WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1374 - Béla Fleck / Michael Morris

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Béla Fleck is more than a virtuoso banjo player. He’s also a banjo missionary, an evangelist for an instrument he feels is often misunderstood and pigeonholed. Béla talks with Marc about how he wanted to move banjo music away from negative stereotypes and open audiences up to its world music roots, its classical applications, and of course its bluegrass heart. Also, Marc talks with director Michael Morris about the new movie To Leslie starring Andrea Riseborough and, oh yeah, Marc Maron. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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We live and we die. We control nothing beyond that. An epic saga based on the global bestselling novel by James Clavel. To show your true heart is to risk your life when i die here you'll never leave japan alive fx's shogun a new original series streaming february 27th exclusively on disney plus 18 plus subscription required t's and c's apply all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what the fucking ears what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast welcome to it i am not broadcasting from the regular place i am not broadcasting from my garage studio i'm not broadcasting from the bunker in los angeles

i'm in new york city i flew out here it takes a tremendous amount of uh of overcoming anxiety these days to sort of get it together to travel i've had worries about the cats just when your life is tethered to pets it becomes a little nuts i mean i've been nuts with cats before different points in my life different cats but there was a period where i'm pretty sure i was uh on the verge of bankruptcy and I might need to move out of my old house, but I couldn't see forward with it because I didn't want Boomer to not have a place to roam, to not have a place to live. Boomer was an outdoor cat. So I'm like, I'm going to have to stay in this house no matter what for however long

it takes Boomer to die. And Boomer disappeared years later. But nonetheless, tethered to pets. Panic. I don't know how people do it with kids. But anyway, I made it. I made it here. I flew on the plane.

I was flying with Jeremy Strong. Not together, but he was on the plane. And we've been talking lately. I have an episode with him coming up. Very good guy. Earnest guy. Give me a lot of information about restaurants I should go to when I'm in London next week for my shows. I believe there's still tickets for the Bloomsbury Theater live podcast taping with David Baddiel.

You can go to WTF pod dot com slash tour for information about that today uh in the city i uh just earlier just before i i said i might be in a in half a meat comb i went over to cats's saw my buddy dave dopey dave from the dopey podcast set me up with the uh buffet of meats and pickled products and a bit of babka at the end at the Katz's. I do that every year. I'm going to do that until I get diabetes or a heart attack, I guess. The yearly, probably take a little off my life, but not a ton. But I'm just here, man. I'm here tonight. I'm going to be doing a music benefit with Jimmy Vivino. I'm going to play a few songs with Vivino's band and play a song with Jimmy Vaughn, who's also

going to be there. Tremendous honor. I'm totally nervous. And that's why I'm in New York. I don't even know if I'm going to do any comedy. I'm going to do the music and then I'm going to go to the Whitney. And I'm a member there for the couple of times a year I'm here. I want to contribute to the arts, but I get membership privileges.

I'm going to go see the arts, but I get membership privileges. I'm going to go see the Edward Hopper New York exhibit tomorrow. I'm going to go to Birdland on Saturday to see Ron Carter play in preparation to talk to him. I'm probably going to eat at a couple of my favorite places. I'm going to see my friend Sam Lipsight, go to Mogador, maybe go to Viselka, go to Kikleides, do the meets and stuff that I like to do. I don't feel like I'm going to go to mogador maybe go to viselka go to kick kleide's do the meets and stuff that i like to do i i don't feel like i'm going to go to the cellar i've kind of uh i don't know it doesn't sit in the same way it used to with me that place for many different reasons but i don't know i've been doing plenty of comedy long sets heading to england to do more long sets i don't need to go do 15 minutes sets at a place

that's hit or miss so i'm going to try to fill my time otherwise in this beautiful fall weather that is happening here in manhattan so we got two guests today i should tell you this um we've got uh bella fleck the banjo player songwriter and composer and michael morris director of the new movie i'm in to leslie now i went to a screening of this movie the other night and it's the first time i saw it on a big screen i brought kit and uh there was supposed to be a q a with me and this guy michael morris the director And I'd never seen it on a big screen before. And I got to be honest with you, it looks amazing. He shot it all on film, which was kind of intense shooting it

because you only get two takes, three takes. And we shot it in like, I was only, he shot it in like less than three weeks. But it looks great. And it's really kind of a sweet movie. Andrea Riceboro is stellar. And it just, it came out great. And it's really kind of a sweet movie. Andrea Riceboro is stellar. And it just came out great. And it was funny.

We watch it, and then we're supposed to do a Q&A. And the person who was supposed to do the Q&A from NPR was a no-show. So I said, well, I just so happen to be a pretty good interviewer. Why don't I handle it? So we basically did a version of what you're about to hear, in a way. Only this is me. We're sort of discussing, you know, we're Michael Morris, a director. He's done a lot of episodic television, including Better Call Saul. To Leslie is his first feature, and it's now playing in theaters and available to rent or purchase on digital on-demand platforms.

And this is me kind of talking about the experience of it with Michael and a little bit about his life. And, uh, look, I'm proud of the movie. He's proud of it. And,

uh, if you can go see it, see it, it's heavy, it's touching. It's, uh, it's moving and,

and it does, it ends. Okay. You'll feel, uh, uplifted, but it doesn't, I guess I heard,

uh, somebody said there's not a false note in the movie really uh and i never i that's a new language to me the idea of a false note um i heard brendan gleason mention it about his new movie the banshees of in a sharon uh i saw him on seth meyers last, and he brought it up about false notes, but the same with 2Leslie. And this is me talking to the director of 2Leslie, Michael Morris. So, now, before you asked me to do this movie,

I had no idea who you are. Fair enough. You're clearly not from here. i was born in london raised in london and uh and i was a theater director in london actually so how old are you i am how old am i i'm 48 i don't usually ask people that but you look very young they do yeah yeah like you know you're holding up pretty well. 48, it's good. Yeah, you're not wrinkled up. Not yet. Yeah, it's coming. But what do you mean?

You come from a big family in London? No, I come from a small family, actually. Just myself and my sister. Oh, yeah? She's an artist. She's a painter and a sculptor. What kind? Figurative?

Abstract? It's a good question. It's figurative, but colorist. Like, she's really free. She's really talented. She went to the school in Paris and won their prize there. Wow. She's just full.

She's someone who is able to sort of channel feelings into stuff. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, you will feel something when you see her stuff. Right. Yeah, yeah. And she's in London? Yeah, she's in London.

And she makes a living as a painter? Yeah, as a sculptor and a painter. Yeah, boy, she's doing great. What's her name? Annie Morris. Really? Yeah, yeah. Check it out.

And her husband, too, actually, Idris Khan. Phenomenal artist as well. They're a great couple. Anyway, that's my sister and me. And your folks are artists? No. My mother was's my sister and me. And your folks are artists? No. My mother was in the theater, actually,

when she, she was from New York and she was in, part of the Cafe La Mama situation there in the 60s. Oh yeah, I just talked to Harvey Fierstein. He was part of that.

He was, yeah. Big. It was a, it was a real thing. My mother was, So was she a Warhol person? She was not.

She was, she would be like, I wish. She wasn't cool enough. But she was, she was more of a stage man she was like the stage manager for the a playwright who's just passed away like i think a year or two ago called um israel horowitz yeah i know him israel was uh was uh um a really important playwright uh especially early on in his career sure i did indian wants the bronx you You did not. I did. You did? Sure. I did it when I was in college.

I did it as part of stage troupe. I must have been Murph. I love that play. Yeah, it's a big play. He's one of those guys that came into trouble for his behavior later in life. But there's a few of those plays. I mean, that's a great play. Well, Line was a great play.

So I should say that I knew him his whole life, and he knew me my whole life. Really? Because my mother was really dear friends with him early on, and yes, you're right about what you said, but I don't think it overshadows the legacy that he had as a playwright. He was one of the few American playwrights that wrote like a, I don't know, like a French playwright. Yeah, and his son few American playwrights that wrote like a, I don't know,

like a French playwright. Yeah, and his son's a Beastie Boy. His son has always been a Beastie Boy, yeah. Yeah, but doesn't talk about his dad much. No, but they're a great family though, actually. His daughter's a producer and his other son is a novelist. They're a really cool family.

So you grew up with- A little of that. Yeah, but an environment that was at least art positive yes that's the i've never thought of saying it that way i'm stealing it that's what it was they they'd never made their living in the arts but art was important yeah yeah so do you go to school for it no i didn't i went to i i started because I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be very early on a theater director. That's what I did from 16.

So I went to school for English. I studied English literature. Yeah, me too. Where? Like a fancy school? Yeah, Oxford. You went to Oxford? Yeah.

That's fancy. Yeah, yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it just felt like, yeah, it is fancy. I'm proud of it now. Yeah, good. And how about you? Where were you? Boston University. Yeah, that's fancy. No, it is fancy. I'm proud of it now. Yeah, good. And how about you? Where were you? Boston University.

Yeah, that's fancy. No, it's not. It's just a big private school. It's expensive. It's more expensive than Oxford. Sure. Yeah, well, that doesn't mean it's good. They've slowly taken over the entire city, I think.

But I studied English, and I did stage troupe. I did theater. I directed some theater, and I did a minor in film studies, which was an art history major or minor. Yeah, I did art history and English and history. Those were my three. I loved that. Yeah. I don't think I really wrapped my brain thoroughly around my studies, but I showed up and I took it in. Yeah. Yeah. And I did a lot of stuff, edited the English journal, wrote poetry. Yeah, I did the same thing. You did?

We had a similar track. I didn't realize that. Yeah, I was big into writing poetry. Yeah, I will do it sometimes as an exercise. I don't necessarily show anybody, but it is part of my process sometimes to write things in the form of those type of thoughts. Yeah, I think it gets harder. Unless you really commit to it, it gets harder to keep that part of your kind of creativity alive.

