reCAP :: Bela Fleck & The Flecktones :: 2016.06.04
A Bela Fleck & the Flecktones performance can still stop time. You're absorbed in the dazzling, genre-exploding interplay among four world-class musicians, you're mesmerized by the choices they're making about that musical interplay in real time, and, if it isn't your first Flecktones rodeo, you're perhaps feeling a bit nostalgic. Fleck & Co. have been doing this for so long, and for so well, that hearing decades-old material like "The Sinister Minister" and "Stomping Grounds" transports you…well, not back in time, but at least to memories of hearing this music for the first time, wondering how you lived without it before, and realizing it's silly to label it because it sounds just as adventurous now as it did then.
The Flecktones, reunited for a short tour for the first time since 2012, are all virtuosos and capable of such high-wire feats on their respective instruments that it's easy to forget the technical accomplishment of the music is only half of their story. No, what makes the Flecktones the Flecktones -- and what's really missing when all we have of them is recorded history versus live, in-the-moment concert experiences -- is the heart in the music.
It's warm -- not really cuddly, but never cold and certainly never remote. Bela Fleck, Victor Wooten, Roy "Futureman" Wooten and Howard Levy invite you into little worlds where folk, bluegrass, jazz, fusion, rock, funk and country shed their traditional definitions and somehow simply merge. Which is not to say the group pinballs among those genres, failing to find a distinct focus, so much as coheres around a genre-less center, letting their long-developed chemistry as a quartet bring personality, verve and excitement to lengthy passages of both solo and group improvisation.
At the Cap they were good for two hour-long sets, drawing liberally on early-era Flecktones tunes and also songs from their 2011 reunion album Rocket Science, including "Gravity Lane," "Prickly Pear," "Sweet Pomegranates" and "Life in Eleven." Given that harmonicist/pianist Levy was an early-era Flecktone and then was not with the group for nearly 20 years, the setlists look a little lopsided these days. But you'd never know that from the playing, which finds Levy, Fleck and the Wootens egging each other on like friends who've been conversing at a level well beyond words for a musical lifetime.
Saturday's show covered a lot of that well-honed conversation, and included some interesting asides in "Rococo" -- a 2006 Flecktones tune only recently played with Levy -- and "Zenergy," which comes from Victor Wooten's vast solo catalog. Still, however warm the reception was for lesser-known tunes, the already crackling energy in the room heightened that much more for staples like "Blu-Bop," "Hole in the Wall" and the goofy swinger "Flight of the Cosmic Hippo." And it sure hit a peak during the inevitable "Stomping Grounds," which, along with evening finale "The Sinister Minister," is perhaps the best-known song in the Flecktones catalog.
Next to each other -- one as set-closer, the other as encore -- they were studies in two schools of Flecktones improvisation. "Stomping Grounds" opened up beyond its jittery melody to a series of sub-group and then whole-group conversations, dovetailing courtesy of Futureman into "Wipeout" at one point and featuring all members of the group picking on each other, yielding the floor, claiming it back, going into psychedelic space before the familiar tune returned. The groovy "Minister," on the other hand, was a pass-the-baton series of solos that offered one more chance to hear each member of the band at full blast, from Levy's slicing harmonica to Fleck's warbling banjo.
The last word -- as it often is -- was Victor Wooten's, as the bassist pulled the whole room's energy into his orbit and provided a typically showstopping display of pushing, pulling, tugging, pinching and slapping on the electric bass, mining its every possibility as a conduit for sonics and rhythmic ideas. Left dazzled, my friend and I were on our way out discussing the merits of Victor Wooten as an improviser and how his on-the-spot creation of interesting musical expressions -- how you can see and hear him use pauses and the spaces between notes to as much effect as he does the actual plucks of the notes -- almost never feels like showboating. Someone walking behind us asked if we were talking about Wooten or about any of the four of them, and of course, he too was right.