Gods: A Review

Yesterday, after spending a few hours floating in the lake on our French Pocket Convertible Island, Jen and I walked down to Benaroya Hall to pray, witness, and testify as to the presence of two gods. BANJO gods, to be specific. I’m speaking of course, of Bela Fleck and Earl Scruggs. Yes, THAT Earl Scruggs. THE Earl Scruggs. And no, he’s not dead yet. (He turned 84 this year.)

Bela Fleck (hereafter, “BF”) was playing with a group called the Sparrow Quartet, which consisted of a cello, a violin, and two banjos (BF and Abigail Washburn, who was also the singer). The program listed it as a “unique East-meets-West blend of chamber music, bluegrass, American roots, and Chinese folk music.” It’s one of those descriptions that’s perfectly accurate but doesn’t give you any idea what to expect if you haven’t already heard it. Pushing that hard on genre boundaries not only makes it hard to figure out where look for it in the music store, but it makes it a little hard for my ear to know what to do with it. In a genre you’re familiar with, you get little moments of pleasure when a tune occasionally deviates from what your ear expects. A normal bluegrass tune playing in G major might jump to an E major chord in a bridge, or a solo might stress a bent Bb note instead of the B you’d expect in a G major chord. But when your ear doesn’t have any clue what to expect, there’s no sense of deviation from the norm. The Sparrow Quartet would play in blended keys – part pentatonic and part major, for example – or possibly in no key at all. And there were handsome harmonies, sung or played, and even when you knew what they were (“ah, there’s a nice 5th they’re singing!”) your ear often couldn’t place them in their proper context because, well, there was none. But there was plenty of beauty in this music. It felt a little like I was a time traveler, going to the future, visiting the Old South, now owned by our Chinese Overlords, listening to music both alien and somehow linked to a past I dimly recognize. Would I buy a CD? Not sure. Maybe just to get ideas of different things to do with a banjo. You can listen to some of this music on Abigail Washburn’s website (she seems to be the band’s ringleader).

I will say this: It is always fucking amazing to watch Bela Fleck at work. It’s simultaneously inspiring and humbling. I go back and forth between thinking, “I wanna go home and play the banjo right now! And every day for 5 hours a day! I love the banjo!” and “Man, I’ll never be any good. I should give up now.” Mostly it’s the former. I want to buy the tablature for every piece he’s ever written and learn it. Of course, skill at the banjo doesn’t necessarily mean I like what he’s playing. Some of it is great and other stuff doesn’t really engage me. But for someone who is constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be done on the banjo, he earns my utmost respect. He’s never been afraid to try crazy stuff, from electric banjo jazz-pop to classical music to middle and far-east music. And he recently made a movie (or rather, a documentary was made of him) called Throw Down Your Heart (subtitle: Bela Fleck brings the banjo back to Africa), and that sounds really interesting too. Way to go Bela for constantly taking risks and pushing the envelope, even when you go places I can’t really follow.

Next was Earl Scruggs and 6 other musicians -- two of which are his sons Randy and Gary, and one of which was a fantastic dolbro player named Jennifer Merideth (who was strangely set apart from the others and not really lit). Earl looks old. He’s stooped over and slightly hunchbacked. He walks like he’s got a colostomy bag under his jacket. He barely speaks. When he does, he’s too far from the mic and doesn’t wait for the crowd to stop cheering, so he’s never heard. The one time he was heard, his son Gary (who does almost all the talking) was saying “This song was originally written in the late 18th century…” (I think he meant late 1800’s), and ol’ Bilbo Banjo jumped in to say “I wrote it!” Everyone laughed and cheered. Earl’s expression was like Carlotta Philpott’s face when she’s trying to listen to the TV with her hearing aid turned down. I don’t think he was trying to make a joke. But nobody cared about any of that. We were there to be in the presence of greatness, to say that we were there and saw him, a god in the flesh. Everything he did got a tsunami of applause from the audience, making it impossible to hear anything.

The thing is, he didn’t do much. I mean, yes, he is still an amazing banjo player. He fucking INVENTED bluegrass banjo as we know it. Hall of fame, lifetime achievement awards, grammys, bla bla bla. Bela owes him, I owe him, every banjo player owes a debt to Earl Scruggs for pioneering the 3-finger style (Scruggs-style) banjo picking. (I myself learned almost exclusively from the Earl Scruggs banjo book when I was taking lessons back in high school.) And that style, the style he pioneered in the mid 1940’s, is exactly what he’s still doing now. No deviation, no exploration. He sounds exactly the way he did back then. Even his solos were note for note what they are in my old banjo book. He played old favorites like Sally Goodwin, Foggy Mountain Special, Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and even the Ballad of Jed Clampet (the theme from the Beverly Hillbillies). There were almost no surprises. I had this same feeling when I finally saw Citizen Kane, and there’s all these clichéd moments (like the newspaper that spins toward the camera with a shocking headline), and then I had to remind myself that this movie INVENTED those things that are now clichéd. Still, it was really great to get to see him and to hear him. But it was such a stark contrast to see Bela Fleck playing this weird-ass music and constantly pushing boundaries and then see Earl Scruggs doing exactly what he did, note for note, 50 years ago. (The one exception was that they did a countrified version of Lady Madonna. The singing was pretty lame, but it was definitely entertaining. I wish I could find tab for THAT!)

During the Sparrow Quartet set, Abigail Washburn mentioned that this was the first time that Bela had ever shared a bill with Earl Scruggs. Bela clarified: “And I’ll be watching the show from out there, with all of you.” So it was a special treat when Earl and the boys brought BF out for their encore. They played an old tune, Reuben, and Earl pushed Bela up to do some solos, which were fantastic. Earl watched from over his shoulder with that Carlotta hearing-aid look. Then Bela and Bilbo stepped up to the mic and Bela played right along with him, note for note, both doing the traditional Scruggs solo that so many banjo players learned.

Like everyone else, I was glad I got to see it, to pay homage to gods old and new.
-David