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Béla Fleck: Rocket Science

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: eOne Music
Released: 2011.05.17
Time:
 64:28
Category: Jazz
Producer(s): Béla Fleck
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.flecktones.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2013
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Gravity Lane (B.Fleck) - 5:58
[2] Prickly Pear (B.Fleck) - 3:49
[3] Joyful Spring (H.Levy) - 2:39
[4] Life In Eleven (H.Levy/B.Fleck) - 5:25
[5] Falling Forward (B.Fleck) - 5:08
[6] Storm Warning (B.Fleck) - 7:57
[7] Like Water (V.Wooten/B.Fleck) - 4:42
[8] Earthling Parade (B.Fleck) - 7:58
[9] The Secret Drawer (Future Man) - 2:12
[10] Sweet Pomegranates (H.Levy) - 5:55
[11] Falani (B.Fleck) - 6:50
[12] Bottle Rocket (B.Fleck) - 5:53

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Béla Fleck - 5-String Banjo on [1,3-8,10-12], Goldtone 10-String Prototype on [8], Deering Crossfire Electric Banjo on [2,6], Producer
Future Man - Drumitar, Acoustic Drums, Percussion
Howard Levy - Diatonic Harmonica on [1,2,4-8,11,12], Bass Harmonica on [8], Synth on [2], Piano on [1-7,10,12]
Victor Wooten - Fodera 4-String Bass, Fodera 5-String NYC Bass, Compito 5-String Fretless Bass on [5,8,11]

Kevin Dailey - Engineer
Richard Battaglia - Engineer
Richard Dodd - Mastering
Jeremy Cowart - Photography
Sean Marlowe - Art Direction, Design
Paul Grosso - Cover Art, Creative Director

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Rocket Science is a studio album by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, released in 2011. It reached number 1 on the Billboard Jazz chart and number 36 on the Top Independent Albums chart. The song "Life in Eleven" won Best Instrumental Composition at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards. The album is the first since 1992's UFO Tofu to feature founding member Howard Levy in the regular band lineup. In his Allmusic review, music critic Thom Jurek praised the album, calling the Flecktones re-energized. He wrote "With Levy on harmonica and piano, it's as if he never left. Rather than try to re-create the band's old sound, the Flecktones push ever further into their own seamless, unclassifiable meld of jazz, progressive bluegrass, rock, classical, funk, and world music traditions on this delightful - and at times mind-blowing - record."

wikipedia.org


A reunion of the original quartet known as Béla Fleck and the Flecktones can be considered something of an event. Banjoist Fleck is probably the most accomplished "newgrass" player of the last three decades, bassist Victor Wooten a virtuoso in his own right and brother Roy "Futureman" Wooten is practically otherworldly on his ever-evolving, custom-made Drumitar. Add to all of this the return of pianist/harmonica wizard Howard Levy, and the potential for genre-defying instrumental improvisation is high. Basically, these guys can play anything they want, and for the first recording of this particular group in nearly 20 years, Rocket Science shoots for the stars.

In some ways, Howard Levy's unique musicianship and creativity have provided a real boost for his old comrades. The compositions are all quite bold, showcasing everyone's versatility and highlighting the collective power of the band. Fleck's impressive banjo style somehow works in the foreground and background simultaneously, as Wooten's liquid bass weaves between Fleck and Futureman's authentically rhythmic drum-work samples. Levy's harmonica can be the least fascinating sound here, but the sonic direction of the Flecktones is still much more adventurous whenever he's involved.

The composition "Life in Eleven" uses Bulgarian dance rhythms, and it might be the most engaging use of the unusual time signature since the Grateful Dead's group-mind-meld on "The Eleven". Futureman struts his stuff convincingly on "The Secret Drawer", which segues nicely into Levy's piano-based composition "Sweet Pomegranates". Mostly following the old Weather Report adage of always soloing and never soloing, the Flecktones are simply amazing musicians whose rapport can't be beat.

