Trio will bring one of the most diverse sounds UK’s Singletary Center has ever seen
Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain
7:30 p.m. Oct. 4 at the Singletary Center for the Arts, 405 Rose St. $20-46. 859-257-4929. finearts.uky.edu/singletary-center.
Through every era of contemporary music, there have been performers quick to proclaim their devotion to diversity. They often promote how they listen to “every kind of music” when in fact, their breadth of performance vision seldom leads them outside the genre in which they are most comfortable in.
Then we have the journeymen visiting Lexington this weekend – three artists with heavily stamped musical passports. While banjoist and one-time Lexingtonian Bela Fleck, bassist Edgar Meyer and percussionist Zakir Hussain will engage in a true East-meets-West summit at the Singletary Center for the Arts, you can bet the concert will wind up in a cultural destination that will surprise artists and audiences alike.
Fleck and Meyer came to their global lexicon through bluegrass, often in the same performance settings. They still hold true to those roots, too. Both re-teamed in June as part of the annual all-star house band at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan and Bryan Sutton.
Multiple (as in 15 time) Grammy winner Fleck is the most visible of the trio members playing the Singletary. The 13-city tour with Meyer and Hussain is just one segment of a very active touring schedule that includes symphonic collaborations, duo dates with fellow banjoist (and wife) Abigail Washburn and a 30th anniversary trek with his popular fusion ensemble The Flecktones.
Meyer’s performance itinerary is devoted largely to classical music and orchestral collaborations. But his resume boasts a healthy crop of recordings where classical and bluegrass/Americana level compositions and improvisations co-exist. Many revolve around a series of projects with mandolinist Chris Thile that include a pair of duo albums, a 2017 recording of Bach trios that added in acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma and a popular acoustic music mash-up called the Goat Rodeo Sessions where the trio was augmented by fiddler Stuart Duncan.
That leaves Hussain, one of the most recognized Indian musicians of his generation. A tabla virtuoso as well as the son of another tabla master, Ustad Allah Rakha, Hussain has worked with many of the leading names in Indian classical music (Ravi Shankar being but one) and has regularly collaborated with numerous artists from the East, including guitarist John McLaughlin, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd.
Curiously, Hussain has clocked more recent performance history at the Singletary than Fleck or Meyer. He performed a tabla/santoor duo concert in 2009 with Pandit Skivkumar Sharma and returned in 2010 to lead the Masters of Percussion. The latter performance fell on the same evening as a University of Kentucky-Cornell basketball game, a fact Hussain was happy to acknowledge by stating, “We send good vibes to the Wildcats” (for the record, UK wound up winning).
This weekend reunites these three innovators, who displayed their mutual musical inspirations on a wonderful 2009 album titled “The Melody of Rhythm.” The recording is a mix of trio compositions that has Indian percussion gleefully augmenting the Americana shades of the Hussain-penned “Babar” while the full trio glides with beautiful symmetry on Fleck’s “Bubble.” The centerpiece of the record is the jointly composed title work, a three-movement concerto recorded with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Fleck, Meyer and Hussain won’t have an orchestra to play off at the Singletary, although they will have the assistance of Rakesh Chaurasia on the flute-like bansuri.
“The thing is, there is so much music out there in this world,” Hussain told me prior to his 2009 Singletary performance. “It’s impossible to be able to partake in all of it, to be part of it in one lifetime. But I’ve been lucky in that I’m continually contacted and befriended by some great musicians of different traditions. I’m now getting a better chance of being able to interact with them in a way where I can actually offer more support and better conversation than I could when I was just a young punk wanting to impress everybody.”
Lyle Lovett and his Acoustic Group
7:30 p.m. Oct. 9 at the Norton Center for the Arts Newlin Hall, 600 W. Walnut St. in Danville. $52-$110. 859-236-4692. nortoncenter.com.
Texas songsmith Lyle Lovett is no stranger to the Norton Center for the Arts. Take, for instance, the performance activity that took him to the Danville venue twice in 2019 – once for a Valentine’s night duo performance with John Hiatt, the second a late October outing with his famed Large Band.
The band for Lovett’s Norton Center return on Oct. 9 will fall between those ensemble settings. He will perform with his Acoustic Group, a five-or-six member band highlighting fiddle, mandolin and a rhythm section.
Whatever the ensemble configuration, any Lovett performance setting admirably suits his Texas-sized music.