This hasn't necessarily been an unusual year for Fleck. He is one of the few musicians on the planet to have been nominated for Grammys in the fields of jazz, bluegrass, pop, country, spoken word, Christian, composition and world music.

Certainly, Béla Fleck's musical kingdom wouldn't have any borders. It would be a cultural and categorical melting pot - and his early love for bluegrass music, which inspired him to learn how to play the banjo, would be part of its Magna Carta.

"I was living in the Bronx, one block from Yankee Stadium, and he was in Manhattan. He wanted banjo lessons. He had already taken lessons from Marc Horowitz, who had shown him some Earl Scruggs things," says Trischka.

One of Trischka's albums - probably 1974's Bluegrass Light, his first solo project - had just been released, and Horowitz, a Mandolin Brothers salesman and folk banjoist who had played with Judy Collins and Tom Paxton, was trying to teach Fleck some of the material. But Horowitz was having trouble with it, so he told Fleck to go directly to the source.

"I showed him the progressive things I was doing at the time, and he just lapped it up," Trischka recounts. "At a certain point, I just said, 'You really don't need lessons anymore. You've got the idea.' I honestly can't remember how long I gave him lessons. Five, six months, whatever it was, it wasn't a long time."

Trischka lets that sink in. "He was obviously the most amazing student I've ever had."

The origins of Béla Fleck's continuing love affair with bluegrass music are common knowledge among his fans: he was captivated the first time he heard the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies.

"That was just a spark, y'know? There was so much incredible music happening in the bluegrass world that you could really fall into it," he says. A few years later, Fleck's grandfather bought him a banjo at a garage sale. It was like finding true love.

Not surprisingly, one of Fleck's first bluegrass albums was The World of Flatt and Scruggs. "It was stuff off the Carnegie Hall album and earlier records, all mixed together. I also found a Flatt and Scruggs album in my mother's closet, [with] a song called 'You're Not a Drop In The Bucket (When It Comes To Loving Me)'. It didn't end up being my favorite, but Flatt and Scruggs never made a bad record. The deeper into the band you got, the more you enjoyed those -" he gropes for the right word – "sleeper records."

The Big Apple must have been an odd world for a kid with a lust for the banjo. "At this point, I was living in New York City, going to school in Harlem, in a wildly mixed racial blend. My friends were all across the board. They used to flap their arms a lot when I brought the banjo around, because that's what they saw on Hee Haw, the only Southern culture they were exposed to. But after a while it wasn't really any big thing."

Though Fleck downplays the drama of his days as a teenage banjo student, his friend Jerry Douglas thinks it was probably pretty rough. "He had to ride into Harlem on his bicycle, and he doesn't know how many bicycles he went through that were stolen. He'd be beaten up and his bicycle taken away."

After a few years with an amateur band he had joined while still in high school, nineteen-year-old Fleck was invited to audition for Tasty Licks, a band formed by Jack Tottle. He got the job, moved to Boston, and played gigs all over the Northeast. Then the band got into the festival circuit, and started heading south.

"The first time I saw Béla, he was with Tasty Licks at the Holiday Inn in Lexington, KY," says Jimmy Gaudreau, who was working with J.D. Crowe and the New South at the time. "Shortly after that I got a call from Glenn [Lawson]. He said, 'Do you know Béla Fleck and Mark Schatz?' I said, 'Yeah, I just saw them at the Holiday Inn. They're great!' He said, 'Well, do you have any inclination of wanting to do something on the side?' And I said, 'Ehhhh, possibly… sounds interesting.'"

Fleck and bassman Schatz, in town for the Festival of the Bluegrass, were invited by Lawson to a picking party at his home. "He said, 'Come on over, have a jam session with us, see what you think,'" recalls Gaudreau. "I stopped by out of curiosity, wanting to play some hot licks with those guys, and it opened my eyes."

After playing with the Country Gentlemen, the IInd Generation, and Country Store, Gaudreau was no stranger to progressive bluegrass. But he had been a member of the New South for three and a half years. He was excited and inspired by the jam session at Lawson's place. "I was looking for something different. After playing with Béla and Mark – and Glenn, who has always been an adventurous musician - I said, 'Let's give this a try!' Ultimately we formed Spectrum, and it came out of that meeting."

Fleck and Schatz went back to the Northeast, gathered their belongings, and moved to Lexington. The new band threw itself into developing a repertoire. "Before that process was even completed, we scored a gig at the Holiday Inn, [with] other things to follow," says Gaudreau. "We were a group that didn't even exist yet, and yet we had work on the books. It was a lot of hard work."