Mitch Myers - 05/24/11
1999-2014 JazzTimes



One would be forgiven for thinking that the reunion of the Flecktones' original lineup for Rocket Science was a nostalgic one, but that's not what happened. Howard Levy left the band back in 1992, leaving Béla Fleck, Victor Wooten, and Roy "Future Man" Wooten as a trio for six years before saxophonist Jeff Coffin came aboard in 1998. the Flecktones - in trio and quartet formations - continued to expand upon the various possibilities that established them early on, releasing recordings and touring the world over. Each member also developed a solo persona, performing and collaborating with other musicians, ultimately bringing his experiences back to the Flecktones. When Coffin left to join the Dave Matthews Band in 2008 in the wake of saxophonist LeRoi Moore's death, it opened the door for Levy to reconnect with his old bandmates. With Levy on harmonica and piano, it's as if he never left. Rather than try to re-create the band's old sound, the Flecktones push ever further into their own seamless, unclassifiable meld of jazz, progressive bluegrass, rock, classical, funk, and world music traditions on this delightful - and at times mind-blowing - record. Things kick off on a sparkling yet nearly pastoral note with "Gravity Lane," as Fleck's banjo, Levy's piano, and Victor Wooten's bass engage in some lovely interplay. When Future Man Wooten's drumitar kicks in on a series of skittering breaks, the entire playing level opens to the stratosphere. "Life in Eleven" begins as a harmonica jam before the banjo enters in breakdown style. Blues and bluegrass meet in the realm of syncopated funk. "Falani" features one of the finer Wooten bass solos on the record and allows Fleck and Levy to engage in sharp contrapuntal exchanges in the background. The rich Middle Eastern modes and melodies in "Sweet Pomegranates" is one of the most provocative and satisfying things on a disc full of more ideas than the listener can count. "Like Water" is the true pastoral jam on the disc, with the Flecktones at their most laid-back and grooving before carrying it all out on the careening, sprightly "Bottle Rocket." Rocket Science fires on all cylinders and comes off as a fresh and exciting reintroduction to a newly energized Flecktones.

Thom Jurek - AllMusic.com



Bela Fleck is the only musician to be nominated for Grammys' in jazz, bluegrass, pop, country, spoken word, christian, composition and world music categories. His totalcount is 11 Grammys' won, and 27 total nominations. Groundbreaking banjoist/composer/bandleader Béla Fleck has reconvened the original Béla Fleck & The Flecktones, the extraordinary initial line-up of his incredible combo. Rocket Science marks the first recording by the first fab four Flecktones in almost two decades, with pianist/harmonica player Howard Levy back in the fold alongside Fleck, bassist Victor Wooten, and percussionist/ drumitarist Roy Futureman Wooten. Far from being a wistful trip back in time, the album sees the Grammy' Award-winning quartet creating some of the most forward thinking music of their long, storied career. While all manner of genres come into play from classical and jazz to bluegrass and African music to electric blues and Eastern European folk dances the result is an impossible to pigeonhole sound all their own, a meeting of musical minds that remains, as ever, utterly indescribable. Simply put, it is The Flecktones, the music made only when these four individuals come together. I didn t want to just get together to play the old music, Fleck says. That s not what the Flecktones are about. Everybody s full of life and ideas and creativity. I was intrigued by what we could do that we had never done before. Visionary and vibrant as anything in their already rich canon, Rocket Science feels more like a new beginning than simply the culmination of an early chapter. The band now embarks on an extensive tour, and there s no telling how this new music will further develop in performance. We re going to have to have this experience together and see how everybody likes it, Fleck says. I know that we haven t even come close to exhausting the possibilities with this record, but we sure went deeper than we ever had before.

