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Photo: Banning Eyre
Teaching banjo to Bassekou Kouyate’s son
when I play with Bela. If I make a mistake, whatever, he is there
with it to cover it up, and it will end up sounding like the real
thing that was supposed to be there.”
Perhaps the best example of Fleck supporting a singer is his
gorgeous duo rendition of Oumou Sangare’s lullaby lament
Djorolen. This version, with just banjo and voice, surpasses San-
gare’s original for its searing emotional impact, and reveals
admirable restraint and sensitivity on Fleck’s part. “About restraint
and simplicity,” said Fleck, “I’ve always found that a barrage of
banjo notes is really effective when it comes out of nowhere, but if
it is constant for a whole record, I find it almost offensive. I can’t
imagine why anybody would want to listen to it.”
M
uch as he enjoys being the pliant sideman, Fleck
clearly delights in finding a musician he can con-
verse with instrumentally, as happened when he
met Bassekou Kouyate. He had a similar experience
of instant clicking when he sat down with the blind
Wagogo musician Anania Ngoliga in Tanzania. Ngoliga grew up
amid traditional music in his village, and started playing the deep-
toned kalimba (ilimba) thumb piano at a young age. He worked
for a time with Hukwe Zawose’s ensemble, but moved on to
become an artist in his own right. Ngoliga sings and plays guitar,
and leads a dance band called Karafu that mixes a variety of styles
in its current base in Zanzibar. “When I first met Bela,” Ngoliga
recalled, “I was very surprised that he could actually play what he
was playing on the banjo. My experience of this project is realising
that with my kalimba, I can actually play more kinds of music than
I thought. I now see I have an instrument that can work with any
other instrument.” Anania says improvising has always figured in
Wagogo music, but when you hear him trading florid riffs with
Fleck on the final track of Throw Down Your Heart, Thumb Fun,
you realise that this African artist is extending the boundaries of
his idiom, much as Fleck has. The effortless rapport between the
two is no doubt one reason why Ngoliga is the one artist to
appear in both of Fleck’s Africa Project tours to date.
Part of the ongoing appeal of The Africa Project is the way it
complements Fleck’s expansive adventures with the banjo. He says
he learns from African collaborators every day he is with them, and
portrays the overall effort as a kind of maturation, a discovery of
emotional depth as a greater power than technical virtuosity. He is
well aware that for all his powers of mimicry and his amazing
capacity to blend, he is not actually ‘learning’ the African traditions
he interacts with so effectively.
“I’m not going to suddenly become a Tanzanian musician,” he
said. “I’d have to spend my whole life, and still it’s too late. I’m not
going to become a Malian musician. But I can be inspired by what
they play, and by their language. And they not only inspire me for
that moment when I am responding to them. This also inspires me
as a player when I am writing my own music or thinking about what
makes a good song. Does it really have to go through six time signa-
tures like I used to think, or can it be in one? Does it really have to
have all this harmony to be a successful piece of music? And the
answer is no. There is awesome music that doesn’t do all that stuff. I
have been pegged as a complicated guy, and so it’s funny that I feel
freer to not try to be complicated in this setting, because the setting
is already so unusual.”
Happily, Bela Fleck’s African conversation continues, bringing
in the process, the amazing sounds of African pickers and
troubadours to audiences just waiting to discover them.
www.belafleck.com F
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