Bela Fleck on taking holiday music to new places
Musicians who explore the fringes of music as we know it often seem to operate in a parallel dimension with few points of reference for the average music fan.
This historically has been true in jazz, where such innovators as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus abandoned the rules established by their predecessors and opened new sonic vistas, leaving many fans in the dust with their experimentations.
Banjoist Béla Fleck chose an instrument most closely associated with tradition-minded country, bluegrass and folk music, but he's also a longtime jazz aficionado who has typically thought and played with the anything-goes sense of his jazz heroes. On the surface, that makes his current holiday music tour look somewhat curious.
But there’s a method to his musical madness, as he told me when we chatted recently for a profile that appears in Friday’s Calendar. He spoke about why he and his band, the Flecktones, chose to record an album of holiday tunes two years ago, and how they applied their penchant for experimentation to yuletide standards such as “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for the record, “Jingle All the Way,” which went on to collect a Grammy for best pop instrumental album of the year.