Amazon.com Editorial Review



Some say you can't go back, but that's not always true. Emerging from his formative years as a rising star in the blue/newgrass community, banjoist Béla Fleck lept onto a much bigger radar with the release of Béla Fleck & The Flecktones (Warner Bros., 1990), after forming the group in 1988. Stretching and, in some cases, breaking down the boundaries of jazz, bluegrass, classical music and much, much more, the group's debut and two subsequent releases - Flight of the Cosmic Hippo (1991) and UFO Tofu (1991), also on Warner Bros. - positioned The Flecktones as virtuosos with mind-boggling chops, without ever losing site of the intrinsic musicality that made songs like "Sinister Minister," "Blu-Bop" and "UFO Tofu" so eminently appealing. Three years of cross-continent touring built a loyal audience, much as Medeski, Martin & Wood would do a couple years later, with both groups becoming heroes to the jam band community that began emerging around the same time.

But, as is often the case with groups that tour incessantly, lineups don't last forever. Having had enough of the relentless road, and wanting to spend more time with his family, Howard Levy, who Fleck called "the man with two brains" for his unprecedented - and seemingly impossible, unless you had the chance to see him do it live, and even then it was hard to believe - ability to not only stretch a simple diatonic harmonica and make it sound like a chromatic one, but to do so at the same time as he played piano and keyboards, left the group in 1992. The remaining Flecktones, including Über-bassist Victor Wooten and innovative percussionist Roy "Future Man" Wooten - who focused, in the early years, solely on his Synthaxe Drumitar, a guitar-looking instrument with a variety of buttons to trigger sampled drum kit sounds, percussion and more - soldiered on, first as a trio, then as a group that invited guests like Oregon woodwind multi-instrumentalist Paul McCandless and Fleck's Newgrass Revival cohort, mandolinist/vocalist Sam Bush, before settling into a consistent quartet for 12 years, with woodwind wizard Jeff Coffin. But as good as future Flecktones recordings were, and as much as the group continued to build and retain momentum, it never truly recaptured the freshness or staggering collective empathy shared by Fleck, Levy, Wooten and Futureman.

All of which makes Levy's return to the fold for Rocket Science a reason to celebrate. With Coffin off to join Dave Matthews Band after the unexpected and tragic passing of saxophonist LeRoi Moore in 2008, Fleck approached Levy to return to The Flecktones. Twenty years later, with the group adopting a more relaxed approach to touring, Levy simply seemed the only choice and it's beyond great news that he's decided to rejoin for a record and summer 2011 tour. Rocket Science recaptures everything that made The Flecktones' so fresh, so innovative, so important during its first five years. It's also clear just what Levy brought to the group, beyond his strengths as a player and, most importantly, a team player.

In the years since Levy's departure, everyone in the band has become a leader in his own right. Fleck, beyond the Grammy Award-winning The Flecktones, has released a slew of fine albums ranging from pure bluegrass to the especially moving Throw Down Your Heart (Rounder, 2009), where he returned to the banjo's roots in Africa, picking up another Grammy in the process. Wooten, in addition to his own growing discography as a leader, participated in S.M.V., a collaboration with two other bass heroes, Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller. And while Futureman has no albums directly under his own name, he has been involved in a number of collectives, including the hippified jazz/jam band Eclectica, which released Streaming Video Soul (ArtistsShare), in 2009. The Flecktones continued to release fine records, and draw large crowds, as they did in 2004 at the Ottawa Jazz Festival, but post-Levy, there was always the sense that something was missing, as the group began something of a downward swing into near self-caricature, where chops and testosterone ruled and live shows seemed to become a near-endless series of impressive but ultimately less-than-memorable soloing.

Happily, all the changes with the release of Rocket Science. The writing hasn't been this strong since, well, the last time Levy was in the band, and because Fleck remains the group's primary composer (though everyone contributes), it becomes clear that it's always been as much about who he is writing for as what he is writing. The tunes are still filled with knotty twists and turns, but there's also a sense of space that's back, right from the first tune, Fleck's breezy "Gravity Lane," which contains no shortage of metric shifts and a baton-like passing of the melody between Fleck, Levy and Wooten, but still seems to breathe in ways the Levy-less Flecktones failed to. And as Levy's harmonica breathtakingly moves in out and around the song's changes, and as Fleck takes a mind-blowing solo that's as impressive as anything he's ever done, it also becomes clear just how definitive the combination of harmonica, banjo, and sometimes bass in the front line really was to The Flecktones' sound, and how anything else has always felt, somehow, less, no matter how good it was.

