Béla (not Lugosi) Fleck

By popular demand, for Halloween we bring you the haunting jazz of Béla Fleck…  Vampire jokes aside, Béla Fleck is a talented musician who has successfully bridged several musical genres, having received Grammy nominations for nominations for jazz, bluegrass, pop, spoken word and country.  Fleck plays electric and acoustic banjo, which is not an instrument you hear routinely on the jazz circuit, but along with brothers Victor (bass) Wooton and Roy (drums) Wooten, they make some unique jazz as the core of the group “Béla Fleck and the Flecktones.” They are well worth checking out, especially if you’re a bluegrass fan thinking of checking out jazz to see if you might like it.  Other members of the group have included Howard Levy (harmonica/keyboards) and Jeff Coffin (sax); Béla Fleck and the Flecktones have won several Grammy awards.

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones have recorded 11 albums in the period from 1990 to 2003.  The group is currently taking a year off for individual projects, but are expected to reunite and return to the studio soon.  The band’s website is here.  Fleck’s personal website is here.  Their best-known albums include:

* Béla Fleck and the Flecktones (1990)
o    Grammy nomination, Instrumental Composition
o    Grammy nomination, Jazz Album
o    Grammy nomination, Jazz Instrumental
* Flight of the Cosmic Hippo (1991)
o    No. 1, U.S. jazz charts
o    Grammy nomination, Jazz Album
o    Grammy nomination, Jazz Instrumental
* UFO Tofu (1992)
o    Grammy nomination, Best Instrumental
o    Grammy nomination, Instrumental Composition for “Magic Fingers” (track)
* Live Art (1996)
o    Grammy winner, live album
o    Grammy winner, Best Pop Instrumental Performance for “Sinister Minister” (track)
* Left Of Cool (1998)
o    Grammy winner, Best Instrumental Composition for “Almost 12” (track)
* Outbound (2000)
o    Grammy winner, Best Contemporary Jazz Album

Fleck was born and raised in New York and started out as a guitar player, but when he heard the theme to the TV show “The Beverly Hillbillies”:

…the bluegrass sounds of Flatt & Scruggs flowed out of the TV set and into his young brain. Earl Scruggs’s banjo style hooked Béla’s interest immediately. “It was like sparks going off in my head” he later said.

His grandfather bought him a banjo when he entered high school, which was the source of some ribbing from his big-city classmates.  However, his playing was impressive enough that they decided he was cool after all.

After graduating, he went to Boston, playing in and recording with the group “Tasty Licks.”  After that group broke up, he was a street musician in Boston, then went to Lexington, KY, where he joined the group “Spectrum.”  In 1981, he was invited to join the progressive bluegrass band “New Grass Revival,” and over the next nine years he toured nationally and internationally with the group, recording albums both with them and solo.  Towards the end of his New Grass period, he met Levy at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and they soon joined with the Wooten brothers to form the Flectones, recording for Warner Brothers in Nashville.  WB called the unique sound of the group blu-bop, and they were on their way…

Fleck has also branched out into classical music (he is named after the classical musician Béla Bartok, not the vampire actor) and most recently world music (during this sabbatical year from the Flectones, as discussed on the website).  Flecks’ total Grammy count is 8 Grammys won, and 20 nominations. He has been nominated in more different categories than anyone in Grammy history.  A feature article on the Flectones appeared in USA Today in 1994.  It’s an interesting look into the life of a musician on the road, and the economic and logistics of the music business today; worth reading even if you hate the banjo.

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Stan Getz

Following on our discussion of bossa nova from a week ago, one of the artists I mentioned needing to discuss was Stan Getz.

“Let’s face it. We [tenor saxophonists] would all play like him, if we could.” – John Coltrane on Stan Getz

Getz was born in Philadelphia on Feb. 2, 1927, and raised in New York City.  He played a number of instruments before his father bought him his first saxophone at the age of 13. Between 1943 and 1949, starting at the age of 16, he played with various well-known big bands of the era (Jack Teagarden, 1943; Stan Kenton, 1944; Jimmy Dorsey, 1945; Benny Goodman, 1945-6; Woody Herman, 1947-9).  He became known as a soloist while playing with Herman, and from 1950 on would primarily lead his own groups.

In the 1950s, Getz had become quite popular playing cool jazz (Cool jazz was a lighter, more romantic style of playing than bebop; cool jazz developed mainly on the west coast, while bebop was more of an east coast phenomenon.) with a Horace Silver, Oscar Peterson, and others.  He was fortunate in having quality musicians in his first two quintets in the 1950s, but developed a drug addiction that led to an arrest in 1954 and a move to Copenhagen, Denmark in 1958 to break his habit.

Returning to the US in 1961, Getz became a central figure in the bossa nova craze of the time.  Joining with guitarist Charlie Byrd, fresh back from a trip to Brazil, he recorded the album “Jazz Samba” which became a hit.  He won the 1963 Grammy for Best Jazz Performance for the track “Desafinado” (“Off-Key,” composed by the Brazilian Antonio Carlos Jobim) from the album.

He next recorded in 1963 with the Brazilians Jobim, guitarist João Gilberto and his wife, the singer Astrud Gilberto. The tune “The Girl from Ipanema” from their album won another Grammy for the bossa nova sound, and the album Getz/Gilberto won two Grammy awards in 1965. Getz was at home in the bossa nova idiom, as it made good use of his sometimes light, sometimes romantic playing style previously developed in cool jazz.

By 1967, Getz was influenced by the jazz fusion movement started by Miles Davis among others, and recorded with keyboardist Chick Corea, who had also recorded with Davis, and bassist Stanley Clark, who had been in Corea’s band “Return to Forever”.

In 1969, Getz went to Spain for another drug-related hiatus, but returned in 1980, playing in experimental, electric ensembles.  To the relief of critics, by the mid 1980s he returned to acoustic jazz, de-emphasizing bossa nova for less mainstream jazz. A very good double-CD set, recorded with Kenny Barron on piano, People Time is from this period: it was Getz’s last public appearance (in his beloved Copenhagen) and final recording before his death in California  (June 6, 1991) of liver cancer.

Jazz News

Be sure to check out jimstaro’s recent diary on how you can help NOLA Public Radio station stay on the air!

Jazz singer and pianist Shirley Horn has died at age 71; an appreciation is available here, from the NY Times.