I think, well, it's, it's, it's like, it's ridiculous. So like in the sense that like, you know,

if you're going to be a poet, that's, you kind of got to be, what's got to be your life because you've got to, most times you've got to be an academic and you know, you've got to live in that insulated world where poetry is important. I'm not condescending it or trivializing it, but just because you can write a few lines, you can't just be, I'm a poet. I mean, you can, but.

Yeah, one poem doesn't make a poet. You're right, it's a life. Yeah, it is. I had that moment leaving school. I thought that's what I was going to do. Yeah. And then I had that exact thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought, like, I can't make had that moment leaving school. I thought that's what I was going to do. Yeah. And then I had that exact thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I thought, like, I can't make a living as a poet. No one can. You become like, you know, the poet in residence at the zoo or something. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, that's not for me. That sounds like an interesting job. Is that a job? The poet in residence at the zoo?

I think it might be. Is that a regular zoo job? I kind of like that idea. What are you? I'm the poet in residence at the Los Angeles County Zoo. Wow, I didn't know they had those. Well, you know, to me, you know, so I beelined to theater directing, which isn't exactly a great living. But, you know, it was more in the world.

It's a community. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, I know a couple of people that are poets. One guy who I went to college with who, I don't know. It's all, it's just that world, it's very specific.

But theater directing, so you just jump in? You do any acting? No, I mean, I acted in school. I actually acted in one of Israel's. I did line. But I was in it and directed it because it was hard to wrangle the cast. And so I would just, would step in. I did enough acting to know that I wasn't an actor

yeah you know but I have a real reverence for it like I really I I like the fact that I know that I'm not an actor if you know what I mean yeah because I it allows me just to sort of participate in a different way um well it's like the directing thing like I noticed from watching to Leslie uh our movie on a big screen last night, that there is something about the gift of a director, and Lynn Shelton had it as well, is letting things sort of play out, knowing when to step in or when to stop it. And in To Leslie, you know, there's a lot of long shots,

not long, I mean, time-wise, that are, you know not talking and you know there's certain courage in that you've got to have a certain confidence to to uh to let that sit and not uh be like i don't know yeah yeah this is going on too long this was never i mean i i think it's you did a lot of plays my my favorite playwright yeah growing up was harold pinter right and harold pinter's all about everyone auditions with that birthday party i love that but but and but the caretaker as well like these plays that have pauses and you realize early on i think it was just being able to do plays that taught me this was that silences are not

silent do you know what i mean like most of what we say is not in the words that we're using no and it's like something i learn all the time more and more, especially as an actor, a film actor, because there's a lot of tricks in film acting, you know, that I don't really know because I'm so, you know, in it and frenetic. But in your movie, because of how I approached it, you know, I was doing things that I'd never done before. But I think that's correct in theater. Annie Baker is a big poser as well. Yes.

And she writes them in. I think Pinter does too. He does too. But yeah, man, I mean, you know, it's powerful if people can hold it.

That's the thing. I mean, I didn't want to, I didn't want to change it. So we made the movie a lot shorter, which was one of the hardest things.

We got the movie to a place we really loved, but it was two hours and 45 minutes. Come on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was two hours and 45 minutes. And we loved it. We screened it for our producers. And even though we all in the back of our minds knew it couldn't be two hours and 45.

That's crazy. It's coming up on two hours now. It's just under two hours. I can't even imagine. Yeah. Where was all that meat? It wasn't with me well you've got you like everything i shot is in there except for one thing almost yeah there's

there's maybe there's only two yeah by the time we got to to your section actually when we get when she gets to the motel i really love the way the story was developed it's an unusual script because most stories about this subject about people struggling with addiction in any way, are usually either a straight downward spiral or there are kind of like unexpected sort of fireworks of everyone's happy at the end. Yeah. And what I love about the way this story is told is it's uncompromising. But then when you meet Leslie, when Leslie meets your character, there is a slow turn. You know, there's a slow turn towards you know i don't know some sort of humanity or someone actually seeing her yeah uh so uh it just felt really the real

way to tell um the story of some degree of compassion so i really liked it when we got there right where there's a combination of her truly you know or close to of having had enough yeah yeah she was like she couldn't get over as well you know they're that process of like she can't really pull guys anymore she can't she can't hide her her uh her hustle yeah so why this this script just popped at you right away yeah it did for every reason i mean there's a lot of reasons i I mean, I think it's, Ryan's just a beautiful writer. He underwrites things. Wait, now, has he written anything else?

He has, but I hadn't read anything else. I only read this. He's now, he's a really prolific writer, actually. But, I mean, he had a movie made earlier by Netflix. But, you know, I think this was the one that came from his heart, you know? It was about his mom, kind of. Yeah, and him. yeah and him yeah Riceboro Andrea you work with years ago as well yeah we did a show called Bloodline on Netflix yeah together and you just knew she was the one to do this yeah yeah my very first I've still got the you know the the copy I wrote Andrea Riceboro right under the title

she's she's not on paper you'd go oh you know she's from the north of england yeah she's not texan yeah it she has it there's a sort of absolute true life um just honesty about her she can't do anything else that you know you say that and you're right a lot of actors have tricks people talk about it lawrence olivier used to talk about that do you know that the thing which one when someone said uh how's it going he was the biggest star in hollywood he said it's awful it's awful they know all my tricks yeah yeah yeah but andrea doesn't seem to have tricks yeah you know andrea is just like a an instrument you know she'll she'll tune herself to wherever it is that that that we we think the character should be and what that journey is and then she just goes you saw her she just she goes yeah it

was it was it was amazing to work with her and and then so the kid too how did you cast that kid you knew him when i knew him yeah when so owen who's it's so great seeing how he's he's huge he's getting huge now yeah but he was cast as uh he was cast as a photo double just not photo double as a photo extra on bloodline because he looked a bit like uh a young ben mendelsohn we needed a young ben mendelsohn for a picture yeah and uh and he was a high school kid in florida wow and he came in and then a season later uh glenn kessler who was writing the show was like we need to do some flashbacks with young ben mendelsohn yeah so we were like let's call that kid and hope he can act. He was brilliant.

He was so brilliant. I'll tell you this. I've never seen this happen before for a realistic show like Bloodline. He was so good that in the second season of that show, he didn't just play the young Ben Mendelsohn. He also played Ben's son in the same season of the same show. Wow. I've never seen that before. That's crazy.

Yeah. It's kind of interesting. Yeah. He's sort of a, he's the real thing. And so, and casting me, I'm going to keep pressing you on this. I was your choice? You were my choice. I went after you.

I know you went after me. I was obsessed with this choice. Oh, it's so funny because like somewhere in my, along the line, it got put in my head that John Hawks had turned it down. No, he didn't. There was an early conversation with, the casting process is Mandarin. I know.

You know, and a producer says, oh, you know, John's a great, and I love John Hawks. Sure. For me, Winter's Bone is a big influence on me. That movie, I don't know if you saw that movie. Sure, sure, I love it. And he was so, so striking in that film.

Yeah, yeah. And so I think early on on there was a there was a certainly a conversation of of oh you know john would be great john that kind of yeah yeah yeah by the time we came to actually casting the film yeah um i can't remember what happened i think um i think john was out of the picture that point by covid COVID anyway. Yeah. But we hadn't cast the film. Right. And it was a combination of, it was 100% a combination of Marin.

Yeah. And I think I've mentioned to you before that really genuinely memorable monologue that you gave in Sort of Trust. Oh, in Sort of Trust, yeah. Which was a heartbreaker. I must have watched it eight times in a row. And then randomly, a photo of you uh from a piece that the new york times did on you yeah there's a black and white

photo sitting in a chair sort of half looking up and i literally and i think i sent it round to my whole producers you know a lot of producers involved in a movie like this and i said that's sweeney yeah like that is sweeney and i already knew what i was seeing in your performance and it's funny because it wasn't from glow which is a great and i i just wasn't a glow watcher so i didn't know your right right right but from baron it was really from sort of trust and sort of trust yeah well i appreciate that because like you know for the whole time i kept thinking like when they're giving me they gave me the script they're talking to me and i don't know who told me the John Hawks thing. Cause I'm like, well, he's not that guy. No.

But, but, but of course not. But then I'm judging myself and they, and I was really like, I don't see this happening. And then I was talking to my manager last night at the screening. Cause I almost didn't do it just because it's COVID. I don't, you know, I'm grieving, whatever. I'm not the right guy for this. And then, uh, yeah. And then I got the text from Chelsea,

from Chelsea Hanward. And I'm like, what is this? The enforcer. Yeah. And she's like, Michael Morris wants you to do his movie. I think you should do it.

Call him. And you don't, you just don't say no to Chelsea Hanward. That was imperative right there. Yeah. Like she, there was no questions. How do you know her?

She was like, she was, has been one of my wife and my great friends. Oh, yeah? For years, yeah. She and Mary were, as soon as they met, they met each other at some, I don't know, some stupid event. And they just, it was just a click. You know what I mean?

They just have, they just made each other laugh. Well, I had a great time doing it and I thought it came out really nice. But I'm curious now. So, you know, the critical reaction is great. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. It was like 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

It was like 30-plus reviews. Yeah, getting on for 40, and people really resonated. Is it still up there? Yeah, 97. Still? Yeah. So what happens with it from where from a business standpoint so now like it's not really a big release you can buy it it's getting great critical acclaim do you

are now obviously andrea is going to be you know in the game for awards of some kind at the very least indie spirit right sag this is my you know this is my first film i i have no frame of reference for this so you know and and i came into it and it feels odd always feels odd to talk about any of that stuff i guess so but like you know as i get older and as i talk to more people there there is an intent at at a certain point to to sort of get the movie out there more and to get recognition any way you can. And part of that is award campaigning. But obviously we're too early in the game, but someone must be thinking about it.

I hope so, because I think it's deserved. You know what I mean? Absolutely. I mean, awards are crazy for any... This is her fucking... This is her movie, man. Yeah. I mean, this is like... Because everyone talks is her this is her movie man yeah i mean this is

like where because everyone talks about her yeah as being the thing the real thing yeah and this is she real things the hell out of this she does she really does actually and and and that's what if they're about anything you want awards to at least be i mean i don't care about who wins anything yeah there's a nomination process and that's really fun because as you you get to kind of you get to recognize a bunch of things sure and so you think well if it's if it's the reasons of what what might you have missed that's really really really powerful and challenging and a great performance you know yeah i hope so yeah and but like what more practically how do we get it in more theaters? You know, it's really difficult. I've had a crash course in this since this movie has been released.

