Fifteen time Grammy winner Bela Fleck took this years Best bluegrass album award for his album My Bluegrass Heart. As a child he developed an interest in the banjo through Earl Scruggs – on the theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies.
While failing in school to master the French horn, Fleck was simultaneously studying the banjo with more success. Moving to Boston from New York, Fleck busked and recorded his first record in 1979. When Sam Bush heard Fleck, he invited him to join New Grass Revival, and he stayed with the group for nine years.
In 1988, Fleck and bassist Victor Wooten formed Bela Fleck and the Flecktones which has won six Grammys.
Bela Fleck weaves the banjo into his personal life too. He met his wife, banjoist Abigail Washburn at a square dance in Nashville, where he was playing and she was dancing. Fleck produced Washburns’ first album.
Last year’s My Bluegrass Heart has Bela Fleck returning to his roots of bluegrass. With the Flecktones the artist fused bluegrass with funk and jazz but over the decades of the bands existence Fleck has repeatedly returned to a purer bluegrass style for about one record per decade.
He described his approach to this years’ Grammy winner this way: ““Typically, when I do a Bluegrass record, I kind of work within a certain idiomatic way of playing. Even though I play around the edges of it, I don’t go that far. But this album, I decided to include it all — some really traditional stuff, some fairly straightforward stuff, but just be myself the whole way. And then put some of the creativity that I would typically put into a project with Chick Corea or orchestra or Zakir Hussain, but put it into a bluegrass context.”