Already, young Fleck had a specific vision, and he was honest about it from the beginning. "He said, 'I'm not going to guarantee that I'm gonna be [with Spectrum] a long time. I'll do [this] till the next opportunity comes along.' I was like, 'Hey, that's what I've done over the years, and I don't blame you for wanting to do the same thing.' I knew it was just a matter of time," recounts Gaudreau.

In the band's early days, Fleck, who didn't yet have a driver's license, lived with Gaudreau and his wife. Fleck had tremendous focus, Gaudreau recollects. "[He] was kind of a musical recluse. He kept himself busy in our guestroom, working. Occasionally I would have to go in there, and there would be papers all over the place, music and notes he was taking. He had long-range plans. Somewhere in his future, it was going to be Béla Fleck and his music. He was arming himself with all the ammunition it would take to get started as a soloist. Even then, he knew."

And even then, says Gaudreau, Fleck's versatility was remarkable. "His banjo style is so adaptable that absolutely everything we threw at him came back with a uniqueness that helped define the Spectrum sound. We were doing everything - from straight-up bluegrass, to country, to bubblegum rock, to western swing - and Béla's imagination defined the sound that resulted."

Like Béla Fleck, Jerry Douglas was a musical prodigy who cut his teeth on bluegrass. He was hired to work with the Country Gentlemen when he was just 18. When he met Fleck in the late 1970s, Douglas was still performing with the Whites (then known, of course, as Buck White and the Down Home Folks). He had already embarked on a career that would eventually include hundreds of solo and guest-appearance recordings with a diverse list of artists.

"I was riding on the Beltway in D.C., listening to WAMU, and they played a tune called 'Texas Barbecue'. At that point, I was starting to hate banjos, just because I was really tired of 'em… you know, ALL banjo players, not any in particular. I guess my banjo repellent had worn off." Douglas, who is only half-joking, laughs uproariously. "But I heard that, and I thought, 'That's cool.'

A bit later, Douglas got a call from Fleck, still living in Lexington and playing with Spectrum. He wanted to come to Nashville to get Douglas to overdub on his first album, Crossing The Tracks. The album would include "Texas Barbecue", as well as Fleck's legendary treatment of Chick Corea's jazz standard "Spain".

"It wasn't long after that I talked Béla into moving [to Nashville]," recalls Douglas. "The New Grass Revival was going to regroup, and try to get Béla in the band. I told him he should join that band and come here. I don't know if it was just my advice, but he did it. He was like my little brother for a long time."

Fleck was around constantly, remembers Douglas with great affection. "When he didn't have anything to do, he was at my house. He and Mark Schatz would show up at the Whites' gigs, grinning from ear to ear like the village idiots. They'd come rolling up in Béla's car before the oil light came on. He'd say, 'I wonder what THAT is.'"

Sam Bush first became aware of Béla Fleck in 1978, when Butch Robins, then one of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, was working on a solo project called Fragment Of My Imagic-nation. Robins asked Bush to help out. "There was one tune Butch had written and played on the mandolin," Sam recollects. "I thought it was probably Butch on the banjo, when I later heard it on tape. He said, 'No, that's the best banjo player I've ever heard, a guy named Béla Fleck.'" Bush was suitably astonished. "I thought, 'Well, the guy must be excellent if Butch Robins has him playing banjo on his own record.'"

Bush later heard from Fleck, who wanted him to play mandolin on Crossing The Tracks. Bush went into the studio and, like Jerry Douglas, was dazzled by the young man's skill. "I was impressed with his maturity on the banjo even then. It was as if there was nothing he couldn't do on that instrument."

The New Grass Revival, Bush's groundbreaking progressive group, split in 1980, toward the end of a three-year tour with Leon Russell. Though Fleck was still playing with Spectrum, Bush decided to give him a call. "When you're looking at replacing a heavyweight like Courtney Johnson, there seemed to be only one place to go, and that was to ask Béla."

Fleck's contributions immediately raised the bar for the Revival. "When he joined the band, we right off the bat had a person who was not only a prolific writer, but a very good writer of instrumentals, as well," Bush says. "Béla wrote so many tunes we couldn't possibly do them all." The young musician continued to grab spare every moment to work on his own compositions, even while the band was on tour. "We jokingly and lovingly would often, when we got to the hotel, make sure that Béla would be on a different floor from us, because he was going to practice all day!"

