There is a tendency to want to isolate a little bit, from people that might look at me from a fan position, because it’s hard to be a real person around them, and I really want that when I’m not out on tour and in that sort of public eye.
BELA FLECKThere 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.
More Bela Fleck Quotes
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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!
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I always try to work with people who are better than me, so I can learn more.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes you can fix something that went wrong with what you do next and make it better than it would have been if it hadn’t gone wrong, as an improviser, and I do know how to do that.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It doesn’t have to be happy music to be inspiring.
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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.
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I think the musical evolution I’ve gone through has come from all the work with the material.
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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.
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Sometimes you can fix something that went wrong with what you do next and make it better than it would have been if it hadn’t gone wrong, as an improviser, and I do know how to do that.
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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.
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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.
BELA FLECK