Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn
Downbeat, July 2020
What you’re about to read is about one third of my original transcript. Brevity and focus are two virtues in the theology of editing. In this case, adhering to them was difficult, for several reasons. One, interviews with two folks generally run longer than those with one. Two, when they’re both complex artists with plenty to say about their individual projects, dialog often condenses into sequential monologs at the expense of conversational give-and-take.
That might explain why banjo virtuoso Abigail Washburn politely exited her living room to check on sons Juno and Theo, leaving her husband, Béla Fleck, also a master of the instrument, to expound on his spectacular new release, Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions. And while Béla stayed by her side in their living room as I asked her about her ambitious recent collaboration with a close friend and guzheng virtuosa Wu Fei, she spoke on her own, and as engagingly as he did.
So what I’ve left for you here is more than enough to capture their professional and personal interactions on matters of more general concern — and, I’ll add, the benefits of crafting informed questions in advance as well going where these two artists want to go in answering them.
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Two motivations seem to drive both your and Abigail’s cross-cultural music. One is to look at musical element but the other is to use the music to make a grander statement.
Béla: It’s funny because you asked about that poster of the New Grass Revival on tour in Turkey. It was a really great thing that I got to be a part of the band as they were established; I came in to replace their banjo player who’d left over a falling-out over playing with Leon Russell at the time. One of the great things we got to do was to travel the world. I discovered on those trips that we were treated as ambassadors, so I could wire ahead and say, “Ambassador Fleck would like to meet some great local musicians.” I was just curious; I knew there were going to be great things to learn. That was the most exciting thing about going on these trips, what kinds of music I might hear and what I might learn that I could apply to the banjo.
What I wasn’t expecting was that they’d get these people into the room and sometimes they would be [unintelligible]. But once I would get my banjo out and we would start to play together, all of a sudden everybody would light up: the musicians, government officials and everybody. A bright line would shine and we would all be happy. That really impressed me. When I went out with the Flecktones, I would make that part of the deal: They would find local musicians that we could perform with onstage.
The only downside was that instead of being a tourist, all I could think about was what music we could play with that person and how to make it happen onstage. Even in Africa I spent most of m time working on music and not looking around, so I could be prepared for infractions that were really cool.
How much research did you do before taking your first trip to Africa, I believe in 2005? And how often did you just go into situations cold?
Béla: Both. I’ve always had as thing about control. Especially in those years with the Flecktones I was able to edit the records and clean things up. If we did a TV show I would remix the audio to get it as good as it could be. But I also noticed that a lot of times I did some of my best playing when I had no control at all. These two sides of my brain were confusing. So when I went to Africa, part of it was to embrace a lack of control and go into situations where I couldn’t possibly be prepared. When I could prepare, I would. If I knew I was gonna meet somebody and play with them and I had their music and I could choose the tune and get prepared, that was great.
A lot of times we would film the first moment I met somebody, before we’d even said a word. We’d start playing. You couldn’t improve on those things by practicing.
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Before world music became a concept, you were a jazz player and a bluegrass player. Your interest in exploring these other things was also a reflection of a certain time in music when maybe people weren’t so inhibited by preconceptions.
Béla: For me, it’s an older approach. That was going on right and left in the Sixties. I’m 61, so in the Sixties I was experiencing the Beatles. Then Ravi Shankar showed up. Anything could happen. Folk music was booming too. All of the musicians that were heroes to us were busting it open and finding connections. That was what you were supposed to do. Then as time went on, it was like, “Jazz is this. You have to play it this way.” But people have been pushing the edges of everything as long as I’ve been around.
Abby, did your interest in exploring other cultures predate your musical life?
Abigail: My interest in learning about other cultures came first. I was an Asian Studies major at the Colorado College. It wasn’t until after my senior year that I bought a banjo and started learning how to play. That was directly connected to my desire to share something American with Chinese people when I would go over there to work and study. So I brought a banjo with me when I did an internship in China. I played it a a local club. I wasn’t very good; I could just play a couple of chords and sing a little bit. But that’s what I did.