The Revival, with Fleck on banjo and Pat Flynn on guitar, toured extensively for nine years and recorded a half-dozen albums. Fleck also worked on several solo projects during his tenure with the Revival, including 1988's Drive. "It was a joyful experience, because we'd been playing these shows around in D.C. for a few years - Jerry, Tony, Stuart [Duncan], Mark Schatz, Béla, and I. Béla dug playing in that ensemble, so he put us together on Drive." The album contained ten original Fleck compositions, each more challenging than the next. "Béla's tunes can be difficult, and I think we all had a few moments when we didn't think we were ever gonna get these things right. The result was very rewarding. At the end of the day, you [knew] that you'd been part of something special."

In 1988, while he was still with the New Grass Revival, Béla Fleck met a brilliant jazz bassist named Vic Wooten. The wheels started turning. "He needed another outlet to bring this vast amount of tunes he'd written to life," recalls Sam Bush. "By the time we ended the band, he had the progressive tunes that he was writing for the Flecktones."

A year later, after a successful nine-year run, Fleck quit the New Grass Revival and formed the Flecktones, with Wooten on bass, his brother Roy "Futureman" Wooten on drumitar (a hi-tech MIDI guitar-shaped drum kit of his own design), and Howard Levy on harmonica. The Flecktones' first release was nominated for a Grammy award, and their second one would be, as well. The band finally won its first award for Best Pop Performance in 1997, for "Sinister Minister", a song on the 1996 double Live Art album.

"The Grammys were held in New York that year, and my mother was there. It was very special. We had never won, and we had been nominated lots of times. VH1 said I was the Susan Lucci of Grammys!" Fleck's nominations this year, for three categories in three different fields, brought his total nominations to 17. As this article went to press, Fleck won Grammys for Best Country Instrumental Performance ("Leaving Cottondale" with Alison Brown, from her Fair Weather project) and for Best Contemporary Jazz Album (Outbound with the Flecktones). Next year, he may earn a nomination in a new field: his first project for the Sony Classical label, due at the end of this summer, will include works by Beethoven, Chopin, and Bach.

Sometime late in '91 or early '92, Fleck had an experience he'll never forget: an encounter with Bill Monroe.

"The Japanese were doing a high-definition television taping, for NHK [Studios]," he recalls. "I had been asked to do it with Victor (Wooten), and he (Monroe) was doing it with his group. Different people were coming in all day to film their songs. I was called and they said, 'Hey, Bill Monroe's banjo player can't make it. They've asked if you'll play, since you're already there.' I said, 'Great, I'd love that!'"

Dana Cupp, who these days plays guitar with the Osborne Brothers, was the banjo-toting Blue Grass Boy at the time, the last one Monroe would hire. Cupp remembers the incident vividly. He worked in Michigan in those days, and commuted as much as he could for Monroe's gigs. He even kept a Nashville apartment with Tom Ewing, then Monroe's guitar player. But he just couldn't make it to town for that video shoot.

"I didn't know about the taping until less than a week before, and it was difficult to get down for that one. I heard that Béla was involved with the project, and he'd indicated that he'd be happy to play with Monroe. I said, 'Why not? You couldn't get a better banjo player.'" Cupp was nervous because he hadn't played with Monroe for very long, and Monroe didn't know until the last minute that Cupp wouldn't be able to make it to the gig.

"I showed up," says Fleck, "and obviously nobody had talked to HIM about it. I wasn't dressed in a suit or anything. I said, 'I guess I'm gonna play with you today, Bill.' And he just looked at me. I said, 'What are you gonna play?' He said [here, Fleck puts on his best Monroe voice] 'Blue Moon of Kentucky', and there's no banjo on that song.'" Fleck laughs heartily.

"So I just didn't go anywhere. When they started the song, I played it. After he heard that I actually could play, he started having fun with me. The second song we did was 'Old Ebenezer', and I actually knew the melody on the banjo. I think he really enjoyed it. I wouldn't be totally sure he remembered who I was, but I sure knew who he was."

When Cupp later talked to Monroe about the taping, the old man expressed some displeasure. "He said, 'That feller playin' the banjo – he didn't know my numbers too good. And he wasn't dressed right a'tall!' But Béla was an unknown then, and that might have had more to do with it than anything."

