Bela Fleck, Abigail Washburn will fill Lexington concert venue with ‘banjo joy’

Spending an hour on the phone with Béla Fleck is akin to climbing aboard a bullet train. One minute, you’re surveying the duo concerts he regularly engages in with wife Abigail Washburn, the setting that brings the banjo giant back to his one-time hometown of Lexington this weekend.

But in no time, you’re immersed in the East-meets-West music he creates with longtime Bluegrass bassist/co-hort Edgar Meyer and champion Indian musicians Zakir Hussain and Rakesh Chaurasia, whose collaborative 2023 album, “As We Speak,” won Fleck the two most recent additions in his arsenal of 17 Grammy Awards.

Ride the train a bit further and you reach a bold, banjo-informed reimagining of Gershwin’s immortal “Rhapsody Blue.” A recording of that project came out in February, yet Fleck already has another album with the late jazz piano innovator Chick Corea due out in June. And just a stop or two down the tracks are further dates with My Bluegrass Heart, the youthful all-star brigade of string music titans that has formed the bulk of Fleck’s touring schedule for the last two years.

It’s a wonder the guy doesn’t, metaphorically speaking, get pulled over for speeding with the swiftness in which he runs from one banjo-infused activity to another, all of which are have been designed to further stretch the instrument beyond the stereotypes Fleck himself shattered decades ago.

But a remark that efficiently encapsulates the daring of his musicality, as well as the seemingly inexhaustible work ethic that fuels it, as Fleck described the 10 solo performances he played as opening sets last summer for the long-running global music fusion ensemble Shakti. Fleck was describing the feeling of presenting his unaccompanied playing in concert halls for audiences of 2,000-6,000 patrons.

“To just go in the room and fill it up with banjo was really a joy.”

That sums up just about any musical adventure Fleck has been involved with, whether it was through bluegrass and a variety of stylistic offshoots, country progression during the ’80s with New Grass Revival, jazz/funk and fusion during the ’90s and beyond with his Flecktones band, West African inspirations, classical compositions, folk influences or even Christmas music. He has won Grammys for recordings reflecting each of those genres.

Filling up a room with banjo joy — that’s what Bela Fleck has always been about.

As the Crowe flies

To get a sense of where such stylistically open-minded music emerged from, you need to travel back to the late ’70s when Fleck briefly lived in Lexington. What he came for was a closer look at the innovations forged by one of Kentucky’s most acclaimed purveyors of the instrument, J.D. Crowe. Fleck’s April 14 concert with Washburn at the Lexington Opera House will be his first local performance since Crowe’s passing on Christmas Eve of 2021.

“So here I was, a Yankee banjo player,” Fleck recalled. “Grew up in New York City. My heroes were Tony Trischka and Bill Keith, both modern guys doing new stuff on the banjo. But this J.D. Crowe thing was irritating because he was so good. It was like, ‘Well, I can’t play like that. I’m learning all this fancy stuff, but I can’t do that.’ There was something that was so visceral, so powerful — the note choices, the tone. Everything about his playing was galvanizing.

“So that made me want to move to Lexington and be around him. I did that in 1979. Any time he was in town playing, I was there watching him, trying to understand it all and, you know, getting un-Yankee’d a little bit by understanding his perspective. I just respected the crap out of him. I don’t think anybody has ever, or ever will, play like that again. Watching him night after night just taught me a lot about being a great musician over and over and over again.”

Bluegrass Rhapsody

So how does a bluegrass innovator make the leap from J.D. Crowe to “Rhapsody in Blue?” Well, the link is not as tenuous as one might suspect. In fact, Fleck’s fascination with the Gershwin classic predates his banjo education.

“I started listening to it when I was a kid,” Fleck said. “My uncle took me to see the movie, ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ I fell in love with the whole story and especially the music. I haven’t gone back to look at it, though. By all reports, it’s a terrible movie, but as a 7 year old, it knocked my socks off. The piece stayed with me. This was long before I started playing the banjo.”