So there's this thing where we are released at home, what they call the video on demand, the streaming stuff. You can get it on Apple, you can get it on Amazon. Sure. And because of that, because that was released at the same day that it was released in theaters, they call that a day and date release. Yeah. There seems to be a thing out there in the world that movie theater chains don't approve of that model.

They want what's called a window where you say, okay, we're going to be only in theaters for a week or two weeks or a month. So if you come at them saying saying we're also available at home a lot of movie chains are not interested in showing the film that's just a policy it's nothing they don't even think they've seen the film they just say we can't what about these smaller theaters yeah uh well i mean i think people have to go you know i think it'd be great if people went and by the way this is a movie shot on film as we've said it's designed to be it's shot in a widescreen it's two three, three, five, which means it's the same, it's the same sort of epic ratio that you want to see in a movie.

Yeah. It's great. It looks great. It really looks good on a widescreen. So I encourage, even though I want people to see it, if home is the best way, that's the best way. But. Yeah. But I just saw some people tweeting like, the closest theaters in another state. I know. I know. I know. I mean, I think that our film distributor, you know,

fell in love with the film at South by Southwest and they bought it I think that our film distributor, you know, fell in love with the film at South by Southwest. And they bought it for absolutely the right reasons that, you know, they didn't buy it because this was going to be, you know, Top Gun Maverick. They bought it because they love it. Yeah. But I think there's a reality, it seems to me, about how you release something like this. I don't know.

I hope there's a second life for more theaters. Okay. I do. Well, great job. And I was honored to be part of it. Well, it was an honor to have you. Thanks, man. Good talking to you.

Thank you. There you go. Good guy. Nice guy. Talented guy. Movie's great. Too Leslie. It's in theaters and on digital, on demand now.

I'm pretty good in it. As my friend Steve Brill, he mentioned to me that my friend Steve Brill was a friend of his and his wife's, and he had seen it, and I was like, why didn't he text me about it? If he liked it, where's my buddy Steve Brill with the text? Huh? Where's that? And then, of course, he went and mentioned it to Steve, and Steve wrote me, I just remembered,

I did mean to text you last week after I saw two last week, very moving movie. Congrats on being in that thing and sharing screen with that incredible actress. Seemed like you got to be in a sort of Sam Shepard play or play the Sam Shepard role. It's pretty cool. Best Marin performance since night of January the 16th,

which is a play I did with Steve in Stage Troop in college. He said, I'm impressed and jealous, which is weird because I'm not an actor, but I really want to do cool shit. I said, I texted back. Thanks about the movie. I held my own.

I think it's a good flick. And Steve said, I was so nervous watching her crush so hard and knowing you were coming up, but you did hold your own, which is sort of like lasting in the ring with Tyson or something. She was, she was just incredible, fearless, fearsome.

So congrats. I said, thanks. It was very nice. A nice exchange. But that's why I guess it was like that. I didn't go in nervous. I just was like, I can only do the best I can do. So Bela Fleck is a banjo player, is the banjo player,

is one of the great banjo players. He's taking the instrument to new places. He's on tour right now to support his album, My Bluegrass Heart. You can go to bailafleck.com for tour dates and tickets. He is a fan of this show. And he sent me his records and, you know, he sent me a personal correspondence. And I'm like, I got to get up to speed on Baila Fleck. I mean, I know he was great and I've heard his name forever, but I didn't know his stuff. So I had a, like I had, I'm like, this guy wants to talk. He's the real deal. I should talk to him, but I'm going to have to listen to 900 records and figure out where

he's coming from. So I did that. And here I am talking to Bela Fleck. It's hockey season and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. to Bela Fleck. chicken tenders yes because those are groceries and we deliver those too along with your favorite restaurant food alcohol and other everyday essentials order uber eats now for alcohol you must be legal drinking age please enjoy responsibly product availability varies by region see app for details hi it's terry o'reilly host of under the influence recently we created an episode on cannabis marketing with cannabis legal, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer.

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and ACAS Creative. I guess mostly in terms of what I listen to banjo-wise is probably Scruggs. Well, yeah. And, you know, and I like those records he made with his kids. Yeah. With the Earl Scruggs Experience or whatever it was, was it? Review. The Earl Scruggs Review.

Yeah. And then I got the kids' albums, too. Yeah. You know, because that's like, I mean, it felt like they were trying to, like, you know, make Dad sound groovy. Yeah, it was a brave move for him, too. Yeah. Because that's like, I mean, it felt like they were trying to make Dad sound groovy. Yeah, it was a brave move for him, too. Yeah. Was that your guy? Well, he's the guy who turned me on.

Like, if you're going to be a banjo player and you hear Earl Scruggs, it's like you turn into a zombie looking for a banjo trying to figure out how to do it. And it has to be him. It's not just anybody. Yeah. He had this magic something. Yeah uh yeah yeah it was him for me he turned the trigger for me sometime around four or five years old when i heard the beverly hillbillies which makes no sense because i'm a new york city kid um queens well that was on tv yeah you know what i mean how young what are you my age or older uh depends on how on how old you are. I'm 59. I'm older. I'm 64.

Okay. So you were catching the tail end of that show actually being on television or were you watching it on like Channel 11 or something? I think it was on Channel 11. Yeah. And it was in the morning. I remember it was light out. Okay.

So it was repeats. Yeah. But that opening thing, I mean, I think that probably got everyone into banjo. Yeah. Like anybody who's going to register banjo that doesn't grow up with a banjo or with music like that, that's where you were going to hear it. Yeah, it's one of those things with banjo where you get all these amazing opportunities for the banjo, but they're couched in Southern culture and a certain kind of looking down on it a little bit. Like dueling banjos, for instance. That blew me away.

I had that record. Right, but it's connected to a male rape scene. And then you've got Beverly Hillbillies, which is all about how dumb... Well, they're actually the smart people in the barrel. The country guys are the smart people. And then there's Bonnie and Clyde, Foggy Mountain Breakdown.

It's all connected to sort of these stereotypes. Negative stereotypes? That really locked this down. And when people forget about it, it'sgy Mountain Breakdown. It's all connected to sort of these stereotypes. Negative stereotypes? That really locked this down. And when people forget about it, it's actually an African instrument. Well, it's weird to me, though. Like, I think, like, I didn't register Deliverance. I just rewatched it. And I don't connect that music with that rape scene.

But I know the comedians did. And it also was about... Square like a pig. Yeah, and also morons. Right. But I know the comedians did and everything. Like, it, and it also was about Squirrel like a pig. Yeah, and also morons. Right. And, like, I just remember being fascinated with the kid who was playing

on the bridge and wondering whether or not he was, you know, who that guy was. Right. Do you know who he was? I know he wasn't a banjo player and, in fact,

it was a claw, he was doing claw, the hand that you see is doing claw hammer style and the banjo you hear is three-finger style. But it was still the most compelling scene ever. It was great. It was powerful, yeah.

It changed my life somehow, because now that we talk about it, I never forget it. Yeah. And I guess the Beverly Hillbillies, I never really associated personally, but I know what you're saying is true culturally, but I don't know that I associated it as I got older with complex music, with bluegrass music, with the music as a guitar player that I just can't wrap my brain around because I don't practice enough. Right. And I don't know how anybody gets that speed, and I never understood how banjo works.

Well, it's a trick. It's a trick. It is a trick. It is. Because you're alternating your right-hand fingers, you only have to play one-third as fast and use open strings. And all of these tricks of open strings, they make you able to blaze. Oh, yeah. But I do like to point out that banjo was like, before it was a white southern instrument, it was in Louis Armstrong's first bands.

Sure. It was in early jazz. So the pigeonholing is a little irritating. I'm very serious about banjo, and maybe you can tell already, but I love it so much, and I hate for it to get stuck in this one, although fabulous, part of banjo music. Sure. It seems to be your mission in life is to free the banjo or to move it through everything. Well, I think so. I was growing up in the 60s.

But where did you grow up? What part of Queens? I grew up in Manhattan. In Manhattan? My mom and my grandparents were in Queens and moved there when I was pretty young. So 100th Street and West End Avenue. Your folks weren't married? My mom and my father split up when I was one or two, something like that.

Did you have a relationship with him? No, I didn't meet him until I was in my 40s. Really? I had to go find him. Wow. It's a trip. It's a trip. relationship with him no i didn't meet him until i was in my 40s i had to go find him yeah wow that's it's a trip what so okay so i now where do your people come from what's uh um well i think belarus is some of me too oh really maybe we're really well i mean jewish yes yeah well my mother's side on your mother's side yeah my father's my father's side goes all the way back to belarus

i did that finding your root show so I know that for a fact. So where? Pale of Settlement, Belarus. Oh, which part of Belarus? Which town? I don't know. I'd have to look it up. Yeah.

I think Minsk is like our scene. Oh, that's it? Yeah. I just know Pale of Settlement, Belarus. I probably do have the towns because they did a pretty thorough undertaking. So your dad wasn't Jewish? No. Oh.

Decidedly not. Decidedly not. Decidedly not. I finally met him, and he was a professor of, like, dead languages and stuff in Maryland. Yeah. A professor of dead languages. Yeah. An interesting guy. Very smart guy.

Tried to make it as an opera singer. He's the one that named me Bela after Bela Bartok and Leo Sianacek and all these great classical composers. But he was not around in any way. So how does your mother account for that? What the hell could go so wrong to where you can't even engage with the guy? I think she tried. Oh, it was just him. Yeah, I think he felt like. Were they married just him. Yeah, I think he felt like... Were they married?

Yeah. Yeah, I have an older brother too. Oh, you do? So he hung around a little while for that guy? A year longer. We're a year apart. Yeah. And then he flew the coop for whatever their reasons were.

