Brown Theatre

91.9 WFPK presents BÉLA FLECK - MY BLUEGRASS HEART

featuring Michael Cleveland, Sierra Hull, Justin Moses, Mark Schatz, & Bryan Sutton Wednesday, December 14, 2022 | 8:00PM | Brown Theatre

I’m so looking forward to taking this band out on tour. For folks that know bluegrass, these folks need no introduction, as they’ve been making a ton of noise in that world for some time.

I have almost always played and recorded my bluegrass projects with the folks from my own age and peer group — Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, David Grisman, Tony Rice, Mark O’Connor, etc. But for this new album, I wanted to open up to the fresh and powerfully evolved musicians who have come along since us, and partly because of us! This tour will feature some of these players.

I first got to know Sierra Hull when she asked me to produce her album, Weighted Mind. She is a shockingly good player, with more than enough ability to play my admittedly angular and sometimes complex form of bluegrass. So I’m thrilled to finally be able to do

I’ve been knocked out by fiddler Michael Cleveland for some time now. I just didn’t know if he’d be interested in playing with me, as I knew him as a hardcore bluegrass player. To my happy surprise, not only was he interested, but he brings a power and drive to my stuff, and an ensemble concept that for some reason I wasn’t expecting.

My pal Bryan Sutton, a stunner of a flat picker and one of the bright lights of the bluegrass guitar continuum has been my cohort in the Telluride House Band as well as an acoustic trio that I toured with some years back with Casey Driessen. But playing on this new album he impressed me over and again with his flexibility and raw ability.

Bassist Mark Schatz and I started playing together way back in 77’, in a Boston Bluegrass band unfortunately named Tasty Licks! We moved together to Lexington, KY in 79’ to start Spectrum. In 81’ I joined New Grass Revival, and he went on to play with Tony Rice, Tim O’Brien, and Nickel Creek among many others. I’m thrilled to be reunited with my old, right-hand man, Mark!

I was stumped for a while as to what to do about the double fiddle and dobro parts on the recording, until I realized there was one guy who could do both — and a whole lot more. Justin Moses is a great mandolinist, banjoist, and a great singer to boot. He’s gonna be our wild card. He will be grabbing the fiddle to double fiddle with Stuart, switching to dobro, then jumping to banjo for a double banjo number, and mandolin for the double mando track from the album. So I’m amazed I could get all that in one very talented guy. As you can imagine, I’m very excited to play with these guys. We’ve all been locked up for so long and we’re dying to get out there and play some music!

— Béla Fleck

ARTIST BIOS

BÉLA FLECK Just in case you aren’t familiar with Béla Fleck, there are many who say he’s the premiere banjo player in the world. Others claim that Fleck has virtually reinvented the image and the sound of the banjo through a remarkable performing and recording career that has taken him all over the musical map and on a range of solo projects and collaborations. If you are familiar with Fleck, you know that he just loves to play the banjo, and put it into unique settings.

A fifteen-time Grammy Award-winner, Fleck has the virtuosic, jazz-to-classical ingenuity of an iconic instrumentalist and composer with bluegrass roots. His collaborations range from his groundbreaking standard-setting ensemble Béla Fleck and the Flecktones to a staggeringly broad array of musical experiments. From writing concertos for full symphony orchestra, exploring the banjo’s African roots, and collaborating with Indian musical royalty Zakir Hussain and Rakesh Churasia with Edgar Meyer, to performing as a folk duo with wife Abigail Washburn, and jazz duos with Chick Corea, many tout that Béla Fleck is the world’s premier banjo player. As Jon Pareles wrote for The New York Times, “That’s a lot of territory for five strings.”

