Photo courtesy of Howard Levy
One of the founding members of banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck’s groundbreaking instrumental quartet Béla Fleck & The Flecktones, harmonica and piano genius Howard Levy, will return to the band for a limited Béla Fleck & the Original Flecktones tour run this fall.
Levy will rejoin the Flecktones Nov. 4 in Dublin, to be followed by two weeks of European dates. Five U.S. shows on the East Coast are currently scheduled to commence Nov. 18 in Bethesda. Flecktones’ woodwind player Jeff Coffin, who’s been out with the Dave Matthews Band, then replaces Levy for a revival of the group’s celebrated Holiday Tour in support of their 2008 Grammy-winning album Jingle All The Way.
When Fleck founded the Flecktones in 1989, it consisted of Fleck, Levy and the extraordinary rhythm brother team of bassist Victor Wooten and percussionist Roy Wooten--known best as Futureman for his self-invented, guitar-shaped portable electronic Drumitar percussion machine.
“Howard’s participation played a huge role in the creating of the sound and concept of the early group,” says Fleck, citing Levy, a.k.a “the Man with Two Brains,” as “one of the most ridiculously talented musicians on the planet [whose] high-spirited improvising and intellectually-adept arranging skills always spurred us into unique areas.”
Allen Ginsberg went a step further. The late poet attended an early Flecktones gig at S.O.B.’s in New York during a whirlwind week of five shows at five different Manhattan venues. In the middle of a Levy harmonica solo, he shook his head ecstatically and murmured “Baba”--a Hindi word for “father” that is used to express affection and respect for a saint or holy man.
“It was one of the most important musical experiences in my life,” recalls Levy of his stint with Fleck. He was already a revered harmonica theorist for developing a revolutionary technique of playing a full chromatic music scale on a standard 10-hole diatonic-scale harmonica when he met Fleck at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.
“I was with [folk music group] Trapezoid and he was with [progressive bluegrass band] New Grass Revival,” Levy recalls. “We ended up jamming at a party until 7 a.m.!”
After the Flecktones signed with Warner Bros. Nashville, Levy appeared on their first three albums, The Flecktones, Flight of the Cosmic Hippo and UFO Tofu.
“It was very exciting and we had a blast from the beginning,” says Levy. “The four of us were kindred spirits because we were doing things on our instruments that no one had done before. And I was able to play equal amounts harmonica and keyboard—and sometimes both simultaneously, which had never been a necessity in prior bands. So I grew a lot.”
Still Levy eventually found even this most adventurous of bands—which fused bluegrass, jazz, funk and worldbeat--stifling.
“I like doing a lot of different things, but we were touring so much that it precluded me from the chance to do anything else,” says Levy, who departed the Flecktones in after the 1992 release of UFO Tofu. “I didn’t want my leaving to have any negative impact on the band’s future, and it didn’t: They went on to far bigger things, and because of them my reputation had spread and I was able to do things I hadn’t done before.”
An example is Levy’s “Concerto for Diatonic Harmonica and Orchestra,” which he’d always dreamed of writing, “but if I had stayed in the Flecktones it would have been absolutely impossible to do.”
The eclectic and prolific Levy is currently involved in numerous projects including contemporary acoustic jazz group Trio Globo (also featuring Grammy award-winning cellist Eugene Friesen and world-renowned percussionist Glen Velez) and the genre-busting Riessler, Levy, Matinier (also starring contrabass clarinetist Michael Riessler and accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier), in addition to his new solo CD Alone And Together on his own Balkan Samba label.
But Levy and Fleck are truly excited about their upcoming reunion.
“Jeff taking the job with Dave Matthews seemed like a turning point for the band,” says Fleck. “We’d been on a light touring schedule and grown comfortable with the same line-up for 11 years, so the first thing we all wanted to do was play some gigs with Howard. He hadn’t been in the band since 1992, and since it was created with him, it seemed interesting to see what we would sound like after all those years.”
Looking ahead, Fleck adds: “Howard’s a lot of fun because he seems to access new ideas every night. The band tends to get excited with him in it, and it was always kind of a hot band when we started. As time went on and with different players, we sometimes went for a 'cooler' sound.”
As Levy notes, Fleck’s banjo and his harmonica make for a unique sound.
“They’re both associated basically with Americana music and are very classic together,” he says, “but nobody would ever associate them with the genres we explored. We went off in just about every musical direction imaginable because that’s the way Béla’s compositional mind works--and I was able to follow. But there is some magical sonic congruence between banjo and harmonica that doesn’t exist between banjo and any other instrument, and even though the guys playing were great, no matter who came after me, it couldn’t be recreated.”
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