Béla Fleck at Carnegie Hall

Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, Justin Moses

Chris Thile and Bela Fleck (photograph by Sachyn Mital)

Banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck returned to the city in which he was born and raised for a concert at Carnegie Hall celebrating his first bluegrass album in more than 20 years. For this concert, he brought along an accompanying retinue of esteemed bluegrass musicians. The guests are among those who contributed to his My Bluegrass Heart album, released on September 10.

Bluegrass is not often played at Carnegie Hall. The very first bluegrass concert at the prestigious auditorium was in 1962, when a performance by headliners Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs with their band, the Foggy Mountain Boys, elevated bluegrass to a higher public stature. Fleck first performed at Carnegie Hall with his band, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, on June 30, 2007.

Bela Fleck

Billy Strings

My Bluegrass Heart is the third chapter in Béla Fleck’s trilogy that began with 1988’s Drive and continued 11 years later in 1999 with The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 2. In the interim, Fleck became an adventurous ambassador of the banjo, earning 15 Grammy Awards in nine different fields, including country, pop, jazz, instrumental, classical and world music. The current album and tour signaled his return to instrumental bluegrass.

With no introductions, the Carnegie Hall concerts started with individual musicians walking onto the stage one by one to thunderous applause. Bluegrass veterans and  newcomers seemed to generate the same amount of fanfare from the audience. Sam Bush (mandolin, fiddle), Jerry Douglas (resonator guitar), Stuart Duncan (fiddle), Edgar Meyer (bass), Justin Moses (resonator guitar, fiddle, banjo), Mark Schatz (bass), Bryan Sutton (acoustic guitar), Chris Thile (mandolin) and Tony Trischka (banjo) were among the established stable of old guard bluegrass masters. Michael Cleveland (fiddle) , Sierra Hull (mandolin), Billy Strings (acoustic guitar), and Molly Tuttle (acoustic guitar) represented the next wave of virtuoso players.

Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull, Sam Bush, Bela Fleck (photograph by Alan Cantor)

Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka

Each composition featured a different team of players, ranging from two (a duet between Fleck and Thile) to 13 acoustic instrumentalists. Often, with so many players picking on their instruments, even finding who was playing a lead was challenging. Because Carnegie Hall utilizes no spotlights, it was up to the attendee to follow the quick changes in lead instruments in many pieces.

The set consisted of all instrumental music until the encore. The main set consisted largely of songs from the My Bluegrass Heart album. The encore songs sourced older catalogs. Throughout the evening, the musical finesse was dazzling. For bluegrass fans in New York, which is not often frequented by such bluegrass luminaries, this might have been a concert of a lifetime, as Fleck predicted in a press release days earlier.

“Calling something the ‘concert of a lifetime’ sure sounds like hype, and in many cases it would be, but not this time!” Fleck said in the press release. “At least for my world and my music, this is an unprecedented opportunity to bring some of the brightest instrumental lights in bluegrass—or any other music for that matter—to the incredible Carnegie Hall stage.”

Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, Billy Strings

Bela Fleck

Setlist

1. Blue Mountain Hop
2. Vertigo
3. Hug Point
4. Round Rock
5. Us Chickens
6. Tentacle Dragon (Revenge of the)
7. Our Little Secret
8. Strider
9. Psalm 136
10. Charm School
11. Hunter’s Moon
12. Baptist Pumpkin Farm
13. Boulderdash

Encore

1. The Martha White Theme
2. When the Storm Is Over
3. Dark as the Night
4. Tennessee (I Hear You Calling Me)
5. Back to the Old Home
6. Whitewater

photograph by Sachyn Mital

photograph by Sachyn Mital

photograph by Alan Cantor

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The Manhattan Beat covers New York City's live music developments as they happen. All photographs are by Everynight Charley Crespo, except when noted otherwise. For a list of Manhattan venues that are presenting live music regularly, swing the desktop cursor to the right and click on the pop-up tab "Where to Find Live Music." For a listing of upcoming concerts for live audiences, visit The Manhattan Beat's January 2022 calendar.