PODCAST: Inside Berklee—Béla Fleck and Victor Wooten

Béla Fleck and Victor Wooten discuss reuniting the Flecktones and the booming acoustic music scene in Boston while offering Berklee students advice on supportive musical conversations.

May 17, 2016

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones is a pioneering, genre-defying group formed by Fleck, a 14-time Grammy winner often considered the world’s greatest living banjo player. The group includes Victor Wooten, who is, likewise, frequently cited as the world’s best living bassist. Wooten, a five-time Grammy winner, is a performance scholar in residence at Berklee and artistic director of the Victor Wooten/Berklee Summer Bass Workshop.

After several years of hiatus, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones—also featuring harmonica virtuoso and pianist Howard Levy and drumitar inventor Roy “RoyEl” Wooten, best known as Futureman—are reuniting for a two-week tour starting June 1, 2016 and concluding at this year’s Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

In this podcast, Fleck—who says he “would have loved to have come to Berklee”—and Wooten talk about the band’s decision to regroup and Boston’s booming acoustic music scene while offering Berklee students advice on supportive musical conversations.