“Then during the pandemic, I was started working on the piano part as an exercise, to see what it was like on the banjo. I started digging around, spent a couple of weeks on a few bars, finding ways to play this and that.

Fleck eventually recorded “Rhapsody in Blue” with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra for his recent recording of the same name. But the album also left room for two shorter variations of the piece. The stylistic bent is outlined in the titles — “Rhapsody in Blue(grass)” with his My Bluegrass Heart band (fiddler Michael Cleveland, mandolinist Sierra Hull, dobroist Justin Moses, bassist Mark Schatz and guitarist Bryan Sutton) and “Rhapsody in Blue(s)” with Flecktones bassist Victor Wooten and two of Fleck’s most longstanding bluegrass pals, Sam Bush (on mandolin) and Jerry Douglas (on dobro.)

“What appeared to be one of my worst ideas ever was this idea of ‘Rhapsody in Blue(grass),’ but it kept coming back. So I began to mess around with it a little bit with Bryan to see if there was anything there. When we started, I asked him to kind of play it in the rhythm style of Tony Rice (the late bluegrass guitar great). All of a sudden, something just fell into place. I showed it to the My Bluegrass Heart band and we managed to get it recorded.”

Remembrance of Chick

“Rhapsody in Blue” wasn’t the only project Fleck immersed himself in during the COVID-19 pandemic. With touring life at a standstill, he sifted through a series of banjo/piano works recorded during a 2019 tour with Corea. That prefaced a second collection of studio compositions the two worked on separately, with additions made through online files sent back and forth, throughout 2020. The resulting compositions are to be released in June as an album titled “Remembrance.”

It wasn’t until November 2020 that Fleck sensed something was wrong. After compositions were completed and approved for what would eventually become “Remembrance,” the usually outgoing Corea hit radio silence.

“He just fell off the map. He wasn’t responding. It was unusual because, typically, Chick would pick up all the time. He was always ready to chat. He would respond when I would send him a track. He would respond almost before I thought it had gotten to him. He was just very responsive and suddenly he wasn’t, so I was getting kind of worried about him.

“That last time I talked to him was on Christmas Day — the day Tony Rice died. He said he was dealing with a ‘human thing.’ I didn’t know what that meant. I knew that something was going on, but he wasn’t really telling me. Then the next thing I heard, he had passed. Just incredibly sad.”

Is there a banjo is the house?

If a constant exists within Fleck’s juggling of musical performance projects, it would be his ongoing concerts with Washburn. Touching on a variety of bluegrass and folk inspirations, the banjo couple have recorded two albums together (the first, 2014’s “Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn,” won another of his Grammys). The obvious familial undercurrent to their performances was highlighted when the two offered a 10-part online series during the height of the pandemic titled “Banjo House Lockdown.”

“Abby and I did a lot of touring over the years when our first son, Juno, was born, especially for the first five years. But then when Theo came along — he’s our second; he’s five now, Juno is 10 — we didn’t do as much. Touring was more sporadic because it’s just harder when you’ve got two kids and one’s in school. Plus, it became time for me to start going back to some of the ... I don’t know what else to call it, Béla music. For those years when Juno was young, I really didn’t do as much of the outside, pushing-the-boundaries stuff. I really loved playing with Abigail, but now it’s a more occasional thing. It’s such a joy, though. She’s always looking to be very be artistic and has an incredible way of connecting with an audience.”

The couple have two new recordings in the works. One is a collaboration with the Colorado Symphony, the other an album recorded as a result of “Banjo House Lockdown.”

“We did 10 episodes of ‘Banjo House Lockdown.’ We had to learn songs each week because we ran out of our own material very quickly. We had to supplement and learn. And the kids were going crazy and we were trying to manage them while doing the show. We didn’t have any help.

“Looking back on it, it’s kind of hilarious. At the time it was happening, it was horrifying. But then we would watch it afterwards and go, ‘Hey, this actually pretty funny.’ We were all in that human moment there together.”

Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn

When: April 14, 8 p.m.

Where: Lexington Opera House, 401 W. Short

Tickets: $39.50-$59.50 through ticketmaster.com