By Howard Pousner
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Béla Fleck journeyed with his banjo to its African motherland in 2005, collaborating with musicians in Gambia, Mali, Tanzania and Uganda, and the good tunes and vibes have not stopped resonating since.
Rialto Center The documentary "Throw Down Your Heart," about Fleck's musical travels to Gambia, Mali, Tanzania and Uganda, will be screened on Thursday, March 4, at the Rialto.
Rialto Center Béla Fleck has nothing but praise for the musicians he is touring with. He said the show includes a "great mixture of East African and West African" music.
The bluegrass star recently won two Grammys for the album recorded during that cultural exchange, “Throw Down Your Heart: Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3.” And a documentary of his trip, simply titled “Throw Down Your Heart,” has just been released on DVD after acclaimed showings on the film festival circuit.
Fleck, 51, also has toured with different configurations of the musicians he recorded with in Africa. His fourth tour of “The Africa Project” brings him to the Rialto Center for Arts on Saturday, March 6. Sharing the stage with Fleck will be Bassekou Kouyate of Mali and his group Ngoni Ba. Kouyate is a master of the ngoni, a West African lute that’s an ancestor of the banjo. Also performing will be two Tanzanian musicians: Anania Ngoglia, a vocalist and player of the ilimba, a thumb piano, and guitartist-singer John Kitime. Master of ceremonies Fleck will join the acts individually and together (a total of 11 musicians on stage, counting Nashville fiddler Casey Driessen) and also play a solo set.
Fleck has just released a second volume of “Africa Sessions” as a download-only offering through belafleck.com.
We spoke to him during a tour stop in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Q: Congrats on the Grammys. Did winning feel different than your first 11, in that this was a departure in your career?
A: Yeah, it felt great. I hate to let things like Grammys get me excited, but sometimes they do. And this is one of those times where it felt like a bit of validation for all the work.
Making a movie and financing it yourself in Africa, doing it right with a great crew and all the beer you need, was not a cheap endeavor. But I’ve got to say, creatively, it was one of the biggest successes I’ve ever had. And people love it. What’s great is now we’re out on tour and people are hearing these musicians and getting excited about it.
Q: Had you taken any inspiration from any other American musicians who’ve explored connections in Africa?
A: Absolutely, the two that had the most direct impact on me were Ry Cooder and Paul Simon when they were doing “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Graceland” [respectively]. But I also looked at them to think about how I wouldn’t do it.
Ry Cooder did such a great job of standing back and letting the other [Cuban] musicians be what it was about. But I was looking for an interaction. I was much more selfish. I wanted to jam with these guys.
Paul Simon’s project was really about writing his own new music, using the African musicians to create a new sound and inspiration. Which is great, I love that record. But I actually wanted the challenge of having to play their music, seeing how I could do it, getting the banjo to fit into their music.
Q: How’s this version of the tour different, and how’s it going so far?
A: Last year, we did one sort of like this with four different groups, which, due to the amount of space on a bus, we could only have small groups. So it was almost like a singer-songwriter theater show where we would all play together in the end. This time I really wanted a band, I wanted it to rock. And I made a great choice, I have to say, because these guys are fantastic.
We’ve got this great mixture of East African and West African stuff, and then you’ve got me playing banjo and Casey Driessen on the fiddle on some of these songs. So we can really bring these three different worlds together for the last few songs of the show, and when it finally gets to that point it’s very exciting. And it feels so natural. It’s like nobody’s really doing anything different than they would naturally do, but because everyone’s so good at what they do, it works.
Q: It’s clear in the movie that you didn’t want to be the “star,” and you were very generous in sharing camera time. On tour, where people might be expecting a Béla Fleck show, does sharing the stage present a challenge?
A: This whole project is about collaboration. ... It’s all about bringing worlds together and finding ways to coexist and make great music as a team. I’m the leader — someone has to run the ship — but everybody is equal, everyone is important, and that’s what it’s all about. There’s a lot of mutual respect going on.
Q: How much did you know about the banjo’s African roots before you took the trip?
A: My knowledge was pretty vague. I knew the banjo had come from West Africa. You know, after I went, that was still pretty much all I knew. I’m not at all an ethnomusicologist. ... [But I was] hearing music that sounds very related to the music that American music is built out of. And you can hear the banjo in the way they play these gut-string instruments. They look like the old banjos that you see in pictures from the slave era. The music that they play is the most compelling thing for me — to hear so many of the elements of our folk music and our blues. It’s all in there.
Q: In Africa, was it hard, coming in cold, to keep up with these players?
A: I remember I was on the telephone from Africa with my now-wife, saying: “Gosh, I don’t know what to do. I can’t learn this music fast enough. Tomorrow, I’m recording with this instrument, and I don’t understand it.” And she said: “You don’t actually have to understand it. You just have to relax and play. Nobody’s going to expect you to become an expert on Ugandan marimba music. Just play with heart and commit to it — it will be OK.”
She’s pretty smart. That sort of set me free. When I didn’t understand things, I just played freely, let it happen and kept in mind that I was the guy who was going to edit it in the end. So if it didn’t work, it wasn’t going to get used. But in the end, it was amazing how much stuff worked. Almost every track we recorded, in all these crazy settings, I was able to use.
Q: Did you find other banjo cousins beside the ngoni?
A: We checked out the akonting, which is the Gambian banjo. There’s also one called the xallum that we saw in Gambia. It’s just the idea of the gourd, whether a calabash or a carved-out piece of wood, with a skin head over it and strings — that’s what makes a banjo.
Q: Can you play any of these banjo cousins?
A: I can dink around on them. The more time I spend, the more I understand how I would play on it. But not owning one, I don’t really have the time to do that or the opportunity.
Q: Couldn’t you borrow one from one of your tour mates?
A: I let the geniuses on their instruments play their instruments, and I do my best to hang in there on the banjo. But that would be a fun thing to do, switch them around!
Concert preview
Béla Fleck: The Africa Project 8 p.m. Saturday, March 6, at the Rialto Center for the Arts, 80 Forsyth St., Atlanta. Tickets, $36-$62, available at the Rialto box office, 404-413-9849