But at any rate, I made a few overtures and never got a reaction. So eventually I just trapped him in his lair. I went to this college and just stood at the end of the line did he know you were the the banjo master well that's what I found out after after meeting him and getting to know him a little bit yeah I found my records at his house it was bizarre it was a very very strange and what's where is it at now I'm pretty sure he passed oh you have every reason to think that he's passed at this point. I did get to say goodbye to him at a certain point.

Dead professor of dead languages. Yeah, yeah. You did get to say goodbye to him? Yeah, I was passing through, and I wanted to maybe introduce his grandson to him that he didn't know maybe existed. But then I found him in a hospital bed. And what I believe were his last days because i haven't been able to find out whatever happened it's been several years you can't find out i can't find out no bit yeah i don't know maybe he's fine oh but i don't think so so did he meet his grandkids no it didn't it

was just a little too late oh i'm sorry man so you didn't get that but i think it's you know it's okay it life is better i, the way it all worked out. Probably. It sounds like he might have been a difficult man. Yeah, he was. Yeah. And your mother was, was she musical? No.

Mm-mm. No, but she did marry a cellist. So that was a good thing. Joe Palladino got a good Italian aspect to things. A cellist? Yeah, Canarsie. And Canarsie. Canarsie cellist, yeah.

But who did he play with? Well, he went into the 7th Army Symphony. So he was in Germany for a long time. Playing cello? Playing cello, yeah. How did that work? I think that's the way to be in the Army, be in the band. Sure, but it's not a marching band.

You're not playing outdoors. No, they had these great orchestras. In fact, what's bizarre is it turned out that one of the conductors he worked with later moved to Nashville and became the main guy in the Nashville Symphony and conducted me many, many years later. And he knew your stepdad? We never. I think I got to introduce them at that point, at one point. Yeah. I don't think he remembered.

There was a lot of people that went through the Seventh Army Symphony. Sure. Oh, okay. Apparently, it was a crack orchestra. Yeah so he got were they playing swing music what were they doing oh no classical really yeah straight up classical yeah huh yeah just what they needed in germany americans playing uh playing german classical music who but uh so you grew up with classical in the house yeah yeah but not the kind of classical my father would have wanted me to hear probably because he liked the really wacky, harsh, you know, Hungarian avant-garde type stuff, you know, more progressive stuff.

My stepfather liked Brahms and, you know, Handel, and his tastes were a little more general. Did he teach you how to read music? No, we didn't do music together, but I would listen to them play the music. You'd have people come over and play string quartets on Sundays, and I'd just listen. I'd fall asleep trying to read the score, but I'd just look at the notes going up and down. I didn't think it had anything to do with me. I wanted to go play the banjo, but I liked it.

So then years later when I did try, I met people who were great classical musicians, and I wanted to try to play with them. At least I knew how it was supposed to sound somewhat. Sure. Well, I mean, that's what's interesting about some of the footage from the throwdown. Is that what it's called? Yeah, Throw Down Your Heart.

Throw Down Your Heart is that you have to, you study the rhythms. And it's a much, in some ways, in terms of scales and whatnot, it's a simpler undertaking than what you're used to, and it's more repetitive. But that is the sort of hypnotic effect of the original musics. Right. Well, it's deceptive. Because sometimes you think something is simpler because it has less harmony, but it isn't necessarily simpler. It's just different. It's complicated in a different way and

there's nuance you know yeah i mean for sure i i mean well i'll get that in a minute so you started playing banjo when 15 15 so i was playing some guitar because i didn't have the nerve to ask for a banjo from anybody i never thought anybody could really play it it was just so impossible so i ended up with a guitar and were you in a band? No, no, just played Beatles songs and stuff, folk songs of the day. But you weren't some kind of wizard, huh? Oh, not at all. No, I was one of those kids who's kind of like, he likes the guitar, as opposed to when I got my banjo. Okay, so I went to see my grandfather just before I started high school.

And he said, hey, I know you like guitar. So I found this banjo. Your mom's dad? Yeah. Great great great dude and he said I got I found this at a garage sale here you want it and it's like I couldn't believe it and just landed in my lap the day before high school started and that began an obsessive relationship with music where I wasn't obsessive with the guitar it the switch wasn't flipped but once i had the banjo it became everything to me and i don't know why maybe it has something to do with the father

stuff too it was like a need to prove worth it became the thing that i poured myself into yeah and by the time i was out of high school i was pretty darn i could play a lot like some of the really good players and went right into professional stuff so you just well there is something magical about a banjo. Yeah. Especially if you're close. Like if you hear a recording, you don't necessarily get all of the nuance, not just the nuance, but there's all these harmonics and the strings ring into each other and it's like sitting

in your lap and the sound is coming up at you. And I just still love just to play it. So how'd you learn? I started taking some lessons. First, I got the Pete Seeger book. That's the book? That was the book back then. And that was enough to get you started?

Well, then I started taking some lessons and I just started going through teachers kind of. I was moving fast. So do you feel like you were a prodigy, a banjo prodigy? I was because my third teacher was like, and still one of the great banjo players of all time, this guy named Tony Trischka, who came from Syracuse, a modernist, like a crazy, free, awesome, primitive, wild, technically virtuosic player. And I could play a whole lot like him by the end of high school. Really? People would say, oh, you guys were playing together. I couldn't tell who was who when I closed my eyes.

And then I had to figure out, oh, my God, there already is one one of him so now i got to find my own way and start sounding different but i went right into professional groups out of high school at a high school so you're out of high school you didn't go to college no so you get out of high school and you're a banjo wizard what year is it uh i'm just 76 so what are you gonna Well, that was the question. Like everybody would tell me, including my other teachers, you're not going to make a living playing the banjo. It's not going to happen, so you better learn a bunch of instruments and maybe you could get a job in a country band playing fiddle, mandolin, banjo, pedal, steel.

I was like, I don't think I want to do that. Be like one of the Mandrells or Marty Stewart or somebody, just kind of jumping around in an outfit. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't me. So so I just I joined a band. I just got into bands and I follow a band through to it's, you know, a better band. And but like so you're in Queens.

We're in Manhattan at this point. OK, you're in Manhattan. You're a banjo player just out of high school and you're an inspired banjo player. What kind of band? Bluegrass band. but there's there's this progressive bluegrass thing has been going on for a long time so there there were bands where i could do like i have to point out i got my mind blown when i heard chick korea at the beacon theater which was a couple blocks from where i lived at at that point yeah and i wanted to play

that kind of music once i did do a record with him i've been yeah several records we have one in the can too that's going to come out at some point yeah yeah it was a big loss it real meant a true mentor and a genius cat to be around what was it about chick korea sound that what was it about what he did well you know there's a lot of kinds of jazz yeah and some of it is like on the back of the beat and kind of sleepy and loungy and some of it is like when the back of the beat and kind of sleepy and loungy. And some of it is like when I heard somebody play like with this forward lean, this Latin energy, I was like, oh, I could relate to that. I could see somehow that working on the banjo. And it just, again, it clicked for me. And it had the same impact on me as hearing Earl Scruggs of like, I don't know what that is, but I want to know.

You know, Charlie Parker had the same impact because he played with a lot of ferocity forward lean you know rhythm really and i think banjo is a is a percussion instrument as and a music and a you know a melodic instrument so you have you know if you get turned on by rhythm it's a good good instrument yeah if you can get into that group well yeah i guess there's a banjo groove that I think everyone's sort of familiar with, the bluegrass banjo groove. But then you kind of move it around. So you're in these bands. So you're saying there was a kind of progressive bluegrass music in the late 70s? As long as I've been around, it was already firmly established.

All these great musicians. Is that sort of alongside of that first Alt Country? Well, there's a guy named John Hartford who wrote the song Gentle on My Mind, but he was actually a progressive bluegrass creator. What does it mean to be a progressive bluegrass player? It means that you don't just play the old Cabin Home on the Hill. You look for ways to, like you're influenced by the Beatles, and you're influenced by Led Zeppelin,

and you're influenced by everything around youelin and you're influenced by everything around you and you include it in your music. And it makes for personal music. It's not a museum thing or a carbon copy of another time. It's you being you. And that's been the key to bluegrass surviving, in my opinion, is people making it their own and making it new periodically. Yeah. And it's a fun thing to be part of, that side of it would i be able to tell yeah well i mean if you like flattened scruggs like if you like earl scruggs you know what that sounds like and that would be yeah you

know in the 60s they tried some bob dylan songs and they did some experiments i can tell when when people are playing covers yeah but is there is there there's a vibe to bill monroe and flattened scruggs and the stanley brothers and jimmy mart these cats that, you know, it's like if you like old country music, you like, you know, you don't like the new slick stuff, but you like, you know, Patsy Cline or you like, you know... That's way back. But I mean, but bluegrass is sort of of its own in country, it seems. to be the same thing back you know when you go back to the 40s and 50s it was all on the same stations but it got separated out and it became uh you know more of a particular thing for the folks that like that sort of thing rather than a pop centrist thing which it was before so it wasn't about it so it seems like a lot of bluegrass wasn't about songwriting it was about playing uh i wouldn't say that i think the great bluegrass book is full of great songs but they're of a

certain perspective a certain time and they tell the story of a person that grew up in this place. Yeah. And so they're very true. They're very real. But I think there's a lot of weak bluegrass songs out there. There's a lot of weak bluegrass playing out there. Is there? It is. How can you fake that shit? There's problem you can't but people don't already if you don't know what it's supposed to sound like you don't know what it could sound like so you got a lot of folks that you know would like to play it and that's cool but they can't represent it at its highest level have you played

with steve martin yeah how's he he's good yeah he's really good okay he's very creative yeah always looking for his own way it's a way to do it. He's not trying to imitate anybody. Does he ever ask you for advice? Yeah. I'm on his board. He gives away money to poor banjo players that are really, really great. He feels like it takes as much work to play the banjo as it is to be a scientist. Well, he loves it. Or a doctor.

