Groundbreaking banjoist/composer/bandleader Béla Fleck has reconvened the original Flecktones, the extraordinary initial line-up of his incredible combo, and the Grammy Award-winning quartet is creating some of the most forward thinking music of its storied career. Brilliantly removing boundaries between musical genres—from classical and jazz to bluegrass and African music to electric blues and Eastern European folk dances—the result is an impossible-to-pigeonhole sound all their own. Tickets are $55 general, $55 Senior/Child and $25 HSU students. Tickets are available at the University Ticket Office and at humboldt.edu/centerarts.
Béla Fleck & The Flecktones have garnered a Grammy nomination for best instrumental composition for “Life In Eleven,” off their hit 2011 record, Rocket Science. The much anticipated reunion record marked the original founding members of the Flecktones’ first recording together in 20 years and immediately jumped to #1 on both Billboard’s Jazz Charts. Rolling Stone notes Rocket Science “finds the Grammy Award-winning group still in fine progressive form.”
The collaboration of Béla Fleck (banjo), Howard Levy (piano/harmonica), Victor Wooten (bass), and Roy “Futureman” Wooten (percussion/Drumitar) has been leaving audiences mesmerized, surprising fans with groundbreaking compositions and nontraditional improvisation. After a recent show at New York’s legendary Town Hall, Relix Magazine commended the group’s “incredibly impressive and well-executed” musicianship, noting “the crowd was silent throughout the majority of the show, only erupting into applause between songs and after impeccable solos.”
Rocket Science has been met with wide critical acclaim. Jazz Times was impressed by the compositions, which “are all quite bold, showcasing everyone’s versatility and highlighting the collective power of the band,” while All About Jazz declared “Rocket Science recaptures everything that made The Flecktones so fresh, so innovative, so important.” Popmatters called it “an album of stirring ingenuity from musicians rediscovering each other and having tremendous fun doing so,” while Downbeat praised, “Together, these are four of the finest musicians on the planet. They push, pull and complement each other to create a sound that is unmistakably their own.”
For more information and credit card orders call CenterArts at 826-3928 or at humboldt.edu/centerarts.