Fleck, Meyer and Hussain at the Keswick

The banjo is the most American of musical instruments, created by slaves in Appalachia who remembered similar instruments in Africa. It has traditionally been featured in the most American of musical genres: bluegrass and Dixieland, country and folk, and, of course, Mummery.

Bela Fleck has made a career of taking the banjo in unexpected directions. He has been nominated for Grammys in nine different categories, more than any other artist, and has won in the contemporary jazz, contemporary classical, and contemporary world music categories, as well as in country and bluegrass.

Bassist Edgar Meyer, a longtime Fleck collaborator, is himself equally at home in classical, jazz and bluegrass. Meyer is a composer and arranger, a teacher (currently at Curtis) and, of course, a performer who has played with Yo-Yo Ma and the genre-bending violinist Mark O'Connor.

After Fleck and Meyer wrote a concerto for banjo and bass in 2003, they were asked to create a similar piece for three instruments. The instrument they wanted to add was the tabla, the traditional Indian percussion instrument, and the artist they wanted to work with was Zakir Hussain, probably the best known tabla player in the West, who has long participated in various transcultural musical projects.

Three nonconformists

What Fleck, Meyer, and Hussain share in common is a reluctance to conform to genre expectations and a willingness to explore the sonic territory that lies across and between genre boundaries. The threesome's album is called The Melody of Rhythm, which sums up the results nicely.

Their recent Keswick concert comprised pieces from The Melody of Rhythm, including excerpts of the concerto reconfigured around the absence of an orchestra, in addition to other material by one or another of the trio. I'd call the results "eye-opening," but in fact I spent much of the evening with my eyes closed, the better to follow the melodo-rhythmic path they laid out.

The banjo and the tabla, it turns out, operate in very similar aural places. Both instruments involve skin stretched across cylinders, and the shared timbre blends to enhance each. The listener is in no danger of losing track of which instrument is which — the slightly percussive banjo obviously has greater melodic capabilities— but there's a reciprocal resonance between the two that opens up the sound of each.

Classical, with a hint of jazz

Equally important (or perhaps even more), though, is Meyer's bass. The bass, alternately bowed and plucked, both grounds the other two instruments and stitches them together, framing and deepening them.

The music itself partakes of all of the interests of its creators. Much of it is structured in classical forms. (Before starting a canon, Meyer not entirely jokingly reminded Fleck to stick to the score.) The world music influence came through in the marvelously complex rhythms. Hints of jazz could also be discerned in a flattened note here or a stretched note there.

Ultimately, though, pigeonholing this music misses the point of what these three performers are doing. It's magical hearing any musician who plays as well as each of these three does. It's a rare privilege to hear what they can do when they inspire each other.