And you don't get paid commensurately for it. So he started the Steve Martin Prize and put together a team of folks like Tony Trischka, we were talking about, and me and others to help them figure out who to give it to. It's pretty cool. Tell me about that guy, though, the guy who you said is kind of out there, the guy that you were playing with in high school. Oh, you mean John Hartford? Yeah.

Oh, well, John Hartford. Like, what do you mean? I didn't play with him, but he was a hero. I mean, he just started doing songs about people smoking dope, and he did songs about, you know, real life stuff. But he had it in a bluegrass framework. And it was an album called Steam Powered Aeroplane. It was just one of the great classic things that just turned bluegrass to this new place. And then there was a band that came not too long after that called New Grass Revival, as Sam Bush ran.

And I joined that band when I moved to Tennessee in 81. Is that before the Flecktones or after? Yeah, Flecktones was after nine years of being in New Grass. And New Grass was a very progressive, like we did long jams and different kinds of, unique kinds of things. but your first few records are pretty straightforward no yeah more or less i was always pushing like i recorded chick korea song on my first solo album yeah yeah no i didn't start out as a straight guy like i moved to

kentucky and then i got into it i was like a progressive new york yankee banjo player yeah and i was trying to i was like i don't want to be a yankee banjo player i want to like be like a earl scruggs i want to be like jay so how okay but yankee banjo player meaning that you were a mimic like i didn't really know how it was supposed to go you know there's gatekeepers and all these different kinds of music and they're like moved i moved yeah i moved to kentucky after how long like after your first record before your first record? No, it was 79. So it was three years after high school I moved down there. To get the real groove. Yeah.

So that was your first grail. Yeah. So you go down there with your proficiency that's pretty impressive. Right. So do you get into like sort of banjo wars? I had the folks that knew tell me I was not all that special. And then I had a lot of things I needed to get together if I was going to be any good. No shit.

Who were those people? Well, they're like the gatekeepers. They're like the people that know. Who are the banjo gatekeepers? We need to know. If you were me, you would have found out. But they'd come and they'd say, okay, you're micing your banjo wrong. Your banjo sounds like shit.

You don't have good tone. Yes, you can move your fingers. They're people that wereiking your banjo wrong. Your banjo sounds like shit. You know, you don't have good tone. And these are old banjos? There are people that were in the banjo community. And I got some really good advice from them. They became some of my good friends. Like Scruggs? No, not players so much. There was a guy named Harry Sparks and Harry Bickle in Louisville.

And they were guys that really knew and really were supportive of keeping, you know, the great things about bluegrass together. And then the god musically down there was a guy named J.D. Crowe. And J.D. just passed this last year. He was a machine. Well, he was just a glorious banjo player in an old-school style, like coming out of Scruggs. And progressive in his way. But really, the thing about him was his sense of time and tone. And I couldn't hold a candle to it.

Nobody could. It was amazing. But he couldn't do what I did, but I don't know that he would want to. He was authentically himself. Yeah, he was awesome. I guess that must be the sort of thing, is that, you know, you get these guys that are dug into themselves, but, you know, it's's enough because nobody sounds like them. You're supposed to be yourself, right? You are, but I think that virtuosos,

it's trickier to find yourself because of your proficiency. I think sometimes you discover your authentic self through limitation. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I couldn't agree more. So when you go down there, like outside of miking your banjo, and when you have to adjust a banjo, it's all those screws around it? Yeah, there's all kinds of ways you can change the sound.

And those guys set you straight on that stuff? Well, I finally got an old banjo, this banjo that I still have. These banjos that were made in the 30s are like the Holy Grail. Yeah. Earl played one. He played a Granada, but these were Gibson Master Tones from the 1930s. Uh-huh.

And they made them right and they had a sound and a depth and a clarity and nobody's ever touched them. So once I got down there, I realized I needed one of those and I got one and then these guys

helped me set it up and get it. So this is like the Stradivarius of banjos. Yeah. And they're like $100,000 items if you get one without the original neck. Yeah. Which is okay because some of the old necks don't hold up that well. Uh-huh.

So you can get, but yeah. $100,000. Yeah. Yeah. Well. For a good one. Guitars are a lot more than that now, you know. The old ones.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not paying for a guitar that much. But I know what you mean, sure. I mean, you can spend some money on a guitar. Jason Isbell spent some real money on that 59 Les Paul. Yeah, I'm sure. You friends with him? Yeah.

He's a good guy. Yeah, we did something. I played on something for him recently for Georgia Voting Rights. Oh, yeah? Yeah. You play with his wife's a fiddle player. I know her, yeah. Yeah. Abby and I hung wife's a fiddle player. I know her, yeah. Abby and I hung out.

My wife is a banjo player, too, and we hung out with them at the Grammys one year when we all won and got stuck in the line together, and we've known each other ever since. Oh, that's great. Yeah, he's a good guy. Solid songwriter. Really cool dude.

Yeah. I like that he's not afraid to speak out about his views about things. I know. He's very active on Twitter. It's ballsy. Yeah. Yeah, from that community, it's active on Twitter. It's ballsy. Yeah. Yeah.

From that community, it's a beautiful thing. It really is. So, all right. So you figure out how to mic your banjo and make it sound different. So what in your style at that time needed to be relaxed or tightened? It needed to be, everything needed to be tightened. Everything was, because in New York, it was all like, all of these sort of bluegrassers that came out of the jazz time you know they they were all about the ideas and there was a phenomenal bunch of musicians people like andy statman and tony triska and kosek well let me ask you real

quick before i lose it because we're talking fast is that is there is the like you know i probably could have watched a ken berns talk, but was there, alongside of the country tradition of banjo playing, is there a banjo style that originated in jazz? Well, yeah, the four-string stuff. Okay. You know, that's the stuff. And it also evolved into this. That was the Dixieland stuff?

Well, yeah. I mean, I think if you're from New Orleans, you don't like that term. You would call it New Orleans music. Okay. But, yeah, it evolved into what's maybe thought of more Cracker Jack banjo playing. Guys like Eddie P. Buddy just, you see them in the old movies, you know, in their show-offs with a flat pick. Okay. They have this incredible technique with a flat pick.

They're like jangling it. Yeah. Like almost like Django Weinhardt kind of guitar playing. Yeah, I guess so. Really? Yeah, exactly. Those flurries of chords up the neck yeah it's an amazing technique um yeah but then it kind of died out of like when

when the guitar came into jazz banjo pretty much died in instant death because black folks um were happy to see it go they they connected it to slavery a lot of white folks put on blackface and sang songs about how great it was on the old plantation. And all these connections and racist images for them, they wanted to get away from it. So when the guitar showed up, it was like, let's do that. Let's get rid of this banjo thing. And then it sort of got excised from the black community. But it's interesting because it's interesting how quickly, you know i talked to taj mahal once right so he

banjo man yeah as well yeah other things yeah yeah uh but like he picked up some old you know crappy k guitar he used to have in the garage you know we were talking about skip james and he was able to pick that guitar up and within really you know two seconds go all the way back to africa with those notes you know and you could hear it immediately. But oddly, the most effective way to sound truly African is with a banjo in terms of those types of runs of notes. Well, yeah, there's just a tone. Yeah.

That's, you know, when you know what that sounds like, you know that the banjo sounds like that. It's true. If you don't know that, you think it sounds like a white southern thing, which is, again, a great musical part of the tradition. When did you know that about the banjo? I think I knew it kind of, you know, you know it in your head, but you don't know it in your body. And I knew that even as before the end of high school. I knew it came from Africa.

It didn't seem to have that much to do with me at the time because I was trying to learn this bluegrass language. And did you ever take it upon yourself to learn the four-string riffs? I wasn't interested. Still? Could you do it now? No. I mean, I would learn the four-string things on the five-string. Right.

Yeah, I would do that. You can do those chord runs? Some of them. I have sort of some workarounds. I mean, it's not really what the five-string does best, but there's some ways. Because I'm using three finger picks all the time. So those flurries. Oh, and that was a flat pick thing.

Yeah, it's a different technique. It's almost like a mandolin thing. Yeah. Huh. Well, very similar. Huh. Yeah. So, all right.

So you go to Kentucky and you get this, you learn how to tighten up. It's all about time, taste, you know, the T's, the taste, tone, time technique. Yeah. And these guys play like, you know, metronomic. They're capable of playing much more metronomic than I was. Because like I said, up north, it was about the idea.

That's the amazing thing about it, right? Jeez, that pace, man. That pace. But up north, people were like, what kind of crazy idea can you come up with? And down south, it was like, can you play in time? Yeah. Two different points of view. Right.

And so I was trying to get to a point where where uh you know i could do both yeah that was my goal yeah and you got it i think so i mean more or less there was a lot of people stopping using banjo in the bluegrass world to make their music like tony rice was great guitar player he wasn't using banjo david grisman had this quintet playing with the mandolin yeah but he wasn't using banjo and i was like if i think if i could play with that kind of a time and still have this technique, maybe I could find my place in that community. Well, why do you think they wanted to get rid of the banjo? Because it overtook everything and it made the music what they were trying to sort of get out from under? Partly, which is what I did when I went to the Flecktones is drop all the other bluegrass instruments.

But it also was because there really wasn't anybody yet who could do that stuff on the banjo and fit into that kind of a group and so that was take down the banjo-ness not just take down the banjo but play the kind of intricate music that they were trying to play that was moving in a jazz direction it wasn't really modern jazz well i mean but jazz but not like they weren't trying to encapsulate a new orleans sound which is the original banjo jazz, right? No. They were trying to move into something. Grisman was really into, I would say if you listened to it, you'd say it was more like a Django, coming out of Django, a combination of jazz and Django's music. And Tony Rice, too, was a little more modern. He was maybe more into 60s jazz and, you know, not Ornette, but McCoy, Tyner type of stuff. And he was into things like that.

And he was figuring out how to play that on a bluegrass with a bluegrass technique on the guitar. Because I was in the Flecktones records, and some of them made me wonder if you'd ever played with Zappa. I wish. Because there were some runs like that. Because in the production and in the way that you guys were handling the instruments and in the composition orchestration, they were so tight.

