Nine-time Grammy Award-winning banjo player Bela Fleck is under the spell of traditional Chinese music.

 

The New Yorker and his Sparrow Quartet band are enjoying their second tour of China and will play tonight at Peking University concert hall. Fleck said Chinese music was a passion and he had learnt a lot from Middle Kingdom's musical traditions.

 

"(Chinese music) has started to come out in my playing and my writing," said the musician. "I'm trying it out to see what develops."

 

Fleck, who comes to Beijing after a US State Department sponsored trip to Lhasa, Guangzhou and Shanghai, said his favorite Chinese musical instruments are the erhu and pipa.

 

"I feel I could learn a lot from a good pipa player," he said. "I use three fingers but a pipa player uses all five. It's an amazing technique. I could try to learn from a pipa player and attempt to bring an element of their playing to the banjo. It would give me a new musical path to explore."

 

In the band's repertoire are songs with Chinese verses written by Abigail Washburn, a Chinese-speaking member, as well as Chinese folk songs and some of the band's more traditional tunes.

 

Banjo-playing Washburn, who started to learn Chinese in her first year at university in the US, lived in China for a few years and has helped infuse the band's music with a Chinese influence.

 

"I come back to China every year and I hope we can come back as a band many times to perform over here," she said.

 

Fleck, who has played the banjo for 33 years, has always been open to different musical influences. The instrument he plays is itself the result of a mix of cultures originating in Africa but now considered as American as apple pie!

 

"The banjo is a mixture of all kinds of things," said Fleck. "For me the great thing about it is the combination of the primitive and the high-tech in one instrument. When somebody plays the banjo fast it almost sounds like a human couldn't possibly be playing it. It sounds as if it must be a machine doing it.

 

"At the same time there is a sound that goes all the way back to Africa that comes from the banjo," observed Fleck.

 

‘Fusion' also happens with musicians combining classical, jazz, rock and Indian music with the banjo to move it away from its bluegrass tradition.

 

(China Daily November 11, 2006)