Bela Fleck & The Flecktones

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones came together in Nashville when Fleck, the banjo man, was invited onto the PBS series The Lonesome Pine Specials. The band he brought along had no business working as well as it did: Victor Wooten playing bass guitar like it was the lead instrument, his brother Roy, better known as Future Man, keeping time on the Drumitar, and Howard Levy on harmonica and keyboards.

Call it jazz fusion if you need a label, but the Flecktones throw improvisation into a blender with progressive bluegrass, rock, funk, classical and music from every corner of the globe, and somehow the collisions come out sounding natural. Levy left in 1992, and the other three kept at it as a trio for several years until Jeff Coffin signed on with his saxophones in 1997. That's the lineup on 1998's Left of Cool, the album that gave the world "Big Country".

Coffin stayed until 2010, and a year later Levy was back in the fold, the original banjo, bass, Drumitar and harmonica setup reunited.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.