And he liked to play shit that was fast. Oh, yeah. And organized. Yeah. You know, it almost seemed like, I don't know that, I don't know Zappa well enough, he must have played with a banjo player at some point. We would have had to just grow, you know. Because it just seems like something he would do. Yeah.

Well, even John McLaughlin did a banjo solo on a record somewhere back there in the past. Really? Yeah. It's a guitar banjo, but it sounds awesome. So when all these guys are kind of moving away from the banjo and you're trying to integrate it into what they're doing, that's when you put the flat tones together? No, it was some years later. At first I had to kind of dig my way in. I wanted to get in with the cats, and those were the cats.

With Grisman and those guys? Grisman, and Sam Bush still liked the banjo, but Tony Rice was like the Holy Grail we've used that word a lot that's all right we're using that a lot today but it's it's true he was the cat you wanted to play with if you if you played anything in this music those two guys and yeah and so I wanted to get in with those guys and and I managed to find my way also Jerry Douglas douglas were you just like would you just annoy him did you um just hang around well a great a great thing to do is invite someone to play on your record yeah if you've actually got someone who's going to pay to have you do a record then they'll go you know it's a small investment of time we'll do the session spend a couple of days yeah and then so i would invite over my my grade yeah and say is there any chance you would play on this record and send it say yeah okay we'll play a couple of tracks and then pretty soon they'd say yeah this guy's okay oh yeah then they'd ask you to do something and then you're in okay that's so when did you know that you'd arrived into that pocket that you wanted to be in

oh and tony rice hired me to play on a on one of his albums and it was the still one of the greatest experiences ever yeah which album uh cold on the shoulder yeah yeah why was it so great just because you worshipipped the guy? No, because he played with Crow, the J.D. Crow guy we're talking about. And he knew how to make it effortless to play banjo. He had an accompaniment. He's a great soloist, one of the greatest soloists in bluegrass guitar. But he knew how to accompany in such a way that it was like flying.

You just felt like you were flying and you could do things that you couldn't. Like a great jazz drummer or any kind of great drummer or any great rhythm player that knows how to put his energy to making the other people sound good. He had this uncanny gift, you know? That's the thing I always envy about guys who can really play and sort of get on. Because it feels like a lot of banjos like flying.

That once you figure out how to do that and you get on that roll, it just never stops. It's addictive. Well, yeah, I could imagine that. But like with guitar, I'm like a kind of, you know, crunchy, you know, my rhythm is specific. My and I don't I don't pick well. I do OK.

But but I'm not I'm not claiming to be any kind of musician, but I do envy whatever practice it takes to get to that place. I just never did it and I couldn't do it. Yeah, but it's important to you. It's like a part of who you are, right? It is. That's the thing. But I've had to settle into whatever dirty kind of guitar playing I do as my limit to a degree, as opposed to compare myself to 12-year-olds on Instagram. Yeah. Well, Fast F fingers is not necessarily the only goal. It's supposed to be an expression of you and who you are. That's what music is, right?

I've accepted that. And I believe that I am there to a degree. Yeah. But for some reason, there's still something about fast fingers that seems very important in my brain. It's appealing. But whoever you are, there's somebody faster. And I go through the same thing. You do?

I wish I could play like McLaughlin. I wish I could play like some of these cats that just i wish i could play like you know some of these cats that that's just on the banjo you mean yeah i mean i can't i'm my i've come to terms with i there's a certain speed like in my 60s i don't think i'm going to get any faster at this point so and the true speed of you know the great electric guitar players in particular or piano players you know saxophone i don't even want to do that though i don I don't like, you know, because it's still about phrasing. I mean, that's sort of my thing, you know. Well, that's the other thing, is do you really want to listen to that?

That's what I've also come, maybe it's a justification for my lacks, but I go, you know, I don't really want to hear people play at that speed all the time. I mean, it's amazing. I love it, but I want to hear them playing some great notes that mean something, and I want to hear some heart. So I'm getting more comfortable about moving in that direction. So when, because like, it seems like the harmonica player on the Flecktones is like that on the first record,

the first two records. Howard Levy. Holy shit, man. What is that? It's a blues harp. That's the crazy thing and he's playing all the notes that don't appear to be on the harp.

He has a system called overblows where he blows the notes to different pitches and he can play in any key on any harp it's bizarre it's amazing and that whole band like you know i could feel that was sort of in terms of like uh you know tight kind of explorations of of that jazz trip that's where it was happening right yeah i mean everybody had different strengths so like how can we put something together here that's really honest and all of us so you know victor and future man had this incredible funk part of their playing howard has all this bulgarian music all this classical music all this jazz i had my bluegrass to bring into it and if we could all be ourselves together in the room it was going to be something you know and it worked yeah and then i would write

these complex pieces and they were the guys that could like when i try to teach these things to my bluegrass heroes yeah they'd be like tony rice had this voice like miles they have too many brains man too many brains get rid of some of these parts man i'd be like ah and then uh so i was simplifying to record with those guys then i met these cats victor wooten and future man and howard and they were like what else you got you know you got any more yeah it was like oh and then to record with those guys. Then I met these cats, Victor Wooten and Future Man and Howard, and they were like, what else you got? You know, you got any more?

Yeah. And I was like, oh. And then I got to work on creating a lot of, and doing a lot of writing. Yeah. Because they could do anything that I could imagine. Now, at this point,

where you're playing with these guys, are you building an audience? Yeah. So when I left New Grass Revival, after, you know, putting this thing together sort of as an idea, I decided, okay, I'm ready to try this thing and go out and fight the good fight and maybe- With the flex zones?

With the flex zones. Maybe this is impossible. This will never be a big thing, but maybe 20 years from now, maybe if I commit to being a band leader, maybe I'll be able to survive. At one point, I won't be able to hold on to these guys, but I'll just be a band leader and I'll try to do this new banjo thing. And then it just took off. Yeah. It just, like, within the first three years, it was, we were on Johnny Carson, we were on Arsenio, we were, you know, all kinds of stuff happened. We were in, at Carnegie Hall for the first time, opening up for people, and it just kind of exploded, and it still makes almost no sense that it would have. People love the banjo. Well, I think they like to see the banjo with, like, black and white guys playing together,

funk, bass, and banjo, and harmonica, and not what they expected. Right. And it kind of presented as a novelty trip. That's why Johnny Carson would put it on. But then there was enough music to make you maybe come back and listen again, a novelty trip. That's why Johnny Carson would put it on. And then, but then the music was, there was enough music to make you maybe come back and listen again. And if you listened a few times, maybe you might start leaving,

you know, keeping it in your life. And are you selling records? Yeah. That's great. Yeah. For that time. Yeah.

I think there was some, you know, a couple hundred thousand type thing. Yeah. And when did you start winning Grammys? It took a long time. Oh, it did.

They called me the Susan Lucci of the Grammys for a while. Really? Yeah, because I think there was seven or eight that we were nominated. But then all of a sudden it started happening, and it was surprising. So how many records did you do with the Flecktones? Oh, we've done a lot. You still work with them? We haven't recorded lately, but we get together and play.

Oh, yeah? Same guys? We're back to the original group. What happened was Howard left after three years out of boredom. He was bored with us at the time. I apologize, Howard. Where did he go? He just went out into freelance stuff, you know, doing a lot of different stuff, his own music.

He played with Kenny Loggins for a while, Paquito de Rivera, you know, jazz stuff. But then we got Jeff Coffin, and Jeff played saxophone with us and it became more of a funk driven sax involved thing and then when Leroy died and Dave Matthews band

because we used to open up for Dave a lot he joined he took that slot so he's been with Dave Matthews ever since

and that we took a few years off and then we asked Howard if he wanted to come back and he was into it

I'm not sure like you know I'm very weird about Dave Matthews but i have i don't know if i can name one of his songs that's the weird thing like there's something about me and my judgmental ass that i don't know what it is well we all do that but but the truth is the less you do that the more stuff there is to enjoy but i'm very guilty of very you know having very catholic tastes well if it isn't this i don don't want to hear it. Yeah, like what ones? Well, I mean, it's oddly enough about bluegrass.

If we're talking about traditional bluegrass, I want it to be flat and scrugs. I want it to be that. If we're talking about jazz, I want kind of blue or I want Coltrane. The classics. We're talking about fusion. I want it to be Weather Report or Return to Forever. I don't want to hear the other. But I've gradually

it's occurred to me about that in in a silent way man oh come on man damn this stuff is you know you can't be beat but uh yeah but i've just realized that if i lighten up i can enjoy a lot more music and that'd be so yeah i guess that's what i gotta do i mean i'm running out of time i should probably do like i can take it in man it's like you know i i really can't i can take it in like you know even like you know re-engaging with your stuff because you know you sent me that package of records and it took me a while and i'm like you know what do i got to know here i because i like country i like scrubs i like banjo to a degree but am i going to listen to banjo all day i don't know but oddly in in the process of listening to your stuff, the stuff I could listen to over and over again where, you know, the Fleck tones was good.

I mean, I appreciate the music. I know that it's great. But the stuff you did with the Indian musicians. Oh, yeah. Like that. And the classical stuff. And I can listen to bluegrass. That's fine.

You know, but there's part of me that's sort of like, I it you know i know what this is right and it's enjoyable but but the stuff you did with chick corea right and the stuff you did with uh josh bell you know that interpretation of that kind of almost american classical stuff that i thought you know i could i could do that like i could find myself listening to that again yeah Yeah. And the Indian stuff, I love that shit. Yeah, me too. So like how, after the Flecktones, you're moving through all these other things, but it still seems like you're a banjo missionary. You're trying to validate this instrument. Right.

In every way possible. Yeah. In fact, I avoided bluegrass for a long, long time. Yeah. Yeah. And I only just came back to it this year. With a new record, right? Yeah. Yeah, in fact, I avoided bluegrass for a long, long time. Yeah. Yeah, and I only just came back to it this year. With a new record, right?

