happens. When you do something fast, you get a different benefit out of it, and if you do something slower you can get another benefit out of you know, there's different things. He was a guy who was always trying new things. Yeah, and you were a guy that's always trying new things. I think I've seen interviews where you've said I just want to get onto the next thing, and my record label's always saying, how about a bluegrass album? Where does that drive come from? With me? Yes? Well, I have to say one of the things that was very inspiring on that Chick session is the minute we finished the last song of the last track, which was a tune called Mountain. It was the last thing we cut. I put the band too in the case. Chick went into the other room, pulled out the music for his next project and started practicing. Wow, that's a little scary, and I went, wow, yeah, I want to be like that. You know, this is my I guess early thirties, and you're like, I had a bottle of wine. I thought, yeah, this was before the wine. This is the wine was a few decades later. But no, um. I always always thought you were supposed to do that, and you know, talking about the Beatles, you know, they just kept changing every record, was like almost like a new band. I thought, that's what you're supposed to do. You're not supposed to like create something and keep doing it. Like that's what Bill Monroe did. He created bluegrass, you know, and on the seventh day he rested. But then he kept playing it the same way. He would always trying to find guys who would play it like the original band more or less, although there was some variation, of course, but his idea was I've created it, and now we will do it. And then there's other people, other artists that continue to change their whole lives, you know. And I like that idea because that's what the Coolcats were doing. That's what Chick Korea was doing, That's what the Beatles were doing, That's what led Zeppelin was doing. The people that we're around that I saw were growing and changing from the Carnegie Hills of Manhattan. Thank you. So that was wonderful, great talking to you. It was fun, great, it was great talk, just great. Thanks to Baila Fleck for explaining his lifelong love for the banjo and sharing a song off his new album My Bluegrasshart. Do you hear the album along with our favorite Beila Flex songs. Check out the playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Gent Taladay, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted, ad free listening for four ninety nine on a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts, subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. For the music by Kenny Beats, I'm justin Richmond,