Global Citizens

If Béla Fleck says something hasn’t been done before, then it probably hasn’t. After all, this is a guy who’s done miraculous things with the banjo and whose Flecktones revolutionized the meaning of “band.” The Sparrow Quartet falls into his “never been done before” category. “It’s a completely different template for a band than any I’ve been in, and that’s what I always look for in every situation,” says Fleck.

Besides Fleck, the Sparrow Quartet features banjo-playing singer-songwriter Abigail Washburn, fiddler Casey Driessen and cellist Ben Sollee. (For anyone counting, that’s a total of two banjos, zero guitars, a fiddle and a cello—not a bass—to anchor everything.) The group’s vibrant new album—Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet (Washburn’s second, not counting two with all-female string band Uncle Earl)—is full of intricate compositions that flit from Appalachian ruggedness to R&B punch, alongside their takes on traditional Chinese and American folk songs and Washburn’s singing in English and Mandarin Chinese.

The Sparrows’ music treads beyond American soil, but Washburn is quick to point out that it’s not fusion. “To me, fusion music is really the literal banging together of two cultures, where you sit down a Zulu musician and a gypsy musician and the one guy plays his rhythms while the other person plays their melodies on top of it,” she says. “And that’s a cool thing—don’t get me wrong. But this is not so much a literal combining of two things—it’s new patterns being created from being global citizens.”

The Sparrows’ lineup fell into place when Washburn invited Driessen, Sollee and Fleck—all of whom she’d worked with individually—to join her on a 2005 tour of China. (She’d been traveling to China for years, and was already fluent in Mandarin.) With all of Fleck’s globe-trotting (including the Throw Down Your Heart documentary he recently filmed in Africa), it was a new experience even for him. “I had done a lot of traveling, but I had never gone to China, and that was sort of a hole in my worldview,” he says.

Official reaction to the group was strong. “We got invited back in 2006 to be the first American cultural mission in Tibet,” says Washburn. “That kind of solidified a sense between us that we have been called on to serve a special purpose—certainly in that situation we were. And it just felt like if we continued to work together that kind of stuff would keeping happening.” And it has. The U.S. ambassador to China even invited the Sparrows to play at the Beijing Olympics.

The Sparrows do a very different thing from bands such as Vampire Weekend, Gogol Bordello and Beirut, who spike their indie rock with Afro-pop or Eastern European flavors (though Washburn says she sees the proliferation of world-meets-pop bands as progress). While Vampire Weekend & Co. draw on world influences mainly to keep things interesting for themselves and their American audiences—not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that—the Sparrows literally enact a cultural exchange with their music and their touring. They’re just as likely to play for Chinese audiences as American, and they offer each fresh interpretations of their own folk music traditions and first encounters with each other’s.

“When we sing a Chinese folk song, I feel connected to all the voices that have sung it before,” Washburn says. “In front of an American audience, they go, ‘Wow, I never thought I’d like Chinese music, but I’m hearing you do a Chinese folk song and it feels really accessible and I really like it.’ When I sing in front of Chinese people, they immediately sense that I have a tremendous respect for their culture, and they can sing along.”

Still, Washburn admits that Chinese audience reactions vary wildly, especially if they’ve never heard American music before: “We go from being totally novelty acts—I mean, just monkeys onstage—to being in front of an extremely discerning and thoughtful audience.”

With the virtuosity and creativity the Sparrows have at their disposal, they do a lot more language bridging than just English to Chinese. They also leap between banjo styles, folk and classical approaches and traditional and innovative playing styles.

Hearing banjos together is pretty rare. Pairing two different styles of banjo-playing like the Sparrows do is even rarer. Washburn plays in the sharper-textured Appalachian clawhammer-style, and Fleck in nimbler three-finger bluegrass style.

“The songs are basically built around [Abigail’s] banjo parts,” Fleck says. “I wasn’t playing functional banjo parts like I would in most bands. A lot of times, I’m sitting out for a third of the song, waiting for the time when it needs that second banjo to come in. I can conceptualize ideas, I might be way up the neck a lot more, or I might be doing abstract lines.”