There is no band quite like Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Jeff Coffin, the band's tenor-saxophone star, often plays two saxes simultaneously. Electric bassist Victor Wootens greases the bottom with high-energy funk lines while his brother, known as Future Man, dresses in a Captain Hook costume and looks for all the world as if he's playing a guitar. In fact it's a Synth-Axe Drumitar, a computerised drum machine with a startling range of effects. Then there's Fleck, a stunning virtuoso who plays - wait for it - the banjo. The music they make is beyond any kind of category and while the banjo is its central point, there are countless interlocking internal styles, some familiar, some not, that shape its direction.
"The more ideas we bring into our music, the more unique we become," Fleck says. "I love all kinds of music and I don't see why we can't play them all, blend them all into one thing, one music." It's a musical manifesto that makes the word `eclectic' appear narrow and limiting. Combining jazz, bluegrass, funk, world music and a whole lot else, it has brought the Flecktones two Grammy Awards from 15 Grammy nominations, while last year they topped the Critics Poll for "Best Electric Band" in the Talent Deserving Wider Recognition category of an influential American jazz magazine.
This week sees the release Outbound, their seventh album and first for record giant Sony. In scale and ambition it exceeds anything they've done before. "This record fits into the context of us never wanting to make the same record over and over again," Fleck laughs. "A recording is a document of what we sound like at a moment of time. But since we allow people to tape our shows there's thousands of documents out there with audiences taping shows and trading tapes, so we wanted to produce something people can't get during a live gig, so we did what we had never done before and got a lot of our friends to appear on the album!"
Those friends include John Medeski (of the group Medeski Martin & Wood), vocalist Jon Anderson (of the group Yes), woodwind player Paul McCandless (from the group Oregon) and guitarist Adrian Belew. The range of music the band covers is predictably unpredictable, from the Word Beat of A Moment So Close to the unreconstituted funk lines that burst out of Scratch & Sniff to the electric jazz of Zona Mona and Something She Said. One of the album highlights is a version of Aaron Copland's Hoedown that never stops for breath. It's an over-the-shoulder glance to where Fleck began his career in music, "I was a roots musician first - roots meaning bluegrass and American folk - and I guess I'm the first musician to come from folk music to jazz!"
During the 1980s Fleck was a bluegrass legend, considered one of the greatest living banjo players who was voted into Frets magazine's "Gallery of Greats" at 26. Then he crossed over into jazz. "I was in a progressive bluegrass band called New Grass Revival," he reflects. "I had won a lot of awards and many people thought I was the top banjo player. So when I went into jazz most people thought it was unusual. Yet even though there's been some pretty incredible banjo players, technically excellent, none had gone all the way - studied harmony, modes, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and do all the stuff you need to do to play jazz.'
In 1989 he formed the Flecktones. "When I put the group together I had the option for form a `jazz group', like a typical jazz group with the banjo as lead instrument, or make a group that was unique, more than just the banjo in a jazz setting. I realised I could make the music much more diverse and much more reflective of the other kinds of music I loved as well. The fact we were so unusual was never a problem, in fact people like us because what we do is so unusual!"
When the group started out, they had to "build an audience from scratch". Part of their success came on the American "jamband" circuit, a phenomenon that has not had much publicity this side of the Atlantic. The Flecktones often open for groups like Phish and Dave Mathews, who have plugged into the underground following for the late lamented Grateful Dead, which was wound up in 1995 with the death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia. "Jam bands are more talented than the average rock band because they really want to develop their improvising," says Fleck. "They don't come to it with a lot of jazz knowledge but people are hungry for something that's alive and different. Kids come along and there's these incredible solos and drumming going on and they're minds are blown. There's nothing like it on the radio, or MTV, where they're spoon-fed pop by the mass media."
Fleck, who year in year out does around 200 gigs a year, is quick to point out the Flecktones are not really a jam band. "We have too much structure and form in our music for that," he says. "But these kids really enjoy improvisation, so you get jazz groups on the circuit like Medeski Martin & Wood, who are really a jam jazz band! Play and play on one chord. But once audiences become familiar with us, what we do, we're able to benefit from the association with the jam band scene. Audiences continue to check us out and come to our shows, buy our albums. We've gradually built this audience that's bluegrass fans, funk fans, Grateful Dead fans, jazz fans, jam band fans, and you look out and the audience is really mixed - young, old, different racial mixtures - which is very cool and so very rewarding."
Outbound by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones (Columbia 498921-2) has just been released.