He is one of my favorite musicians.

Somebody I probably go back now,

35 years of listening to his work.

He is maybe the man when you think of the banjo in music today. It's Beela Fleck. Thanks for doing this, Bela. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. So I guess it probably starts with a lot of interviews this way because you're a little kid. And you're like, all right, the guitar is cool. The banjo sounds cool, but maybe the guitar is cooler. But why the banjo for you? Because the banjo's cooler. No, it's really bizarre.

It's a question that I still try to figure out, because I grew up in New York City on the Upper West

side in the 60s in 40, 1958. So, yeah, banjo music was not going on. I mean, it wasn't a pop culture thing, really, right then.

And if it was, people laughed at it up in New York. It was a joke. And people didn't really

understand where it came from, you know, that it was actually, came from Africa, and that it

was in the beginnings of jazz, and Louis Armstrong's music and stuff like that. People only knew

about like dueling banjos and male rape scene

and he-haw, you know, crackers with

hay bales and, you know, all that kind of stuff, which is part of the

history of the banjo and a beautiful part of it. In fact, I play banjo if it wasn't for earl scrugs and bluegrass but there's a lot more to the story that really um is quite late in the story so anyway i i found a banjo uh took me till i was 15 to actually find one but i started hearing banjo when I was five or so, and it just blew

me away. I didn't know what it was. I didn't care about the country aspect of it. I just liked

the sound of that banjo. I didn't know what, you know, what was going on. Yeah, it is, it's such a

distinct sound, obviously, right? And I think it's intimidating. You know, it feels like, okay, if you play a guitar and you go, okay, well, I can probably figure this out. Now, granted, if you can't fingerpick that it would just be like a completely different language. But I imagine it intimidates a lot of people because it feels like such a harder starting point. Yeah, and it intimidated me. Like I said,

I heard it when I was five and I found out what it was eventually, but I never had the nerve to

think I could play it. I just became a fan of it. It was so impossibly perfect. And yet it had this

connection to, you know, to ancient tones and something, something about it. It's old, but yet

almost computer perfection. And I never thought I could play it. So I never, never got one.

But then I went to guitar, you know, the second best instrument around and started learning a bit

about the guitar. And then just by flu fluke my grandfather got a banjo for me

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