Or Monroe might simply have been annoyed because his regular banjo player didn't show up. In his five-year tenure as a Blue Grass Boy, Cupp got a lot of flak from Monroe about his out-of-state residency. "He'd ask if anybody knew any banjo players that were man enough to move to Tennessee. Bill liked for a job to be covered. Rob McCoury did fill-ins sometimes, and Bill didn't mind. But here was somebody he didn't know, and he wasn't wearing a suit… When I heard it, it was fine." Cupp shrugs, chuckling.

The ultimate irony? Fleck never got a copy of the video. He'd give anything, he says, to get his hands on one.

In 1999, Fleck assembled his bluegrass buddies again, this time for a Warner Brothers follow-up to his jazzy 1994 Tales From The Acoustic Planet, Vol. 1. The second volume, called The Bluegrass Sessions, also featured guests like John Hartford, Tim O'Brien, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs - and Earl Scruggs himself, who joined Béla in a poignant rendition of "Home Sweet Home".

Tony Rice was once again tapped for his improvisational wizardry. "Béla knows, when he asks me to be on one of his projects, that I'm not a melodic person per se, and I think he hires me based on that. He's looking for someone who's willing to stretch outside the norm and drift away from the main melodic lines that he's written himself. I think Béla wants me to be to his albums what John Coltrane wanted McCoy Tyner to be to his albums."

A resident of North Carolina, Rice was the odd man out in the recording studio. "All the other guys - Sam and Jerry and Stuart and Vassar [Clements], and Mark Schatz - live in the Nashville area. They all worked together so much; they had the opportunity to rehearse one-on-one with Béla. [As] the imported guy, I had to come in and read most of the album off of charts. Once I had the basic outline of each tune in my head, I was free to drift away - yet, at the same time, to stay enough within the charts to be something that Béla approved of, obviously."

Like Drive, The Bluegrass Sessions would prove to be a breathtaking romp through a uniquely American art form. Rice still listens to both albums with impartial admiration. "As long as I have a pair of ears, I will occasionally go down in my room where there's peace and quiet, and I'll put [one] on, and play the whole album."

The core musicians from The Bluegrass Sessions still play together occasionally, and Fleck says their gigs have helped promote slow but steady sales of the album. "That band could record and have something to offer at the drop of a hat, because we went out and played sixty-something shows and the band got better every time." He adds, tantalizingly, "It's possible, at some point, that there could be a live album from that material, because we recorded a good bit of it."

When will Fleck be ready for his next bluegrass adventure? "It took me 12 years after Drive to make another bluegrass record. I don't believe it's going to take that long this time. But I [don't] want to do another until I think I have something different to offer. I want to feel like I have something to say about bluegrass music."

The possibilities are limitless. Rice thinks a Béla Fleck tribute to Earl would be great. Tony Trischka would like to see him work with Alison Krauss. Jimmy Gaudreau wants to see him collaborate with Nickel Creek, a banjoless group of brilliant young musicians. And Jerry Douglas thinks it would be fascinating to hear him play with Ralph Stanley. "Or something really traditional! He goes against that grain, but he's not afraid to try it. He'll wade into anything with that banjo."

Fleck always ventures into foreign musical territory with a tremendous sense of adventure. By now he has learned that artists who experiment with other genres are often scorned by hard-core traditionalists. Scott Vestal, a brilliant banjoist whose skill and fearlessness, according to Trischka, are comparable to that of Fleck himself, knows just how it feels to be ostracized by some purists in the bluegrass community.

"There's definitely been a cold shoulder over the past couple of years," he comments sadly. "It's a shame. Music is a living thing; it's a healthy, natural thing for it to grow. Look at what those guys back in the '40s and '50s. What were they doing? Something different. They weren't doing the same old thing, or it would have been… the same old thing. It wouldn't be what it is now."

"Béla's probably turned more people on to bluegrass music than even some of the really big bluegrass leaders, because the influences he's had come out every show," observes Douglas. "He talks about Earl Scruggs - somebody's gonna go buy an Earl Scruggs record. It leads people to the very music that the xenophobes are trying to protect."

Fleck himself is very diplomatic about the whole thing. "There are people who are really into holding that traditional line, and there are people who are just more open about it. I think it's great that they're both there. You need people to be pushing the edges, because if people weren't trying stuff, we wouldn't have bluegrass in the first place. But you also need people to protect good forms when they do turn up, keep them from dissolving before they have a chance to mature."

