“So that’s how it’s going to be!” quipped the banjo legend Béla Fleck, as the audience offered his trio a standing ovation before even one melodic sound wave had collided with the walls of Swasey. Many of the songs performed at this Saturday night Vail concert were derived from The Melody of Rhythm, a concerto written by Béla, the classy bassist Edgar Meyer, and the animated tabla guru Zakir Hussain. Each man dressed as if trying to jibe with the personality of his instrument, from blue jeans to tux attire, but this unlikely combination of personalities and instruments really did fuse beautifully. After a while, listeners decided to just give up trying to categorize the tunes as bluegrass, jazz, world music, or classical because the genres, like slippery pigs, defied being pinned down for long. With an encore and two more standing ovations, the group left the stage toweling off the sweat from their faces after their very physical performance.
Earlier that day, Fleck had carved out some time to hold a private lesson with a fellow banjoist and long-time fan of his, Justin Hiltner, ’14. Béla helped him appreciate the full range of his instrument and suggested mastering certain scales and exercises that will keep him busy for the next year. One outstanding piece of advice Béla had for him was that the point is not to compare yourself to others in your field but just to work hard at being “the best ‘you’ you can be.”
From the level of concentration in their facial expressions, it was easy to see that playing in this group requires skills we take for granted. During a Q&A session at The Roost, Zakir mentioned how he had never put so much effort into learning to listen to others in a group until he began working with Edgar and Béla. While playing, Béla and Zakir are constantly checking in visually with one another, and Edgar admitted that the biggest chunk of his brain is always with his fellow musicians, not with his double bass. Béla called this continuous adjustment to others in the group a “flexible metronome. The best music is not metronomic,” he said. “There’s a lot of beauty in that motion.”
Some students took the opportunity to ask the trio technical questions and found them to be very sincere and laid-back. Just as they did during the evening concert, the men constantly lobbed good-natured insults at one another, which added to their overall appeal. Curious about the formation of the group, Rob Flax, ’10, who came into town just for the concert, commented, “It makes sense that Indian and bluegrass, etc., could work together, but how do you go about pulling that off?” Béla responded that, “if you make your own rules, there’s no way to lose. It’s all about expression. We make music we like.” He added, half-jokingly, that he and Edgar had worked together in the past, but they wanted to get Zakir on board in order to steal some of his material. In this ever-shrinking world, these three are ambassadors proving that musical genres from various corners of the globe can be interwoven and translated into a form we can all appreciate.
by Lisa Alberico, published in TheDEN 2010