Bela Fleck Quotations

My most powerful memory was hearing Earl Scruggs on 'The Beverly Hillbillies' as a 5 or 6 year old. That sound just blew me away, shook my head up.

I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz.

I think it is very ironic that most people think that the banjo is a southern white instrument. It came from Africa and even for the first years that white people played banjo they would put on blackface.

I always try to work with people who are better than me, so I can learn more.

They think the banjo can only be happy, but that's not true.

So it doesn't have to be happy music to be inspiring.

I don't know enough about hip-hop, though I've heard some great hip-hop. I just did a thing with Qwest Love - we did a performance together in Memphis at the Folk Alliance Festival, and we had a great jam and a conversation.

I think the musical evolution I've gone through has come from all the work with the material.

Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It's amazing what you see and what you learn.

I learned that I'm so busy with what I'm doing, so focused on what I'm doing, that I miss a lot of opportunities for interacting with people.

I think I'm getting better at being verbal. I used to have a lot of problems with it. I had my own little demons that I was fighting, and I used the banjo as an escape.

I was a big fan of a writer named Jack Vance, a science fiction writer. He always wrote about these guys who were either going down a river in a strange world or would be in this one land where people acted really strange, and he'd have these interactions with them that were strange - he'd usually get run out of town or something. Then he'd end up in the next town over where the rules were totally different. And I love this stuff.

I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn't actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake. He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.

There are a lot of chapters to the banjo's history. Part of it are the roots in Africa, where it's a more primitive instrument. Then it comes to the United States where it morphs into the slave music that they created here, which was very African in origin.

And then Earl Scruggs comes along and transforms the banjo into a virtuosic modern instrument. For the first time, the Southern banjo style becomes the identity of the banjo, and everything from before is wiped off of people's consciousness by the power of that explosion.

Being from New York, I wonder why am I inspired by bluegrass and Earl Scruggs? But when I look at the whole history of the banjo, I feel really good about it, including the Earl Scruggs part.

There's a lot of hip-hop that would be great with a banjo in it. It would just groove like crazy, and I hope I get to be one of the guys who does that, because it's coming. It's coming.

When I play my own music, or when I play new music, there's much more stress and intensity of thinking about how I'm going to make it work!

It doesn't have to be happy music to be inspiring.

I doubt anybody would have pushed me [on the music]. When I was at Sony nobody ever gave me any creative suggestions on the music.

I did so much research that I knew what I was getting into. I was trying to find specific musicians.

We've been playing together since June. It's a cool experience on a personal level. They're the guys that I looked up to when I was coming up.

There really had to be some letting go and just sort of giving yourself up to the gods. I worked so hard to be prepared, but I had to be prepared to play things I was NOT prepared for.

It was a very ambitious trip. I have to say, to my surprise, all of our ambitions were fulfilled. All of the musicians we were going down there to record with, we recorded with?I've edited about nine or 10 songs down from the trip, and the stuff is really, really unusual and special. It far exceeds what I hoped for in sort of the refined qualities of it. I thought it might just sort of be rough stuff out in the woods. But ? some of this stuff is just amazingly fine, fine stuff.

It's like music theory, which was created to study what already was. Bluegrass exists, and since it's been around long enough there are people who want to talk about it,

The band deserves to be recorded. And we also recorded a live CD on the tour. Some day that will come out, for sure.

I've gotten back with the band so I could get some rest!

They went crazy over that, and then they just opened up.

I'm just full of ideas. I have hundreds of possibilities. Hopefully, I'll continue to have space for that creativity to happen.