Finding the Bluegrass Was Greener

Bela Fleck, the man who took the banjo from its rural roots to the mean streets of jazz, admits there was a time when he wanted to get out of bluegrass altogether.

“I was trying hard to be a jazz contemporary when the Flecktones were first beginning,” Fleck said by phone last week from Arcata, Calif., during a tour stop. “I wanted nothing to do with bluegrass rhythms.”

But Fleck, whose popularity was founded on his work in the ‘80s with the Nashville-based New Grass Revival, an ensemble that blended bluegrass sound and form with the improvisational sensibility of jazz, soon realized he was making a mistake.

The Flecktones “were playing all kinds of music other than bluegrass, and, as time went on, I began to feel like a hypocrite. Bluegrass is probably what I’m best at,” he said. “So around the third album, we started utilizing it more.”

Since then, he’s discovered that despite his best efforts, his bluegrass training showed even when he was trying to hide it.

“I realized that if you really listen to our first album [‘Bela Fleck and the Flecktones,’ from 1990], there’s more bluegrass on it than I realized at the time.”

Still, there’s more to the Flecktones than jazz and bluegrass. The quartet, which appears tonight and Saturday at the Cerritos Center, brings together funk, pop and Celtic sounds as well as the occasional reggae beat and various Eastern influences.

The 39-year-old Fleck, like many in his generation, was attracted to the banjo after hearing Earl Scruggs play “The Beverly Hillbillies” theme on TV. The graduate of New York’s La Guardia High School of Music and Art began playing banjo at 15. Shortly thereafter, he heard keyboardist Chick Corea’s album “Light as a Feather” and began to explore the possibility of applying his chosen instrument to jazz.

“Hearing ‘Spain’ [from ‘Light as a Feather’] gave me the same thrill as hearing the banjo for the first time. It went right to the center of my brain and began massaging a strange spot. It opened neurological pathways to harmony and rhythm that completely set me free.”

Fleck said learning to play jazz on the banjo was, and continues to be, a slow process.

“I’ve had to figure it out one note at a time. There are books that lay out all that harmonic and rhythm stuff for saxophonists. But there’s nothing like that for banjo.”

It was sometime around 1988 that a phone call from bassist Victor Lamonte Wooten suggested the musical concept for the Flecktones. Wooten and his brother, percussionist Roy Wooten (known to his friends and Flecktones fans alike as “Future Man”) first began performing as the Flecktones in 1990.

“It’s unusual that we’ve been together some nine years. Most of even the coolest groups usually only last three or four years. We’re very democratic. But we couldn’t have the kind of marriage we have without being allowed some flings. Victor has a solo record, and I’ve been doing other projects.”

(Fleck teamed with bassist Edgar Meyer and guitarist Mike Marshall on last year’s critically acclaimed Sony release “Uncommon Ritual,” and with Indian slide player V.M. Bhatt and Chinese erhu player Jie-Being Chen on the eclectic “Tabula Rasa” from audiophile label Water Lily Acoustics).

With Wooten’s electric bass and Future Man’s “drumitar,” a guitar-shaped, electronic percussion instrument, the group’s sound is anything but traditional. In 1995 and 1966, saxophonist Paul McCandless (from the group Oregon) joined the Flecktones on tour. He’s heard, along with guest appearances from Corea and saxophonist Branford Marsalis, on the 1996 double concert recording “Live Art.” In the last year, saxophonist Jeff Coffin replaced McCandless and is heard with the Flecktones on their upcoming Warner Bros. recording, “Left of Cool.”

“Left of Cool” is another departure for the Flecktones, not only utilizing overdubs for the first time but also putting an emphasis on vocals. Four of the 15 tunes feature singing from Fleck, Future Man and pop performer Dave Matthews (for whom the Flecktones have opened concerts).

“Victor’s solo record is nearly all vocals, so that sort of pointed the direction. A couple summers ago, I wrote 10 or 12 songs [with lyrics], something that I hadn’t done before, but I didn’t know what to do with them until now.”

For their Cerritos performance, the Flecktones will split the bill with two-handed, “taps” style guitarist Stanley Jordan, who usually joins Fleck somewhere along the line for a duet performance.

“Stanley is really great,” Fleck said. “We don’t really plan anything with him, but it still manages to happen. He’s an amazingly harmonic player.”

* Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and Stanley Jordan play tonight and Saturday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. 8 p.m. $25-$40. (562) 916-8500.