BELA'S BANJO BACK IN THE FLECKTONES MIX.Byline: - Fred Shuster Banjo banjo, stringed musical instrument, with a body resembling a tambourine. The banjo consists of a hoop over which a skin membrane is stretched; it has a long, often fretted neck and four to nine strings, which are plucked with a pick or the fingers. Slaves brought it to America (by 1688) from W Africa, to which it may have come from Europe or Asia. It was played in minstrel shows in the 19th cent. It is used frequently in hillbilly and Southern folk music.-playing bandleader Bela 1 First king of Edom. 2 Benjamin's first son. An alternative spelling is Belah. 3 City later called Zoar. Fleck doesn't spend time off in predictable ways. When he put his longtime jazz-fusion group the Flecktones on hold last year for the first time since 1990, it was ostensibly to relax and perhaps study music composition. He ended up traveling through Africa with a film crew in search of the roots of the banjo, headlining Carnegie Hall in a jazz-fusion outfit with Stanley Clarke, playing casuals in China with his girlfriend, going on the road with a bluegrass trio and, eventually, making a new Flecktones record. ``I was originally going to go back to school,'' Fleck said. ``I wanted to take advantage of a year off the road. But I kept thinking about Africa and how much I wanted to explore where the instrument came from. So, I thought, this is the time to do it.'' Back on familiar ground, Fleck spearheaded the Flecktones' new back-to-basics album, ``The Hidden Land,'' which starts off with a Bach fugue dissociative fugue , psychogenic fugue a dissociative disorder characterized by an episode of sudden, unexpected travel away from home or business, with amnesia for the past and partial to total confusion about identity or assumption of a new identity. fugue (fy, delves into swing and ends up somewhere south of Pat Metheny. The four-piece Flecktones appear Saturday at the Wiltern in Los Angeles as part of the Acoustic Planet Tour Vol. II, also featuring the Yonder Mountain String Band and Keller Williams. ``Acoustic Planet is a phrase I much prefer to Americana, which is constantly used simply for music that doesn't fit into the mainstream,'' said Fleck, 47, who was born in New York and named for Hungarian composer Bela Bartok. ``I'm put in that niche, but I also do jazz-oriented stuff, world music and classical. That's my favorite way to be -- to exist in as many worlds as I can.'' Since their debut, the Flecktones have managed to blend a wide variety of styles on their largely all-instrumental records to worldwide acclaim and full concert halls. ``We thought we were doing uncommercial, weird music -- but we were embraced right away,'' Fleck recalls. ``Warners signed us, we had a VH1 video in heavy rotation at the same time as Tracy Chapman, we were on Johnny Carson a bunch of times. And we ended up at Carnegie Hall our first year out.'' BELA FLECK & THE FLECKTONES Where: Wiltern, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Tickets: $35.50-$42.50. (213) 480-3232; ticketmaster.com. CAPTION(S): photo Photo: (2) Bela Fleck and the Flecktones are back on the road to promote a new album after a rare yearlong layoff. |
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