I was planning to go to law school after I’d finished that internship. I came back and worked for another term in state government in Vermont, where I lived at the time, as a lobbyist. At the end of that I’d taken my exams to go to China and study undergrad law. I got ready to go but first I went on this big trip before I’d go to America and live in a cubicle, so I wanted to go and see some stuff. Part of what I wanted to do was to learn some banjo music before I did that. So I traveled.
I went to West Virginia and North Carolina. Then I ended up in Kentucky at the Bluegrass Music Association’s convention. I’d learned a couple of new songs by then. I played them, including one song that I’d translated into Chinese. People just really thought it was special, and after I’d left the IBMA [International Bluegrass Music Association] I was offered a record deal. It was really shocking.
Béla: That’s pretty much the way it happened to me too [laughs].
Do you ever explore each other’s style, with Béla doing clawhammer and Abigail doing three-finger, just for fun?
Béla: I did a lot of clawhammer when I was wooing Abby. As soon as we actually became a couple, I figured that she was way better at doing it than I was. I get a lot of musical influence from Abby. There’s a lot of [sounds like: flam] that can be played three-finger style.
Those styles represent two completely different communities.
Béla: Absolutely.
Abigail: It’s surprising when you see somebody who can play both.
Béla: I would say that I’ve done a lot of things that were hard to do, playing with different musicians on the road. But it takes just as much creativity to figure out how to make a banjo do well with clawhammer and three-ringer style. I’ve put a lot of thought into now that we play a lot of different banjos in different registers to make a big sound.
Abigail: I certainly like the technical aligning in where your sixteenth-notes hit. A lot of that has to do with understanding the spirit of how someone plays. Béla always pushes the beat forward.
Béla: I rush [laughter]. That’s another way to put it. I come by it honestly because bluegrass music has what we call a forward lean. If it rushes too much, it’s rushing. But if it’s on the front edge, it feels right. You push the time and the band knows how to follow. In the old days, when the soloist was closest to the microphone, everybody would follow the soloist’s rhythm. The sound of the band because every soloist had a different amount of swing to his playing, a different amount of drive. As each soloist and vocalist changed, the band’s sound would change. A great bluegrass recording would have that feeling of constantly ebbing and flowing, pulling forward and pulling back in a beautiful way. Old-time music tends to be more on the back end and funkier. There’s some driving stuff, and different players play differently. But Abby certainly leans toward the middle or the back end a little. So it was actually kind of tricky to find a way to lock together our sixteenths. It took some real adjustments on both of our parts.
Abigail: And there’s a lot of X-factor. We’ve just got to play together a lot and find each other like, “Okay, on this song, why don’t you meet me more on the front?” That takes a long time.
Béla, did your interest in other cultures also predate your interest in playing music?
Béla: Not really. It all came out of wanting to learn more, to do everything on the banjo that I could possibly figure out how to do. If I heard a Bach piece, I was like, “Wow, I want to know how to do that on the banjo!” Or even in jazz: Try to learn a Pat Martino solo. “Well, why don’t you learn to play a guitar?” Well, I’m not an electric guitarist. I’m a banjo player. The banjo speaks to me. The electric guitar doesn’t. But I want to know what the notes are, so I would learn a Charlie Parker solo or a Bach piece or occasionally an African thing.
Did you actually transcribe Charlie Parker solos?
Béla: Yeah. I’d rarely do a whole solo, but there’s just a world in just a phrase. Just like you can grow four measures of a Bach piece into a whole style, with Charlie Parker or Pat Martino or a lot of these guys, if you learn a few phrases that jump out at you, you pull so much from that. When I would learn part of a Bach partita, maybe I couldn’t get the whole thing in the key it was in. Maybe I could learn some of it. Or I could learn a Chick Corea phrase. That totally changed my understanding of the banjo every time.
The first world music that interested me was the Chieftains. They didn’t have a banjo in the band, but I didn’t know any of their music wouldn’t sound great on the banjo. The banjo came very late to Irish music.
Abigail: What about Shakti?
Béla: Shakti was around that time, yeah. I wasn’t as into them as I am now. But I was really into Return To Forever. I remember seeing them play at the Beacon Theater when I was seventeen. I had been playing banjo for less than three years. It was just an epiphany to see. I liked Chick the best but I was most inspired by Stanley and Al because they would zoom up and down their instruments from top to bottom. There was no area that they didn’t know. For me, playing the banjo, I was very much locked into positions. We didn’t play scales up and down the neck, the way those guys did. I actually went home from that concert and stayed up all night, mapping out scales. They were there to be found but people hadn’t really done that it that way.
