With his group the Flecktones, pioneering banjo playerBéla Fleck has honed a startlingly original and genre-bending mix of bluegrass, jazz, and pop influences into a sound that has garnered acclaim, awards, and audiences. This eclectic sound is featured on the companion CD and DVD releases of Live at the Quick, stirring documents of the Flecktones' renowned live show released in February 2002. Marking the group's first ever DVD release, and their second album on Columbia Records, Live at the Quick captures the Flecktones at the height of their powers, their incendiary live show augmented by a cast of virtuoso special guests.
Since the group's formation in 1989, the Flecktones' relentless touring has garnered major attention, highlighting the interplay of true virtuoso musicians: Fleck, bassist Victor Wooten, percussionist Future Man and - joining the group in 1997 - saxophonist Jeff Coffin. Famed for routinely playing over 200 concert dates a year, the Flecktones reached more than 500,000 audience members in 2001 alone.
The Flecktones made their self-titled debut recording in 1990, at the time dubbed a "blu-bop" mix of jazz and bluegrass, and soon became a commercially successful, critically acclaimed and award-winning band, their six album releases in the 90's documenting their musical evolution. After creating The Flecktones live-in-the-studio, the group went on to experiment with overdubs and guest artists on later albums, with contributions from artists such as Amy Grant, John Medeski, and Dave Matthews. The Flecktones went on tour with the Dave Matthews Band in 1996 and 1997, and Fleck is featured on several tracks on DMB's 1998 album Before These Crowded Streets.
Often considered the premiere banjo player in the world, Fleck has virtually reinvented the image and the sound of the banjo in a remarkable performing and recording career that has taken him all over the musical map, both with the Flecktones and on a range of solo projects and collaborations. With the Flecktones, he won his fifth Grammy in 2000 (Best Contemporary Jazz Album) for Outbound, a typically wide-ranging project--with guest artists that include guitarist Adrian Belew and singers Jon Anderson and Shawn Colvin--built around Fleck's concept of "the banjo being weird."
Edgar Meyer emerged in the 1990s as one of the world¹s most talented string bass players, at home, remarkably, in both the classical repertory and in bluegrass. He is also a composer whose works achieved wide diffusion in the late 1990s; they served as cornerstones in the efforts of the giant Sony label to forge new audiences for classical music by offering compositions with a direct, accessible musical language. Born in the major American recording center of Nashville, Meyer was the son of a bass player. When he was two or three years old he started imitating his father by holding a broom, pretending it was a bass, and acting out playing it. He started learning on a real instrument at five years old, taking lessons from his father. The instrument was a 1933 bass made in Czechoslovakia and in use, hanging from someone¹s ceiling, as a flower planter. Meyer has said that he grew up with the bass as his primary means of personal expression, and became committed to the instrument so early that he is unable to remember a time when he was not. Later he studied with Stuart Sankey, but still credits his father as his primary teacher. He attended the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, studying with James Buswell. Meyer won numerous competitions, and from the beginning forged a crossover career, playing with classical musicians as well as popular and country acts. What steered him toward the country side--an unusual place indeed for a classical musician--was his encounter, in his early twenties, with the virtuosic and complex progressive bluegrass music of the 1980s, as exemplified by such performers as Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, and Bela Fleck. He moved to Nashville in his early twenties, and has toured and/or recorded with Garth Brooks, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Hank Williams, Jr., Emmylou Harris, James Taylor, Lyle Lovett, Reba McEntire, Travis Tritt, the Chieftains, the Indigo Girls, Bela Fleck, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra, Joshua Bell, and Mark O¹Connor. From 1986 to 1992 he was a member of a progressive bluegrass band called Strength in Numbers. He began to compose around 1990, primarily to write down things that had emerged in his playing from "noodling around" and improvising, and "codify" them into pieces. He was a regular performer at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival from 1885 to 1993; six of his earliest compositions were intended for performance there. He has composed a double bass concerto, a bass quartet, a work called Trout Variations (based on the Schubert song used in that composer¹s "Trout" Quintet), a string trio, a violin concerto (premiered and recorded by teenage sensation Hilary Hahn, and a double concerto for bass and cello. Much of his music is influenced by bluegrass and traditional American folk styles. Meyer records exclusively for Sony Masterworks. He is married to violinist Connie Heard; they have a son. He has been a member of the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center since 1994, and in that same year became the first bassist to win the Avery Fisher Career Grant.