Never in all my life have I seen musicians as masterful, as creative, as entertaining as the Flecktones.
The Flecktones is an odd group of musicians. Traditionally speaking, a banjoist wouldn’t team up with an electric bassist and a saxophonist—the sounds and styles of each instrument are completely different. Throw in the wacky “Future Man” with his homemade drumitar (an electronic sound-effect/drum machine shaped like a guitar) and the band becomes even stranger.
The Flecktones is not a freak show. Rather, it is four people who have reached musical enlightenment and are continuously taking their music to unexplored heights. The strangeness is mere coincidence.
The band members are incredibly innovative; traditional use of their instruments isn’t good enough. Traditional simply isn’t the sound they strive for.
If there is a sound in that banjo which hasn’t come out yet, Béla Fleck is determined to find it. Twist a knob, bend the fret board, pluck the part of the strings not meant to be plucked, and voila, it sounds like a distorted electric sitar played with a bow.
But it’s just a banjo—and he plays the difficult riff over and over with seeming ease. He will then duplicate the difficulty with a variation and a solo before moving back into the original, amazing, unorthodox riff. And all the while he’s relaxed, smiling as the onlookers, with jaws dropped, observe the precision.
The spotlight then moves on to Victor Lamonte Wooten, the best electric bass player in the world.
“Were going to leave Victor out here for you guys to take care of,” says Future Man as the rest of the boys leaves the stage.
Wooten smiles and starts out with a funky slap bass line. He moves on through variations of that riff covering the whole fret board, then a bridge, a turn around, and back to the funky riff.
He then goes into chopsticks—that piano jingle that everyone can play—playing his fret board like a piano (both bass and treble clefs) with both hands. Once his piano playing is warmed up, he decides to jam chopsticks into a Chopin piano sonata.
I need to stop here to convey the virtuosity of this instance for a bit. The Chopin is a piece only master pianists can play well. Wooten was playing it—both parts with both hands—on a steel stringed electric bass. Damn.
He moved the music into the “Nutcracker Suite,” funky slap string style. From there he went into a beautiful rendition of “Amazing Grace,” then “Amazing Grace” funk style, tagging the ending with a beautiful cadenza and a bow.
Then the spotlight moves to Jeff Coffin. With a microphone on his alto saxophone, he has it wired though an effects processor. He’ll play its authentic sound, click a button, and will suddenly have a sax that sounds something like an electric guitar played under water with a wah-wah effect.
Coffin solos with this rock steady sound reaching the top of the chromatic scale on his alto. But he wants to get higher, so he grabs his tenor sax and travels up a few octaves in pitch.
Then he switches back to the alto—soulful and low—again to the tenor screaming high, then alto, then tenor, alto, tenor, then both together, one in each hand playing a high/low double-sax power riff down the expanded scale until, out of breath, he turns it over to Future Man.
Born in 2050, Future Man (a.k.a. Roy Wooten) has the first in homemade drumming technology. His drumitar, with a different drum sound activator on each fret, enables him to play as a physical drummer would while still permitting him to stray from regular humans’ meager physical restrictions.
His drumbeats can be more dynamic—especially when they are done in triple time—than any traditional drummer. Many of his drums are household items.
In a blurry whirl of flying fingers, drumsticks, hands and feet, Future Man gives a perfectly complex drum beat to accompany the other other-worldly performers.
Béla Fleck and the Flecktones has expanded the definition of music once again.