Yeah, which, you know. What's it called? My Bluegrass Heart? Yeah, and I don't know if you know Chick Corea had a record called My Spanish Heart. Was that his last record?

No, it was quite a ways back. Because I had the last one. I know he passed away before I could talk to him, really. Yeah. But, you know, I always thought he was a Latin guy because all of Spain and all this Latin stuff that he would do. But when I got to know him, I discovered he was an Italian guy from Chelsea, Massachusetts.

And I always thought it was interesting that we all think of Chick Corea. And we even won a Latin Grammy together for our album. Neither of us are Latin. Does anyone know this? No, we didn't mention it. That wouldn't have been the night. But I thought there was a parallel because I'm a banjo player from New York City. They came into bluegrass.

The bluegrass is going to be part of what I do, no matter whether I want it to be or not. It's just in there. Nature of the instrument. Yeah. And I love it. It's a really great thing. I'm proud of it. But like when you make decisions around taking the instrument to a different place, which you seem to have done over and over again, like with the Fleck tones and then, you know, I don't know what came next. Was it classical? maybe after it's all happening at the same time i have this pal edgar meyer who's a great classical musician as well as a lot of other things and he was the first musician like truly bodacious

classical musician that i knew that was kind of in my age group and he started showing me box stuff and like sitting down and giving me the time did you know how to read music then no i still don't read i use this banjo tablature it's very slow but i've got to work around basically never tried to read music i tried but uh no the problem is that the banjo the way it's tuned there are you know there's a lot of different places to play the same note oh okay like and the distance could be this far i've got i'm holding my hands three feet apart yeah to find the same note right and then you're going to play 16 notes in us in four or five seconds so how are you going to sight read that so you got to And then you're going to play 16 notes in four or five seconds.

So how are you going to sight read that? So you've got to know where the note is more than you have to know what the note is. Yeah. So if you see the patterns, you see the numbers, then I can just read it. Right, okay. But I have to arrange the tablature. Like that whole classical record was a big job because I had to arrange the tablature. Which one? The one with Josh?

Yeah, that one. So that's- If you don't want to be bored and get sick and tired of your trip, you've got to go find new stuff to wake you up. That's also what drove you then? I think it's a little bit of attention deficit disorder. But that makes sense to me if you're a pure music guy.

Yeah. You know what I mean? A lot of people, yeah, but I mean, you're in a world of music where, I don't know what the difference is but it's not like you know no producers telling you like you know we got to do that song over and over again i'm the one that says i'm the one that says let's do it over and over again because i want to get it really no no i mean like to sell records i mean like we want this to sound the same we want the new record

right to be like the one that sold a bunch of records right whereas like it seems like in the world of musicians you're in it's like where can we take this thing yeah we would avoid all those like for instance we wouldn't we had sort of a hit like a vh1 hit of a tune called sinister minister it was instrumental but it did really well and we wouldn't we wouldn't even play it that was the flat tones yeah we wouldn't even play it at gigs for a while we just got tired of it and just we were always like people would say when they came to see us the first time that it was just so new and special. And then when we came back the next year, if we played the same stuff, it wouldn't be new and special again. So when we came back, we'd make sure we had a whole different set list year after year. And so they would have a possibility of having that experience, you know, over and over again with the same band. Yeah. That it wouldn't be, you wouldn't know what was coming, which is not the way you build a music career, really, I've discovered. Yeah.

You know, that people want to hear the hits. They want to, you never played in Sinister Minister. I can't believe you never did that. We came to see you. We came all this way, you know. So now I'm lightened up. And Chick Corea was, he didn't want to play Spain. And when he did, he would play a screwed up version of it with all the wrong notes

because he was so sick of it. But then later in his life, he was like, yeah, let's play Spain. We're going to play Spain. and when he did, he would play a screwed-up version of it with all the wrong notes because he was so sick of it. But then later in his life, he was like, yeah, let's play Spain. We're going to play Spain. We'll play it right. Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. Give them what they want.

Well, he was thrilled at a certain point in your life that something connected like that in a more of a mass way. Yeah. And not ashamed of it, but proud of it. So, all right, so you're saying the African thing, the classical thing, and the Indian thing, that all happened simultaneously? It doesn't look that way. Just ongoing ongoing, you know, what's interesting. You're trying to learn stuff. Yeah, I know, but, like, tell me a little bit about that Indian thing, because I'm kind of, like, fascinated with Indian music. Oh, man.

And, you know, there's something about meditative kind of repetitions that, like, I can listen to it all day long. Yeah. And I like that record. So how'd that come together? Edgar, I was telling you about Edgar Meyer. We had written a piece, a banjo concerto, a duo concerto, bass banjo concerto for the Nashville Symphony. Was he one of those on the three banjo player records?

No, he's a bass player. Oh, what's that one with the three banjo players? That's Tony Trischka, who I was telling you about, and Bill Keith. Man, you really do your homework. I thought there was going to be a guy over here with a list for you of everything. I was listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, you really do your homework. I was listening. I thought there was going to be a guy over here, like, with a list for you of everything. I was listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so. Well, thank you for that. So, anyway, we had written a piece, and the Nashville Symphony

built a new hall, and they wanted Nashville composers to write a piece for the new hall. Yeah. And so they asked us to do it, and we said, well, we just did something for you guys, and they said, well, what if it's a triple concerto? And so we started looking at who we might want to do that with, who we could learn from. And we had on the list, it was like Bobby McFerrin and Wynton Marsalis.

And our favorite pick was Zakir Hussain. Yeah. Zakir is like this guy we always wanted to have time with. Is he the sitar guy? No, he's the tabla. The tabla guy. Tabla god, yeah. Oh.

And he's the guy we were able to get. He's the guy we most wanted to learn from because he had the most information that we didn't have. And so we started writing with the rhythms. But also, the album was called The Melody of Rhythm. There's a lot of melody, too. Oh, because, yeah, it actually has notes, the tabla. Well, the tabla does, but Indian music. I mean, he's not trapped on the tabla just because he plays the tabla.

He knows that music inside out. So we started writing this classical work that used Edgar's harmonic knowledge to try and figure out how to use these Indian rhythms and classical harmony and created a whole thing. And then we started touring with Zakir, and that led to knowing a lot of the other great indian players and going over to india a good bit and um and uh just experience in fact last night zakir and a bunch of world-class players came to see my bluegrass band in in uh in san francisco in oakland yeah it was real sweet they live up there uh he lives there yeah and these folks were coming or the tabla player who played sitar on that one the one you put out who played this there was no sitar on that. There was none?

VM Bot, who played a slide guitar. That's it. Sounds like a VM Bot. No sitar player. No, that would sound like sitar, but it's not. And he's playing it in an Indian style? Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah.

Because obviously it fooled me. I didn't realize. It would. Because I was wondering about it. Because I heard that. I'm like, dude, they got a Dobro player on this this right no it's that's this guy uh he's an amazing musician yeah and so just starting to interact with those guys and realizing that banjo worked really well with those instruments it's a cousin and they liked it they were like well it sounds like one

of our cousins of our they might even claim it and say no it comes from from from india first not not well it seems like there is like it seems like there is some form of banjo in China and one in India and then several in Africa. That's right. Middle East too. Yeah, if you're going to go to primitive instruments, you're going to either have a gourd or a drum that you're going to put stuff on.

I don't know when they started emptying things and making holes, but it seems like a lot of that stuff is just strings over something that has a tone of its own that's right it's the most natural thing in the world right but it's neat that skin has a sound to it you know that vibrating membrane has yeah yeah that's i mean that's what makes it different but but i again like Again, I think it's sort of amazing that it seems like your journey in life is to demystify or to de-hillbillyize banjo. Yeah. I mean, I have to point out to people regularly that I do love hillbilly music and bluegrass. It's like I wouldn't play banjo if it wasn't for that. Of course.

But I think I got tired of being laughed at as a teenager walking down the street and people sell it saying squeal like a pig or yeehaw right i was like very serious about the banjo and i didn't like i didn't like that so i think i carried that through like i wanted to had something to prove between that and my parent situation you know i had something to prove so um that's what i tried to do but yeah but it's sort of like it but it makes perfect sense in that it's the instrument itself is is not only timeless but a variant of many instruments around the world that's right so you know understanding like even in that in the documentary where you play some you know bluegrass riffs for all those africans yeah they they

literally are laughing because it's so impressive and and elating just to hear because they're familiar enough with what that instrument can do or what it is yeah but to hear that you know that pace and that energy which is different i mean the music the music in that doc, some of that African music, is very fast. Yeah. And it's complex in rhythms. But they're not bluegrass rhythms. And a lot of times, they're in sixes and threes. Yeah.

And there's not a lot of four-four, oddly enough. Well, I mean, that's right. I listen to Baba Mal, some of that old and Monster Sex, that record. Like those rhythms are, it's very interesting because that's what I was talking to Taj about, is that you can hear that coming up through, like Skip James to me for some reason. But a lot of those guys a bit. But it kind of changed to a 4-4 pretty. Well, yeah.

But Baba Mal is such a badass. We went to see him in Denver where the Flecktones had a night off, and he called and said, my band didn't show up. Can you guys come? Really? And so we all played a whole night with Baba Mal in Denver at the Badanic Gardens. Really? Completely unrehearsed.

His band didn't show up? Yeah, I think they got stuck on a flight or something or in Africa or something. right can you help me it was awesome so much fun see that's like well that's amazing you got to be a pretty top-notch musician to pull that off well i mean he'd start and we just get on there we just jump on board we had a great time well talk to me about that about the uh the african stuff about like you know the the uh the the what what's the word I want? It's not as simple as it seems. Yeah, try to do it, you know. Well, I saw you trying to do it.

Yeah, and I had to, you know, let the chips fall where they may because we were filming, you know, every day, new music with new people, and sometimes I could figure it out and sometimes I couldn't. And I had this satellite phone at the time I called Abby. Back then we were new to our relationship, but I called her. I said, I don't know what to do. I mean, we're filming. I don't know. I can't do this.

