Your backstage pass to the DFW music scene and beyond.
DALLAS -- Talk about dueling banjos.
Bela Fleck, the Grammy-winning musician who has explored jazz and classical with the banjo, is now taking the instrument back to its roots by linking it to the music of Africa with his album and documentary, Throw Down Your Heart, and accompanying tour.
At the Granada Theater on Wednesday night, the only Texas stop on his tour, he showed off the banjo's journey through popular music in an electrifying set in which he shared the stage with players of Malian ngoni (predecessor to the banjo), a Tanzanian thumb-piano master and an American fiddler. The collision of Afro-bluegrass-jazz-blues was a culture clash of surprisingly raucous proportions.
But Fleck started with a little bait-and-switch. The three-hour show (with a half-hour break) began quietly, with him on banjo. He then brought out thumb-pianist Anania Ngoliga and guitarist John Kitime for a couple of songs, though the vibe remained intimate and mellow.
Then he dropped the bomb in the form of ngoni player Bassekouye Kouyate and his group, Ngoni Ba, who, in the Malian proto-funk-rock tradition of such fellow countrymen as Amadou & Mariam, Vieux Farka Toure and Tinariwen, amped up the energy and turned what had been an appreciative but stationary crowd into a sea of bobbing heads and dancing feet.
Cary Darling is the Star-Telegram pop culture critic. 817-390-7571