Sino-Western Explorations
Abby, I listened to your album with Wu Fei. How did you and she meet?
Abigail: We met in Colorado.
Béla: I was there!
Abigail: Yeah, you were. I was on tour with the Sparrow Quartet, a band that came to be because of touring in China. Béla said he wanted to come with me when we were early in our dating. I think this was in 2006. I had already done one trip to China. The next time, as I was getting ready, he said, “Why don’t you invite me [laughs]?”
Béla: She said, “I’ve already invited a cello player and a fiddler. The band would be two banjos, cello and fiddle. That’s not really a band, is it [laughs]?”
Abigail: But we just decided to make it work. It doesn’t really matter that much because they don’t know [laughs]! So we got there and started working on ideas. That’s how we first started playing together.
Béla: We actually discovered it was kind of a great combination of instruments.
Is her English good?
Abigail: It’s fantastic. She’s an American citizen. In a way, she and I took parallel paths in the sense that I started going to China when I was eighteen and in college. She came to America for the first time when she was twenty-one. We both intensely became a part of the other person’s native culture.
What kind of discussions preceded your decision to do this album?
Abigail: It’s been a really organic process in the sense that when she and I first met, she was in the John Zorn camp on his label [Tzadik Records]. She was creating a lot of work for avant-garde festivals here, touring over there and enjoying life in Boulder, where she was living with her boyfriend at the time. Nick Forster at eTown Radio told me about her. There was definitely a connection between us that day. I loved how fun and sweet and connective she was. So we started emailing each other – that’s what you did in those days. And slowly but surely we formed a friendship through writing an email to each other every six months or so.
As time went on, she moved to New York City, and I visited her up there. Eventually she moved back to Beijing. I was going on tour in China every year, so I would visit her in Beijing. One of those times I went to Beijing, we said, “Let’s just play some music!” I stayed with her and we played music at night. Then we decided we wanted to come up with some duo stuff for this literary festival in Beijing. We ended up performing our first duo show there. Then we formed a band called the Wu-Force with a guy named Kai Welch, which was totally silly, just for fun, but we had some deep stuff too.
Then she moved to America with her husband. Things had started changing in the sense that all these countries started having more and more intense dictatorships. They were starting to experience that in their own lives and were starting to get kind of crushed in terms of pressures from the government surveying and monitoring them. It was getting scary. By then they’d had their second child. That was the other thing: She and I had both gotten married around the same time. We had children at the same time, who were really close friends. So all of that just lined up. When they decided to move to America, they wanted to move to Nashville. She knew it was the right place for her. Jeremy wasn’t sure what he wanted to be, but he thought America would be a good place.
So they moved here. That’s when we started writing this material. We didn’t quite know where it was going to go. We thought maybe we would record it someday. We got paid for some of that work by getting a Metro Council arts grant and playing at public schools all around the area, with a big concert at the end. That helped us form a lot of new material. Then Béla said, “Let’s record this in the basement here.”
Béla: One of the things that’s so special about their project is the way that they found tunes that could lie on top of each other. Using two languages in the same song, sometimes singing in different languages simultaneously and alternating words, there was a lot of really unique creative energies. the fact that it was so rooted in folk music and cultures meant the tunes almost sound like they were born to go on top of each other.
So some of this is folk material.
Abigail: A lot of it is creative takes on folk material.
What were your criteria for selecting which tunes to record and especially to blend together?
Abigail: Themes. Also, how they would connect harmonically. But it was also really close friendship and knowing each other really well, going through some challenging times as new mothers trying to keep our careers going while loving our kids. That spirit made us really glad to have those moments of solace on the porch together, asking, “What’s an amazing song that helps you put your child to sleep?” and then combining the right ones.
Béla: You guys were doing show-and-tell: “Hey, here’s this great tune!” Then the other one says, “Wow, that makes me think of this other tune! I wonder if they could go together?”