She said, just play like a jazz musician. Just respond. Don't worry about it. Play like a jazz musician. What does that mean? Instead of feeling like when you play bluegrass or even with the fleck tones, I feel like I'm driving the thing. I know every note.

I know what it's supposed to be. I can hold it together. But then you can play where you just leave a lot of space and play over the top and let things fall where they fall and if you have the right attitude it can be awesome and i have a battle within uh between being free and being uh set like like working out these very complex structures yeah like with the fleck tones or classical stuff where it's all set and then totally playing with chick or whoever and being completely free and they're two different sides of of me and most musicians honestly but um so in this case sometimes i could be the me that knew what was going on and could like really deliver you know fundamental stuff and sometimes

i had to be the me that was just responding to stuff that i had no idea what time signature we were in uh-huh and hearing it back i was it was an honest attempt you know that's like even i i've watched some of it and it's just like you know you like it was interesting when you got past the riffs that you know into the repetitions that they were playing well that's what's what happens if you can relax and let the unconscious take over. You'll just start, you know, that jazz side of playing where you use your ear and you just respond.

And usually you don't know what you did when it's the best. You're just like, I don't know, I'm just playing and he's doing that and I got to do this and I don't know what it is. And so there's this guy, this blind musician that played the thumb piano named Anania. We had that experience just playing together where what he played just triggered a lot of stuff out of me

that I didn't know how to do, but I just did it. It was exciting to hear it back when I got home because I didn't know what had happened. It was like six weeks of just one day after another being like an incredible challenge. And then I was hoping it was going to be good. And when I got home, some of it was. You know, a lot of it was.

So what's going to be the next thing now? What are you going to do? Well, I have this record with Zakir and Edgar and Rakesh Shrasia, this Indian classical. More Indian classical stuff? Well, I'm saying Indian, but it's a combination of it's just four guys playing their instruments it's really cool music hybrid hybrid music yeah and acoustic music and we're putting that that's coming and uh my wife and i abigail how'd you meet her playing banjo yeah kind of she's part of the community how long you been together oh i think about 12

years something like that maybe longer got a couple kids? Yeah. Young kids for an old man, yeah. Are they playing music? Starting to, yeah. Little Theodore, he likes to play the drums. He's four years old. He plays like John Bonham. I mean, he plays like... What is it with these kids that are like just sort of have this, you know, can do it?

Yeah. I mean, I watch it. I don't know if they're... I watch it on ig all the time but there are these kids now that is it something in the water is it like you know it seems like the world is filled with prodigies all of a sudden yeah i mean i don't know that they're prodigies they're both just real musical kids who've just been around it their whole life you know whether they like it or not you know what you mean juno's a golfer like juno's nine and he's like he wins

these golf tournaments and he interesting i say hey I want to learn a little bit of banjo anytime. I'll be glad to tell you. He says, no, Papa, you play banjo, I play golf. That's hilarious. And he's amazing. But lately he's become interested in fiddle, and he sings like a bird, like with perfect pitch. So I think things could turn. I'm hopeful.

But they don't have to be musicians. No. But how did you meet Abigail? Was it just on a festival or something? I know she came to see me. She's a little bit younger and didn't like it. You know, I heard the Black Tongue. She likes the real, you know, traditional stuff, you know, the old time stuff. So it wasn't her thing. You guys record some old time stuff sometimes. Yeah. But over the years we met through the community and then I always thought she was an example of the kind of person I wished I was with.

And then one day we were both weren't with other people and I stalked her. And that's how it went. And that's how it went. And it's been the best thing that ever happened. Do you play a lot? Well, we go out and tour together. We take the kids and we go on a tour bus

and play, you know, small venues. And, you know, like you and I play some of the same venues. Probably, yeah. Like Tarrytown, Music Hall, things like that size. Yeah, yeah. And we go out and play. We get six or seven or maybe eight or nine banjos on stage and trade them around. No shit.

And she's a really good performer. She's very good with the audience. Yeah. I kind of stand there and try and think of something to say and let the music do its thing. She's got a communication skill that's really beautiful. She's a great singer, too. So it's nice. It's nice. Great. Yeah. Let's a great singer, too. It's nice.

Great. Let's take the banjo out. Oh, really? Are you sure? If that mic's going to work good with it. Let's give it a shot. You want to play? You want me to demonstrate things? What do you want to do? Sure.

Oh, yes. These things sound good, even way up the neck. Some body to it, yeah. Yes. Well, that's where you were playing on that African stuff. Once you got up there, it becomes almost more of a percussion instrument when you're way up there. it's like a lot louder way up here than down here oh my god yeah there's a power to it up there yeah so like when when when you think of indian music what what's what riff do you start with um maybe uh What riff do you start with? Maybe a...

Something like, you know, that's Hansa 20. It's called, it's like the easiest starter. Do you ever try? They have some good scales. I'm sorry to interrupt, but this is one I love. It's just not what you expect. Do you ever try to do those bends, though? Well, the problem with the banjo is if you bend, the bridge moves and things get out of tune. So you can do a little bending, but if you get – I mean, I would love to have had more of a bending career,

but it's just everything just goes out of tune didn't you ever think about getting a banjo made so you can bend well an electric one

you lose all the sound if you have a solid bridge I can't believe that you Bela Fleck cannot have a guy make you a banjo you can bend on

well we do have these oh yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's what they do. Yeah. So it's like a bender. Yeah, yeah. You lock it down. They're called Scruggs tuners. Are they?

Yeah. Okay, so that's... He used to do it by ear, where he would bend the string in the song by ear and bring it back up perfectly back in the old days, but then they created these cam tuners that were mechanical. And now they make these ones. Bill Keith was involved in making these ones that have stops inside the keys. Yeah. Inside the tuners, yeah.

Yeah. Wow. So, all right. Well, I'm wary to play whole pieces of other people's music because I don't want to get charged for it. But you got an original one? I could play just a... I just like to start playing and see what happens. I could just play a little bit and see if anything good happens.

If it's not good, please don't play it for anybody. Well, I won't. I won't. I don't know. I like to just fool around. Kind of find my way out of things and start just throwing my hands around and see what happens. Well, that's what I do. Yeah. But I'm very limited.

That's what we all do. I just like, I think for tomorrow's show or whenever on Thursday, I just recorded some guitar before you came over. It was just pretty much E and C. Yeah. And then I just went from

A to G back to E. But it was good. Those are good. Yeah. You ready to go? Yeah, you want to do something? Let's jam, man. I'll just do it.

That's right. Thank you. want to go to an A? That's cool. Thanks, man. It happened. It's great talking to you. It's great playing with you. Thanks for coming. Hey, thanks for having me. It was a real fun conversation.

And I'm a big fan of the show. I appreciate it. I go running to it all the time. You do? Yeah. So you knew what you were getting into. Yeah. You did good.

Thanks, man. Yeah. All right, there you go. A little banjo, a little guitar. Yeah, the whole ride. His most recent album is My Bluegrass Heart. And you can go to bailafleck.com to find out where he's touring for dates and tickets. So, okay, that's that. Hang out a second.

It's winter, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So, no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats, but meatballs, mozzarella balls, and arancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose? No, but moose head? Yes, because that's alcohol and we deliver that too, along with your favorite restaurant food, groceries, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.

It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton. The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of

Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to kids night on saturday march 9th at 5 p.m in rock city at torontorock.com look folks for full marin subscribers there's a new ask mark anything episode posted with answers to your questions about lots of stuff here's a bit of my answer to a question about why we haven't had Bob Dylan on the show. And then, you know, I was told to just call Jeff Rosen. So I called Jeff Rosen, and I was like, look, man, we met a long time ago. Look, he knows that people know the show.

And I called Jeff, and I said, look, and he's like, of course I remember you, and I know the show, and whatever. I said, look, and he's like, of course, I remember you and I know the show and whatever. I said, well, what are the chances, man? I want Dylan to do this 1000th episode. It'd be important to me. What are the chances of that happening? And Jeff Rosen said, zero.

Zero chances. And I'm like, why? He's like, because he's got no axe to grind. Doesn't feel like doing interviews. He's like, because, you know, he doesn't, he's got no ax to grind. Doesn't feel like doing interviews. He's not great at interviews. The last interview he did was for the AARP. It's just like, he just doesn't do them. You know, it just, there's no reason.

And I'm like, what about you? Do you want to do an interview? And he's like, why do you think I've had this job for as long as I've had it? I don't talk okay that's posted now for full marin subscribers to sign up go to the link in the episode description or go to wtfpod.com and click on wtf plus next week we have ralph macchio on monday and dr henry lewis gates on thursday for those of you who don't know, I'm in London. We have a live WTF at the Bloomsbury Theater on Wednesday, October 19th

with comedian and writer David Baddiel. Tickets for that are on sale now. My standup shows at the Bloomsbury are on Saturday and Sunday, October 22nd and 23rd. Dublin, Ireland, I'm at Vicar Street on Wednesday, October 26th. Oklahoma City, I'm at the Tower Theater on Wednesday, November 2nd. I'm in Dallas, Texas at the Majestic Theater on Wednesday, October 26th. Oklahoma City, I'm at the Tower Theater on Wednesday, November 2nd.

I'm in Dallas, Texas at the Majestic Theater on Thursday, November 3rd. San Antonio at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts for two shows on Friday, November 4th. And Houston at the Cullen Theater at Wortham Center on Saturday, November 5th. I'm in Long Beach, California at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center on Saturday, November 12th. I'm in Long Beach, California at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center on Saturday, November 12th. Eugene, Oregon at the Holt Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, November 18th. And Bend, Oregon at the Tower Theater on Saturday, November 19th. In December, I'm in Asheville, North Carolina at the Orange Peel for two shows on Friday, December 2nd. And then Nashville, Tennessee, I'm at the James K. Polk Center on Saturday, December 3rd. And my HBO special

taping is at Town Hall in New York City on Thursday, December 8th. Go to WTFpod.com slash tour for all dates and ticket info. Here's a little more of me and Bela. Thank you. I like that though. go. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah!