As We Speak

The last time Songlines interviewed Béla Fleck, he had briefly set aside his global adventures to return to the music that first inspired him to pick up a banjo. It was late 2021 and he had recently released My Bluegrass Heart, his first straight-ahead bluegrass album in more than 20 years.

In the intervening two decades there were acoustic jazz albums, classical crossovers, a folk record with his wife, Abigail Washburn, and the collaborative recordings he made with African musicians during his travels around the continent in search of the banjo's roots. There was also the concerto he composed for banjo, double bass, tabla and orchestra and which he recorded with Edgar Meyer, Zakir Hussain and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on the 2009 album The Melody of Rhythm.

As We Speak reunites him with Meyer and Hussain but in place of the orchestra we have the bansuri (wooden flute) player Rakesh Chaurasia, making up a quartet of musical adventurers who marry a startling virtuosity to a fearless desire to step outside the boundaries of their own traditions.

Fleck, Meyer and Hussain first met Rakesh when he sat in with them during their tour of India in support of The Melody of Rhythm and so As We Speak has had a long gestation. The album's title references Hussain's description of the interplay of their four instruments as a ‘conversation’ and the metaphor fits perfectly.

Rakesh apart, three of the quartet contribute individually credited compositions but it's merely based on whoever brought the original tune to the table for, as Hussain suggests, the dozen pieces sound like a bunch of old friends shooting the sonic breeze and chewing the musical fat together, so much so that authorship of the conversation becomes irrelevant.

The opener, ‘Motion’, credited to Meyer, begins with a classical-sounding double bass ostinato but is immediately joined by Hussain's complex rhythms and some dazzling experimental harmonics from Fleck before Rakesh's flute solo soars heavenwards. The title track, which closes the album, is theoretically a Hussain composition but features some stringed magic from Meyer, playing his bass at the top cello-like end of its register and Rakesh's flute at its most bird-like. In between, ‘Owl's Misfortune’ is listed as a Fleck composition, but the dominant melody is played by Rakesh while ‘Tradewinds Bengali’, which features a thrillingly kinetic banjo-tabla duet, is a joint Fleck-Hussain composition. ‘Rickety Karma’, on which Rakesh doesn't play, is credited to all three main writers and, of all the pieces on As We Speak, sounds closest to an improvised jam.

It's surely an easy money bet that this album will win what for Fleck would be his 16th Grammy award. The only doubt is working out in what category this wonderful work should be nominated.