Was it more challenging to blend vocally than instrumentally, because of the contrasting nuances in singing?
Abigail: I think it was really natural.
Béla: This is really the most Chinese-oriented thing you’ve ever done, as much as you’ve dabbled in it. That side of you got to expand a lot.
Abigail: It’s also the most intimate [project]. I had a girl band in China, which you never heard, that did a lot of stuff. But that was a different kind of music. With Wu Fe I’ve had years, more than a decade, and we brought that close friendship.
Béla: What I like about it is, in the course of you being in all these bands or even playing with me, you pull out a Chinese song, almost like a parlor trick: “Hey! I bet you weren’t expecting this!” It’s usually a simple folk song. People love it. And then we move on to something else. But this is the first time I’ve seen you go all the way in. It shows that it’s not just a parlor trick, that there’s a lot going on.
This projects explores new possibilities while also respecting the sources of the music.
Béla: It’s not the genre that’s good or bad. I mean, talk about all the people who hate fusion because it all started to sound the same. It wasn’t the original guys who made it that made people think it was a dirty word.
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The African Immersion
Béla, your film Throw Down is quite moving. You state that its purpose was to explore the roots of the banjo in Africa but as it played out that seemed less and less to be the real goal.
Béla: That was never the real goal. It was an incredible experience but it was also like a six-week calculus test. Every day I was playing with new musicians, playing music I wasn’t familiar with. I had also bet the farm on the thing. Sony dropped out on me a week or two before I went. I wasn’t going to give back all the money I’d paid for the film crew, the lights and everything. That was fine, but I really wanted it to be good. I had to do whatever extra legwork I could do on my end to make sure it was gonna be good. So that five or six weeks was a super-intense, focused period. When I got back, I was so thankful that nobody got hurt. Nobody got sick. We made it home with all our stuff. We didn’t come home with empty hard drives.
Then I went through this period where I almost had bigger epiphanies through years of editing the recordings and the film. It was a heavy Flecktone time. I was out on tour with them or with Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty. You’d have all day on a tour bus. You’d get there in the morning, the guys didn’t want to rehearse; we’d just run a couple of things at soundcheck. So I had all day. I’d sit in the back of the bus, getting to find out what had happened. That was my real immersion in that music. I could take all this time to listen to us. Maybe we had four takes: I could figure out what happened, what I didn’t understand.
Then I started editing the movie myself too because I couldn’t afford to hire a thousand-dollar editor. Plus, I wanted to know what happened. I got to learn a lot about how I played and what I did, what was good and what wasn’t good. I got to learn the music a lot better.
Then after editing two albums of music and the movie, including an hour of extra footage, I brought the guys over on tour and we started playing the music live. We played the same songs every day. We’d practice them. So my African immersion was about five or six years, from beginning to end.
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The first place depicted in the film is Uganda, where we see some great examples of communal music. That giant marimba seemed to have two or three people playing it simultaneously.
Béla: I think it was eight people, at least six.
This exemplifies a completely different performance aesthetic than we have in Western music, where the performer is separated and somewhat above the audience.
Béla: You have to remember that it was very loud. I don’t know that they actually heard anything I was playing [laughs]. Talk about a mashup! At that time I had a world phone, before cell phones. I used it only a few times because it was very expensive. But there I am in [sounds like: Neppa Senney], on the first part of the tour. Abbey and I were together at that point, just a couple of years into knowing each other. So I had the world phone and I called Abby. I was in kind of a state of anxiety: “I don’t know what to do! I don’t understand this music. I don’t know how I’ll get through it. I’ve got everybody here. The camera crew is here. We’ve got the mics.” And do you remember what you said?
Abigail: [unintelligible]
Béla: You said, “You don’t have to find the one. You don’t have to know the music. You just have to bring yourself and be yourself. React to what you’re hearing. Nobody expects you to know Ugandan music. You’re gonna be in a different place every day. You’ve got to give yourself permission to be yourself be yourself and let whatever happens happen.” All I could think of was, what would Branford Marsalis do? Or Sonny Rollins? They’d just play! They don’t care where the one is. they’d just find their own one and play along. That’s what I ended up having to do with those guys. A lot of times I could figure it out, but I remember that freakout moment.
