A journey of discovery led celebrated musician Bela Fleck to uncover the history of the banjo, writes Larry Schwartz.
BANJO virtuoso Bela Fleck was “smitten” the first time he heard the great African singer with whom he is touring Australia.
The Nashville-based musician compares Mali’s Oumou Sangare to others who have had a big impact. “[It’s] like when you hear Earl Scruggs, if you are a banjo player, [or] one of the great blues guitarists or Hank Williams or someone like that,” he says. “Time stops for you.”
Sangare draws on the hunters’ songs and dance music of the Wassoulou forest region where she grew up. Fleck says when he heard her sparse music he could “hear the space where the banjo would fit in”.
She was about to return to Mali after a US tour when he sought her out in Brooklyn to discuss the visit that led to Throw Down Your Heart, a documentary DVD and soundtrack CD of his collaborations while visiting countries including Uganda, Tanzania, Gambia, Senegal and Mali.
In January, Throw Down Your Heart won Fleck his 12th and 13th career Grammys at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, for best contemporary world music album and best pop instrumental performance for the album’s title track. Sangare was also nominated in the best contemporary world music album category.
It was not just Sangare’s voice that drew Fleck to Africa; he wanted to explore the origins of the instrument he has played since his mid-teens. To do so he looked to American author and musician Banning Eyre, who writes that the first banjos were probably made in the West Indies and the US by slaves trying to recreate a fretless instrument Malians call the ngoni.
Fleck, however, found a stronger resemblance to a bigger stringed instrument called the akoting, used in Gambia for folk music similar to traditional banjo music in the US before Scruggs revolutionised it in his collaborations with “Father of Bluegrass” Bill Monroe. He notes that more slaves would have come from Gambia than Mali, which is inland, and the sounds he heard on the akoting, “more like the music that was played in the slave times”.
His project takes its title from a town in Tanzania where he heard about the despair of slaves who saw the sea for the first time and realised they would never go home. The town is called Bagamoyo, said to mean “threw down their hearts”.
He wrote the title track at Amsterdam airport while waiting for a flight to Nairobi and recorded it with the celebrated Mali ngoni player Bassekou Kouyate. “If I have an hour sitting at an airport, I get my banjo out and a lot of times it’s a relaxed environment where I get ideas.”
The soundtrack features some of the continent’s best-known players — including the Madagascar guitarist, D’Gary, South African singer Vusi Mahlasela and the Mali kora legend, Toumani Diabate, who recently toured Australia. Some of the recording was done in the US.
“I always put the banjo in people’s hands,” he says when asked how African musicians had taken to the fretted Western version of an African instrument. “They found it interesting.” Fleck says the adventure was especially rewarding because his filmmaker brother, Sascha Paladino, accompanied him to make the documentary. Fleck’s parents divorced when he was barely a toddler and he was in his teens when his mother married Paladino’s cellist father.
“It really was a way to get closer and yet do something together that we could both be proud of.”
Fleck was born in New York City. His parents named him for the Hungarian pianist and composer Bela Bartok. He took to the banjo after hearing Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell’s hit, Duelling Banjos, from the film Deliverance.
He has since recorded with musicians including cellist/bassist Edgar Meyer and Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain on a recent album. Fleck has challenged preconceptions by pioneering the use of the banjo in various genres.
“That seems to be my little job and it’s a great job because it’s a labour of love,” the musician says. He was inspired by African collaborations by “guys like Ry Cooder and Paul Simon”. “I’m a creature of this day and age and those are the people who led me into realising how great some of the music was,” he says. “But I wanted to have my own experience, not try to imitate the experience that they had. So I had to go deeper and go to different places.”
The Age 19-Mar-2010
Larry Schwartz Writer 