Banjo Masters Coming to Sixth & I

“With the banjo, there’s the single notes, to start. But it’s not the single note that’s important. You get a flurry of notes, they cascade into a waterfall of sound, and after a while, it’s like you have a piano in your lap.

“Playing the banjo, listening to the music, both, you get addicted. You’re just in a zone. It’s a kind of ecstasy, sure.”

That’s Béla Fleck talking about the banjo and banjo music and bluegrass, the sound and the feeling of it all, that, in Fleck’s case, encompasses a whole world. He ought to know. He is the crown prince, the modern king of the banjo, and he and his wife Abigail Washburn, an expansive musical original in her own right, are considered “banjo royalty.”

Fleck and Washburn will bring their unique, and also addictive, talents to Sixth & I Historic Synagogue Saturday, Oct. 22, and with them they’ll bring banjos — several — Fleck’s delirious playing, Washburn’s uncanny, authentic and gorgeous voice and a range of ballads, banjo rides and old Appalachian and gospel-style songs, part of a national tour that includes much of the music from their self-named album, winner of the 2016 Grammy award for best folk album.

The album is just about a perfect piece of music as enjoyment, in technique and in the way that Fleck and Washburn’s joy with the music and deftness in the doing seems to flow out of the whole enterprise.

Neither of them appears on the surface to have any business being where they are and doing what they do. They don’t have the background that is permeated with Appalachian grit or the legendary sounds and culture from which bluegrass comes, although, inspirationally, giants like Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson figure strongly in their imaginations and their playing.

Fleck — full name Béla Anton Leoš Fleck — was born and raised in New York City by his schoolteacher mother and, famously, named after Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, Austrian composer Anton Webern and Czech composer Leoš Janáček, which might explain certain aspects of his musical journey.

He studied French horn at New York City’s High School of Music and Art, which did not make as much an impression on him as first encountering the banjo — in the form of hearing Earl Scruggs play the bluegrass theme song of the hugely popular television sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

“I was raised in Manhattan, the Upper West Side, so, no, it probably doesn’t sound like a natural fit,” he said in a telephone interview. “But hearing that one day, it was just an amazing sound to me,” he said. “It made a huge difference.” Abigail Washburn, raised in Illinois, was influenced by the sound of Doc Watson. The result is in their playing. Fleck prefers the three-fingered Scruggs style, Washburn the traditional claw-hammer method.

The album seems the essence of folk, it seems old but freshly minted. It’s as if Fleck and Washburn have learned and expanded and took in along the way and enriched the material with their personas, their gifts and the things they learned and experienced musically. The music retains an essential, basic simplicity inherent in old tales and stories and delirious. It is improvisational (Fleck is a fan of Charlie Parker), but also highly focused playing.

Fleck — the master of the banjo — is also a prime example of where musicians, players and composers have been heading for quite some time now. He’s the provocateur of mixing genres and arenas, tracing music to its roots and bringing it back home again. He began at age 15 with being given a banjo bought in a garage sale by his grandfather. He recorded a solo album in 1979 and a musical hookup with mandolin player Sam Bush followed. His association with the New Grass Revival would lead to the formation of the legendary progressive group Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, featuring Victor Wooten, Howard Levy and Roy ‘Future Man’ Wooten.

That sound encompassed bluegrass, jazz, pop, blues and rock. It led Fleck to Africa to discover the roots of the banjo, including such West African instruments as the ngoni, a kind of banjo that traveled to North America with slaves.

Fleck seems at heart a collaborationist, an endlessly curious soul, a boundary stretcher full of expansive imagination. He played with Mali musician Bassekou Kouyate, went and toured in Africa, created a jazz album with Chick Corea and, in 2001, collaborated with playing-partner Edgar Meyer on “Perpetual Motion,” an album of classical material that included John Williams, Joshua Bell and Gary Hoffman playing two Chopin mazurkas, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and other classical works. It won the 2002 Grammy for best classical crossover album. Fleck has won 16 Grammys altogether.

This restless but focused journeying — others have done it too, with Yo-Yo Ma taking up bluegrass and Bell coming out with a star-filled crossover album — seems to be at the core of what Fleck does. “These musical connections have always been there,” he said. “You have to be curious about everything, it’s always something that enriches what you do.”

For Fleck, it’s about playing the banjo, all kinds of banjos, and playing music that he loves, and not just bluegrass, but mixing things up.

Washburn brings with her a persona that seems both light and serious, along with a lifelong interest in Chinese culture.

They met at a very bluegrass-ish kind of occasion, a square dance, and have a son named Juno, born in 2013, who is apparently musical and may end up being a golfer.

“I don’t know where he got that, but he’s developed an interest in golf,” Fleck said, still a little surprised. “We got him a little driver. He comes with us on tour. He’s very, very special.”

When he talks about his son and his wife, there are the factual bits, like the single notes of a banjo, and then, building keenly, a rush of parental pride and love for his family.

“She brings her passion, her talent, her knowledge and her own persona to this,” he says. “She has a terrific sense of humor, she plays beautifully, with intelligence and respect for the music, and that amazing voice brings a whole other dimension to things, it deepens.”

Washburn, in the videos and photos, is one of those people who bear themselves memorably. She’s a beautiful woman who’s not afraid to make funny faces, a talent no doubt useful in raising a toddler. She makes mini musical stories out of songs like “Shotgun Blues,” “Little Birdie,” Doc Watson’s “And Am I Born To Die?” and “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?”

The album seems a perfectly matched offering of talent.

Fleck himself — with his forays into other worlds, bringing his banjo with him, taking things in — has already been a pioneering and transformative force. He has an open face, open to the world, curious, a little different from his more scruffy, earlier persona from the Flecktones.

Like the sound of a long, endless banjo riff, Fleck, together with Washburn, is still building his musical life, from the single notes to that crescendo that plays where you feel good, rafting on the notes, the water and the music rising.