Having another chordal instrument in the band also liberates Fleck from having to fill too many shoes. While he has used MIDI and looping technologies to create underlying harmonic movement in the post-Levy days - his remarkable sleight of hand and foot on "Vix 9," from Three Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Warner Bros., 1993), as good an example as any - Levy brings the expansive orchestral voicings that only a piano can...and a much more definitive jazz-centricity as well. The Flecktones has always been considered a jazz band as much as a jam band, but when Levy left, the harmonic center of the group shifted. On Levy's gentle "Joyful Spring," the ambience of his piano ties it more closely to a tradition that's always been an underlay to the group, but which has become increasingly distant in recent years, while Fleck's "Falling Forward" positively swings.

And while there's no shortage of soloing throughout the hour-long set, the easygoing camaraderie and competitiveness that made The Flecktones' early performances so uplifting and filled with positive energy is back. Solos fly back-and-forth throughout "Life in Eleven" - a direct segue from "Joyful," and clearly co-written by Levy and Fleck as a context for plenty of friendly exchanges, with Wooten's combination of rapid-fire thumb-slapping, finger-popping funk, percussive harmonics and chordal inventions as impressive as ever; Fleck's light-speed picking and ability to ascend to exhilarating mini-climaxes a marvel; Levy's gritty harmonica and flurry-filled piano a constant source of wonder; and Futureman's playing anchoring the entire track while, at the same time, pushing and pulling his band mates to stretch for greater heights. Futureman, who no longer plays the Drumitar exclusively, gets to take a more extended solo during his own "The Secret Drawer," also incorporating his strange hybrid of drum kit and other percussion so big that it would probably take up the entire back of the van they used to use to transport both the band and its gear in its early days.

Some say you can't go back again, but with Rocket Science, clearly you can. Even the cover art harkens back to the cartoon covers of The Flecktones' early days. With The Flecktones hitting the road during the summer, there's a chance for those who missed the group in its formative years to really hear what all the fuss was about. And while every member of the group has become a better player in the years since they were last together in this incarnation, they've never played better as a group. Few reunions actually manage to successfully recapture the original magic and sound as if there is something new to say. Rocket Science puts Béla Fleck & The Flecktones back on the relevancy map; let's hope that Levy can stick around awhile, because if this album is any indication, there's plenty more in store.

JOHN KELMAN - May 19, 2011
2014 All About Jazz



Rocket Science, the first album of new music from Béla Fleck and the Flecktones in six years, opens with a familiar banjo gambol from Fleck, which soon makes room for something unheard in a Flecktones song since 1992: Howard Levy's harmonica. The song is "Gravity Lane", and Levy blows a prosaic harp figure over Fleck's mellow theme until bass-maestro Victor Wooten and mad-scientist/percussionist Roy "Futureman" Wooten jump in and slowly build the song into the tumbling rhythms and improvisations that mark the Flecktones' signature sound. Any attempt to categorize that sound forces you into clumsy descriptions like "avant-garde jazz-funk-grass", but it's safe to say that the Flecktones sound has been revitalized impressively on Rocket Science.

Many fans discovered Béla Fleck and the Flecktones in the mid-'90s, after Levy had already left the band, at which point the Flecktones were touring and performing as a trio. At that point, they were attracting a lot of attention from the jam-grass community, which lumped them in with improv-minded progressive newgrass bands like Leftover Salmon and Sting Cheese Incident. Many of those fans missed the Howard Levy years altogether. Levy, also an extraordinary pianist, was a member of the Flecktones for the band's first three albums, from 1990 to 1992, so a return to the "Original Flecktones", as this year's tour is being billed, caught some by surprise.

