Review: Béla Fleck pushes boundaries of the banjo in Schwartz Center concert

A packed house filled Emory University’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday for the fascinating new collaboration between banjo luminary Béla Fleck, bassist Edgar Meyer, tabla wizard Zakir Hussain and bansuri player Rakesh Chaurasia. Performing in support of their upcoming album As We Speak, which releases May 17, it was an evening of fascinating musical interplay commanded by Fleck’s banjo.

He casts a broad and looming shadow across the realm of modern music. The leading pioneer of the banjo as a jazz instrument, Fleck stands alongside other major contemporary masters like Bill Laswell and Pat Metheny — players who are not only virtuosos, but also innovators who push the boundaries of what their instruments can accomplish. 

After soaring to fame as a member of New Grass Revival and then with his own band, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Fleck’s work runs a wide and majestic gamut across an array of genres, from classical to jazz and now East Indian music.

In keeping with his towering presence, Fleck was the first to distinguish himself within the ensemble and, as always, he was quick to liberate the banjo from the familiar confines of its pastoral Americana roots. Fleck’s exotic foray into the realm of East Indian traditional music prompted him to modify his phrasing into something sonically akin to a sitar.

Fleck’s primary counterpart in the ensemble was Zakir Hussain, whose command of the tabla was a one-two punch to the senses. What is most notable about Hussain’s virtuosity is in the way he seems to unleash his dynamism in carefully contoured phrases that always serve to accentuate the surrounding musicians. It is a seemingly telepathic level of anticipatory intimacy.

The quartet was rounded out by Rakesh Chaurasia, a master of the bansuri (an Indian bamboo flute). His technical ability was, like his bandmates, stunning. But what was most notable was the manner in which exotic arpeggiated runs across eastern modalities would be intercut with western blues phrases or classical motifs. That harmonic cross pollination quickly came to define the performance.

Looming large in the background was double bassist Edgar Meyer. A MacArthur Fellow and Avery Fisher Prize winner, his formidable resume belies the commitment to subtly that he brought to the stage. While there were moments of sheer virtuosity to rival his bandmates, Meyer was largely a calm and understated presence who focused more on the textural possibilities of his instrument — occasionally even making it sound like a bluegrass fiddle — and filling the cavernous space around the soloists that would normally be occupied by a chordal instrument.

The ensemble of Fleck, Meyer, Chaurasia and Hussain captured the concept of “world music” as it truly ought to be understood. In popular parlance “world music” refers to any music that deviates from the western popular song form into the realm of indigenous folk stylings. But the best application of the concept is in music that bridges gaps between cultures by combining their native stylings together to form a larger whole. Fleck and his band mates reached that level Thursday night. It was music that felt, at every turn, like looking out different windows on a train bound for everywhere.

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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.