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It's late on a Sunday afternoon and I've just stubbed the hell out of the two outermost toes when the phone rings. On the other end of the line is banjo player extraordinaire Bela Fleck. He's called to tell me about his beautiful new acoustic album, Throw Down Your Heart (released March 3 on Rounder) and the documentary film of the same name, but my sympathetic nervous system has taken over and my immediate thoughts are frenzied. I'm not even sure I am making sense. Yet it is Fleck's calm voice, candid and funny descriptions and careful explanation of his most recent, large-scale project that causes thoughts of my traumatized digits to fade and my excitement to rise.
Throw Down Your Heart, subtitled Tales From the Acoustic Planet Vol. 3/Africa Sessions is a years-in-the-planning aural journey of Fleck's voyage to trace the lineage of the banjo to its African roots. Additionally, Fleck used the journey to play with some of Africa's finest known and unknown musicians. Throughout his career, Fleck has relished putting the banjo in unusual, unexpected arrangements and settings. While many of us might think of the banjo as the quintessential American instrument, it most likely started as a gourd, a stick and several strings or hairs. And like the music that emanates from its now flattened, metal belly, the banjo has a strong African history dating well before the earliest European slave trade. In fact, it is from these tragic journeys through the “narrow passage" that the album and film take their name. When captured slaves were taken from inland and finally saw the ocean at Bagamoyo, Tanzania, they “threw down their hearts," realizing that they would never see their homelands again. Fleck tells me this phrase stuck with him, and that the meaning has evolved into something positive “like falling in love."
“It just seemed like such a poetic phrase," Fleck says. “I understood the emotional component." It became important to Fleck and his recording team to do something positive with this effort. “You hear all these horrible statistics about Africa - AIDS and other illnesses, wars," he pauses, “but film and music can show the true beauty of what Africa really is and has to offer."
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The whole project was the result of conversations between Fleck, Sony Classical and Nichole Smaglick, a tour guide, who long dreamed of a trip where Fleck would teach banjo in Africa. Preferring the idea of going to Africa to learn and absorb rather than instruct, Fleck got his wish when Sony Classical, upon a final budgetary review, pulled the plug on the Africa project. At that point Fleck decided to make the trip and fund it himself, and in so doing, he was able to make it his own. Having toured South Africa and Northern Africa with The Flecktones, Bela felt like he'd never been to “Africa proper." A childhood fan of the Tarzan books, and a bit of a career “thrill seeker," Fleck long suspected if he made it to Central Africa there might be “great [musical] payoff."
Early in 2005, after months of planning, Fleck, along with a team of five documentarians including his younger brother and the film's producer, Sasha Paladino, traveled to Uganda, Mali, Tanzania and Gambia to capture the sights and sounds of Africa. Over five weeks the team captured more than 250 hours of film and 40 hours of music. This material was tweaked and narrowed down to 18 tracks, which comprise the music on Throw Down Your Heart. The documentary is screening around the country now, and has met with rave reviews and already won several awards. Fleck says it will be released on DVD later this year.
Most enlightening was not what Fleck discovered about the origins of the banjo and the roots of popular music but what he found out about himself and his playing. In his three-decade-and-counting career Fleck has put the banjo in every genre from jazz to pop. He is a cerebral, complex artist, who asserts he was teetering on the edge of being burned out by his role in The Flecktones. They'd been going strong for 20 years and touring steadily for the last fifteen. In 2005 they decided to take a break, leaving members free to experiment with new scenarios. Bela took the opportunity to invest himself in an intense form of personal and musical renewal.
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He began working with bassist Edgar Meyer and tabla player Zakir Hussain, and went on to collaborate with them on an orchestral work. He also began to play with fellow banjoist Abigail Washburn in The Sparrow Quartet (two banjos, cello and fiddle), where the ensemble spread unconventionally-arranged classical wings. But, the biggest undertaking and realization was that it was time to go to Africa.
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Fleck shares that the Africa trip was personally rewarding. Tracing the route and evolution of the banjo, as an instrument, was interesting because the ideas and influences Fleck encountered will long inform his banjo playing. Within The Flecktones there was always a level of control Bela maintained, but it was starting to wear on him and tax his creativity. In Africa, he experienced a lack of control combined with a steep learning curve of trying to learn and anticipate the subsequent days' musical meetings, which was as thrilling as it was exhausting. Fleck says the experiences he had playing with African musicians were “truly inspiring on a musical level." And this went back to the overall intent of the trip - to play with and learn from African musicians. Perhaps the seed was planted long before when Fleck, a longtime admirer of Malian 'songbird' Oumou Sangare, began to look for any reason to record with her. “I was crazy about her music, and so trying to put something together was somewhat selfish," he laughs.
Planning a trip like this was a logistical nightmare. Fleck discussed the special packing considerations, travel needs, broad medical precautions and the itinerary planning necessary to travel across the Atlantic to Gambia and Mali in Western Africa, and then thousands of miles to Uganda and Tanzania in Central Africa. The Fleck/Paladino team set up meetings in advance with local musical directors, who proved indispensable. They conducted auditions with musicians that the local field producers had set up, and “almost everyone made the cut." While traveling and recording in Africa did present unique challenges, the language barrier was not one of them. “We rarely had to use a translator," he says proudly. The team had made careful preparation in selecting field producers who could act as translators, but their services were seldom needed. Music was the lingua franca, and while recording the most foreign premise to the African performers was the idea of a second 'take.'