What opened the door for Levy's return was the departure of saxophonist Jeff Coffin, who joined the Dave Matthews Band after the death of LeRoi Moore in 2008. As much as Coffin contributed to the Flecktones over the years, which is plenty, the band resounds with freshness by reuniting with Levy, and many of the new album's brightest spots come courtesy of Levy's instrumental and compositional contributions. It goes without saying that any Flecktones recording is packed with spellbinding instrumental skill, but the musical ideas on Rocket Science are more satisfying, often more melodic, and more graceful in the amalgamation of styles than on any Flecktones album in a long while.

Of course, the number of musical ideas the "Tones" cram onto any one album (or on any one song) has been as much a knock against them as it's been a virtue. Through the propulsion of such mind-boggling talent, the band has had, on occasion, a tendency to let their musical imaginations run far enough that the listener ends up feeling mauled by all of it. It's unfair to label Bela & Co. as a jam band, implying that their bread and butter is endless noodling - they are much more gifted as musicians and meticulous as composers than that - but the Flecktones' tendency to indulge themselves in their every musical whim hasn't always translated into great records, as their 2003 triple-album of excess, Little Worlds, indicates.

Rocket Science certainly doesn't eliminate the kind of musical adventurousness that they do so well (something their fans count on), but the album finds a suitable balance between digression and restraint. Part of that success is due to the record's collaborative writing process between Fleck and Levy, which resulted in some of the record's finest moments, like the suave "Joyful Spring" - featuring exchanges of piano, bass, and banjo on a mellow theme - and the blistering showstopper "Life in Eleven".

As its title hints, "Life in Eleven" is played in complex time signatures, 11/16 and 11/8, so it'll be fun to watch the festival hippies try to dance to it as the band gets Bulgarian on their asses. Levy honks with obsessive fury here, trading rambunctious solos with Fleck and Wooten, while Futureman keeps time with razor-sharp acumen. There's a clever shift into a middle passage, a more standard jazz-funk vamp, which then succumbs to Levy's heart-stopping piano rampage before reaching a typical Flecktones wrap-up crescendo. This is all exciting stuff, although it's also the kind of skronky modernistic clatter that won't be for everyone.

Futureman contributes the solo composition "The Secret Drawer", allowing us to hear the advancements made to his Drumitar. Twenty years on, the device is still a marvel, and on Rocket Science, Futureman plays it with catalytic precocity, alternating tricky syncopations and guiding the band through endless rhythmic changeups. His brother Victor, for his part, backs off of the myriad bass effects for which he's been known, opting instead for a fat, sensuous, unadulterated tone, one that contributes the album's warm integrity and helps establish a template in which each player is subordinate to the ensemble.

Despite the collaborative nature of Rocket Science, most of the songs remain Fleck's, like the loose articulation of "Storm Warning", a live mainstay from his trio concerts with Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty. Here, Levy's harmonica maintains the same theme throughout while the others exchange discursive phrases throughout the chorus, creating tension and release. Fleck switches to a Deering Crossfire electric banjo here, which he also uses on the relatively straightforward "Prickly Pear", as he trades riffs with Levy, this time his harp coughing through thick distortion. Later, Fleck plays a prototype ten-string banjo on "Joyful Spring", reminding us again that when it comes to the banjo, the history of the instrument is divided into pre-Béla and post-Béla.
 
"Falani", the album's penultimate track, is an example of the album's focused structural thesis. The bridge allows Wooten to lay down some expressive phrases but mostly Fleck and Levy exchange subtle variations on the theme, sometimes in unison, sometimes breaking out in the chorus on self-assured solos. "Bottle Rocket" is the album-closing knockout, opening with Wooten's popping bass figure, bringing to mind classic Flecktone fare like "Stomping Grounds". Levy trades off on the harmonica and piano, expanding the sonic palette; the band toggles between bop-style digressions and the head's evocative eight-note riff. Toward the end, Béla takes over, playing with incredible velocity, amazing in the coherence of his thought. It's a fitting summary to an album of stirring ingenuity from musicians rediscovering each other and having tremendous fun doing so.

Steve Leftridge 8 June 2011
1999-2014 PopMatters.com
 

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