“If you don’t tell people where the beat is, they may end up on the wrong beat for life.” – Béla Fleck
So many of these grooves are so strong, it would be difficult to resist jumping into them.
Béla: One thing we’ve learned from collaborating with a lot of people is that if you don’t tell people where the beat is, they may end up on the wrong beat for life. It’s very had to unlearn the beat you first learn. So if you’re playing with the Flecktones or Zakir or somebody like that, and I start showing them one of my tunes and it has an upbeat and they think the upbeat is the downbeat, they’re perennially going to feel that way.
But sometimes that makes for great music. In the Flecktones we have an agreement not to talk where the one is. Sometimes that can make for very interesting syncopated music, as long as we’re all feeling it and it feels good for everybody.
That explains all the claps on one and three in polka music.
Abigail: Those are my people [laughs].
Béla: As opposed to polska, which is a different thing altogether. We just saw this band called Väsen. They’re from Sweden. They play the nyckelharpa fiddle. The music is crazy and beautiful. You think it’s in all kinds of odd meters. But polska means “waltz,” apparently. They say, “We’re going to play another polska for you,” and I’m thinking “polka” but they’re all in some kind of subdivided threes.
The Lonely Virtuoso
Going back to the communal nature of a lot of the music you encountered, since everybody joins in for these performances, is there any concept of virtuosity in that culture? Does everybody participate equally?
Béla: It depends on the culture. In Mali, for instance, there’s lots of soloing. There’s lots of appreciation for soloists. I didn’t see it that much in Uganda. In fact, Anania [Ngoliga], who is one of the most stunning soloists I’ve ever heard, doesn’t have the respect over here that he got from me and the people who saw the movie. It’s not valued the same way over there. He’s not a superstar in his own world.
Because the concept of superstardom is foreign to that culture?
Béla: Because instrumental soloing isn’t as big a deal to folks in that particular area.
I wonder if that’s frustrating to him.
Béla: It is frustrating. On occasion someone sends me something about what he’s up to and he’s doing cover songs [unintelligible]. I mean, there are always people who are into it and know how special he is.
I’ll tell you how I found him. I had met the guys from Afro-Pop. They sent me some stuff that country. I wasn’t interested in most of it. It was all Afro-pop; it was like very codified [unintelliglbe] from outside of Africa and pop-oriented, stardom-oriented and singer-oriented. It’s like the [flip?] problem in Nashville, where it’s all about … I guess Pete Seeger would call it cult of personality, about somebody being a star. But that’s the goal of the music, not the actual music itself.
Anyway, in between these fifteen rock bands that were playing — it was cool stuff; don’t get me wrong — I heard two minutes of somebody playing a thumb piano and singing like a bird. It was like in The Producers: “That’s our Hitler [laughs][!” “That’s the guy I want! He’s amazing.” It didn’t take me thirty seconds to realize that he’s the bee’s knees. It was the coolest thing I’d ever heard.
Young jazz players inevitably get enamored of the chops they’ve developed. Can these musicians learn something constructive from music that is more community-based, made by people supporting each other rather than trying to cut each other?
Béla: For me, there’s some essence that makes you want to listen to something. It’s usually not about how fast somebody plays. That might get you for a second: “Wow, he’s got really good chops!” But you know how quickly I wanted to hear any kind of work from Anania, there was some element about it that hit me in the first seconds. It could be somebody who is minimalist or it could be John McLaughlin or Earl Scruggs. Incredible technical ability is a part of it but there’s a lot more to it than that. That’s the mystery of it all: What makes you care about the music?
That’s my message to anybody who’s an instrumentalist. It’s harder as an instrumentalist to get people to care about what you do. So you’d better be playing something meaningful.
I was always told that you should be part of great music. It’s not just about you being really good at what you do. You’ve got to find great music to attach to, that you can be part of, and be in combinations of musicians who are doing something meaningful. That’s a lot harder to achieve than technical ability.
Abigail: And that idea of the community making music starts to feel more and more important when you feel yourself more and more in something that feels like a dictatorship or an imbalance in relation to what’s happening in our forms of government. I felt more and more drawn to that. It brings a sense of power when you might feel out of control.
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