Thursday, March 26, 2009
Throw Down Your Heart – Bela Fleck
One of the benefits of my part-time job is that I get to listen to Bob Edwards (of NPR fame) on Sirius XM Radio. The other day I heard his interview of Bela Fleck, the banjo player who burst on the scene with Newgrass Revival years ago and has been re-writing the banjo rulebook ever since.
The interview had less to do with Bela’s ability to play jazz, Bach, and previously unimagined improvisations on an instrument usually associated with people who are missing teeth than it did with the origin of the banjo itself. Having spent several years touring and playing to hundreds of thousands of school kids where we inquired at every show whether anyone could identify what continent the banjo originated on and never received the correct answer – I’ll grant that I have more than a layman’s interest.
The banjo comes from Africa, at least the precursors to it’s current form did and it came across the Atlantic with folks who were brought to this country as slaves. So Bela decided to go to Mali, Uganda, Tanzania and The Gambia to explore the origins of his chosen instrument and in the process he discovered a plethora of banjo-like instruments and some astonishing musicians and music.
He has documented his musical journey in a film, Throw Down Your Heart, and the soundtrack CD includes some astonishingly beautiful indigenous music recorded in the field with 21st century sound equipment. Bela accompanies many of these pieces and the result is not unlike Paul Simon’s Graceland, David Byrne’s Rei Momo, or Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social Club although the results seem even more organic.
The CD is currently available and the film is being screened around the country. He is also organizing a US tour for some of these amazing musicians. If you are a banjo fan, I don’t see how you can live without this record. If you are a world music fan, a folk music fan, if your musical taste extends beyond the pap of American Idol, it is you will love this music. It is haunting and rhythmic and rooted to the earth.
Check it out at www.throwdownyourheart.com and discover a world smaller and even more vibrant than you imagined.
Thanks for this review, Don. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have known about this film and soundtrack. You and Deb want to go to the screening in Tucson with me, late June? Or, want to find a way to bring the film to us? That’s a summer project I could work on.