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When I ask Fleck what it was like to record in unconventional places - often in small town centers and village communal spaces, hotel rooms and the mouth of the mighty Nile River - he draws out the words “an adventure." In the planning phases of the trip, he had committed himself and his team to making the highest quality recordings they could. He took only two banjos on the trip, but they ran eight-track and six-track recording setups simultaneously and often only one would be up to complete the task. That meant running these decks on battery packs, battery packs that one couldn't charge just any old time because of the lack of electricity. Fleck is uncompromising in his appraisal of his crew, an “incredibly good, dedicated group."
While the team left room each day for recording, they also left room on each daytrip from their home base for chance encounters, unplanned jams and more recording.
“We had a definite set of goals, but we left space for happy accidents," Fleck says. “Each day was something new. [I] kind of had to wipe my brain clean." It wasn't until he returned home and found himself in post-production and really “living with the music" that he had a chance to digest what had happened. “The process of editing and recording yielded as much material as going over there."
The resulting distillation is a hauntingly beautiful collection of songs and African instruments. Some tracks are instrumental, some have vocals - all are clear and crisp recordings made in some of the most remote places on Earth. Some tracks are simple, just a single instrument and a voice, like the blind thumb pianist Anania Ngolia from Tanzania on the duet “Kabibi." Other tracks are more densely layered with choirs and singing groups, such as the opening track, a welcome song called “Tulinesangala," where Fleck performs with thirteen female cooks from Nakesenyi, Uganda, or “Jesus Is the Only Answer" performed with the Ateso Jazz Band. Malian singer Oumou Sangare has a beautiful, haunting voice, which is complimented by Fleck's crisp, sparse banjo on “Ah Ndiya" and “Djorolen," the latter a plea to remember the most helpless or disenfranchised in society.
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One of the most satisfying and mesmerizing tracks on the album is “Wairenziante," which translates to, “Even if I don't have a cow (someone will love me)." In addition to three dozen musicians, it features a 15-foot marimba (xylophone) constructed over a pit in the earth. Fleck laughs when he recalls how it took about seven or eight men to play it.
One of the tracks was born in Fleck's studio in Nashville out of a 22-minute jam session with D'Gary and two other musicians, and he decided to bring it with him to Africa. Through the use of his studio and editing programs, Fleck later added instrumentation and vocals recorded in Africa and the result is a lush, expansive six-minute track with 20 musicians.
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What is interesting is that almost all the tracks feature the banjo, and in every instance it sounds in place. Some of the tracks feature a fiddle and are reminiscent of bluegrass despite being clearly African in form and pattern. Even a simple arrangement of banjo with vocals sounds surprisingly complex, due in part, I suspect, to the polyrhythmic layering of African music and uniquely African vocal timbres. The acoustic banjo's sound is so pure and straightforward that it provides the perfect accompaniment and compliment to the voices and traditional African instruments featured on the album. Given what Fleck discovered about the origins of the banjo, this should come as little surprise.
Almost certainly the banjo came to the Americas with the slave trade as populations from Western Africa were depleted. It's likely that the banjo prototype came from the Gambian akonting, a three-stringed round lute made from a gourd stretched taut with animal skin, or the Malian n'goni, which has a longer, more oblong body than the round banjo. While the steel-stringed banjo is certainly a more refined, stylized instrument, it's clear, both visually and musically, that these age-old instruments and traditions have informed everything from the field hollers to the blues to Americana and beyond. The new album and Fleck's documentary are arguably essential listening for those seeking the lines of connection between the instrument we know and its ancestors.
To experience the music and cultural history of Africa more deeply, Fleck is trying something new with a two-week tour to support the album's release. He's brought four of the African musicians over for the tour. Vocalist Vusi Mahlasela (simply called “The Voice"), guitarist D'Gary from Madagascar, kora player Toumani Diabate and thumb piano player and singer Anania Ngolia will join Fleck for a two-week tour, already in progress. Each evening's format will likely be the artists performing solo and then Fleck joining each for a couple numbers. Each evening on the 15-date tour will culminate with a 'jam' of sorts, most likely tunes from the album. Fleck says the trick was selecting musicians who were stylistically and sonically different enough from each other yet could all come together each night while keeping each performance intimate.
So, would he do it all again?
“Absolutely," he says without skipping a beat. “I like the idea of every five years going somewhere else. I don't want to go and only learn African music or only learn Chinese music, but I think that by immersing myself in these cultures I can inform my own music."
Though he acknowledges taking on the roles of planner, financier and performer was a significant endeavor, it was “incredibly rewarding" and he looks forward to the next project. And it is visionary projects like Fleck's that remind us how we are all connected, that music from cultures across the globe can lead us to our roots.
Bela Fleck is currently on tour with Toumani Diabate and Vusi Mahlasela, details available here. For a better idea of what to expect at these very special shows, check our review from last week in Oakland here.
You can get more info on the documentary film at www.throwdownyourheart.com.
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