MICHAEL CLEVELAND The world tends to look at accomplishments in the form of accolades and although only in his mid-30’s, 2020 Grammy Awardwinner Michael Cleveland, has plenty

to his credit. Cleveland is IBMA's most awarded Fiddle Player of the Year with 12 wins, has won Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year six times, and fronts their 6-Time Instrumental Group of the Year. And, he is a 2018 Inductee to the National Fiddler Hall of Fame. Picking up the fiddle at age 4, by age 9, Michael was invited to sit in with the legendary Bill Monroe at the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival. Soon after, he brought his virtuosic style to the Grand Ole Opry as a guest of Alison Kraus, and was hand picked for the IBMA Bluegrass Youth Allstars before he was 14. His blistering prowess and technical fluency have since marked him as a sought-after musician, leading to performances with Vince Gill, Marty Stuart, Tim O’Brien, J.D. Crowe and the New South, Andy Statman, and The Kruger Brothers in recent years. However, it wasn’t until 2006, when Michael formed his own band Michael Cleveland & Flamekeeper, that he found the right vehicle for his musical vision, and he hasn’t rested since, constantly looking for new ways to push himself and his music forward.

SIERRA HULL In her first 25 years alone, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Sierra Hull hit more milestones than many musicians accomplish in a lifetime. After making her Grand Ole Opry debut at the age of 10, the Tennessee-bred virtuoso mandolinist played Carnegie Hall at age 12, then landed a deal with Rounder Records just a year later. Now 28-years-old, Hull delivered her fourth full-length album for Rounder in 2020: an elegantly inventive and endlessly captivating album called 25 Trips. Revealing her profound warmth as a storyteller, the album finds Hull

shedding light on the beauty and chaos and sometimes sorrow of growing up and getting older. To that end, the album’s title nods to a particularly momentous year of her life, including her marriage to fellow bluegrass musician Justin Moses and the release of her widely acclaimed album Weighted Mind — a Béla Fleckproduced effort nominated for Best Folk Album at the 2017 Grammy Awards.

JUSTIN MOSES Justin Moses is an awardwinning multi-instrumentalist celebrated as one of the most versatile musicians in all of acoustic music. A prominent Nashville session musician, he has appeared on stage or in the studio with an endless list of diverse artists such as Alison Krauss, Del McCoury, Garth Brooks, Emmylou Harris, Brad Paisley, Vince Gill, Bruce Hornsby, Béla Fleck, Peter Frampton, Rosanne Cash, Marty Stuart and Barry Gibb among many others. In 2018 and 2020 he was named Dobro Player of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association. Moses began his musical journey at the age of six after becoming interested in the mandolin. He soon developed a lasting passion for making music. He started to hone his skills playing in his family's band as a child. Since then, he's toured with bands such as Blue Moon Rising, The Dan Tyminski Band, Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder, Blue Highway and The Gibson Brothers. In his two-year stint with Tyminski, he realized an early dream of playing the Grand Ole Opry for the first time and recorded the 2009 IBMA Album of the Year and Grammy-nominated album, Wheels. He released his fulllength album Fall Like Rain on January 22, 2021 with Mountain Fever Records.

MARK SCHATZ Twice named IBMA’s Bass Player of the Year, Mark Schatz has toured and recorded with a stellar array of artists including Bela Fleck, Tony Rice, John Hartford, Tim O’Brien, Nickel Creek, Claire Lynch, and Sarah Jarosz. Mark is the Musical Director for internationally acclaimed Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble which showcases other talents such as clawhammer banjo and Southern Appalachian clog dancing. This versatile multi-instrumentalist has two of his own solo recordings, Brand New Old Tyme Way and Steppin’ in the Boiler House on Rounder Records, which feature his own eclectic blend of original compositions on the banjo, and two bass instructional videos on Homespun. Mark recently launched his own solo show: Mark Schatz — The Solo Concert, in which he brings all of his skills to bear to tell his story through his own tunes and songs.

BRYAN SUTTON Bryan Sutton is the most accomplished and awarded acoustic guitarist of his generation, an innovator who bridges the bluegrass flatpicking traditions of the 20th century with the dynamic roots music scene of the 21st. His rise from buzzed-about young sideman to first-call Nashville session musician to membership in one of history’s greatest bluegrass bands has been grounded in quiet professionalism and ever-expanding musicianship. Sutton is a Grammy Award-winner and a ninetime IBMA Guitar Player of the Year. But these are only the most visible signs of Sutton’s accomplishments. He inherited and internalized a technically demanding instrumental style and has become for young musicians of today the same kind of model and hero that Tony Rice and Clarence White were for him. And supplementing his instrumental work, he’s now a band leader, record producer, mentor, educator and leader in online music instruction.