Respect for Béla Fleck's musical adventures comes from surprisingly traditionalist corners. Little Roy Lewis, for example, is a charmingly perceptive fan. "Somebody's always sayin', 'What do you think about Béla Fleck?' And I say, 'Well, I've heard him do from Earl to ever-what! He's one of the most remarkable banjo players in the world today, probably the modern Earl Scruggs.'"

Lewis grew up listening to frailing banjo in Lincolnton, GA. "When I heard Earl Scruggs the first time, I didn't wanna do that other style anymore. Just like a dog runnin' on three legs, and all at once he's got all four of 'em going, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Then I got to hearing Don Reno on television in 1952, and he was playing a different style even from Earl." Lewis learned the material of the two great masters by listening to their records on an old wind-up gramophone. "Now, what Béla's doing, I would never be able to do in my entire life. A lot of the stuff he does just goes right over top of my head because it's so wonderful. But I am so tickled that somebody's doing something different. At one point, I thought that Reno was the only one that could make his banjo sound like Arthur Smith in the old days with his guitar, but Béla has really done it on all styles of music. It's not very many banjo pickers in the world can do what Béla Fleck can do."

According to Sam Bush, Scruggs himself is a Fleck advocate. "I know he likes Béla very much personally, and he admires Béla's playing a lot. And he knows how much Béla loves his playing, and how much time he has put into learning to play like Earl. The bottom line: if you're a banjo picker and you can't pick it like Earl, you can't pick!"

Bush offers a memory that illustrates Fleck's intense studies of the masters of bluegrass banjo. "When he moved to Lexington, it wasn't just to play with Spectrum - it was to learn how to play like J.D. Crowe. He was a disciple of Crowe, and by damn he was serious about wanting to get it right. That's the thing about him. He's got his own style, but he can quote you Scruggs licks all day. He knows as much about Earl as anyone."

"When I first met J.D. Crowe, I was scared silly," Fleck recollects. "He could walk into a room when I was playing, and my playing would drop, go downhill. I wanted so bad to be good when he was around, but inevitably I'd play at my worst when I saw him walk in." He admits that Earl Scruggs can bring that out in him, too. "It's not that I don't think I can play when they're around, it's just that they occupy such a high position in my understanding of what the banjo is, and how it got there. I'm awed by their actual existence. There's a sheer ability to play that I don't think I have, especially when it comes to bluegrass. But whenever I play bluegrass, I want to play it with a lot of respect, and as much understanding as possible."

For his part, J.D. Crowe says that he was only vaguely aware of his influence on Fleck back in Lexington. "I was just doing what I do, and evidently he was liking that style. By talking to him I could see that he was trying to get into something different with the banjo. I probably said something like, 'I think it's good that you're trying to do something different because you know you can't sound like me. You've got to do something on your own, regardless of what people say. You can't sound like somebody else all the time.'"

Crowe greatly admires Fleck's technical skill. "As far as his knowledge of the banjo, he probably knows more than 15 banjo players. His knowledge has gotten to be at such a higher level. People just don't think of the banjo being played like that, and he's made it work really well. I'm glad to see somebody of that caliber take an instrument that I think so much of, and take it to a different level."

Tony Trischka, Sam Bush, Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, Jimmy Gaudreau. They're all incredible artists who have made musical history, they've all worked closely with Béla Fleck, and they each acknowledge that he's some sort of genius. "There is no one like Béla," they say, with affection, reverence, and pride.

Fleck's ability to transcend genres is legendary, as is his knack for bridging the enormous gap between them. Perhaps these skills symbolize the difference between someone who can use a hammer to build a house, and someone who can use a hammer to build a kingdom.

Certainly, Fleck's musical kingdom is vast and far-reaching. He inspires a devoted following wherever he performs. Many of his fans call themselves Fleckheads, after the acolytes of the Grateful Dead. One fan has seen the Flecktones play more than 75 times; another got Fleck's autograph tattooed on her leg. He accepts the honor and responsibility with grace and humility, as a monarch with an undisputed right to the throne might accept his crown.

"I don't think he takes his celebrity for granted," Jimmy Gaudreau comments. "He's extremely grateful for his gift, and to be where he's at these days."

"Béla's a really good guy," Tony Trischka agrees. "Aside from his great business sense and musicianship, he really cares about his audience and his friends. He tries to do the right thing. He always goes out after the show to the front of the stage to meet people, unless he has to get to another gig. He told me once that it wouldn't be worth it if he couldn't do that. It's not just the party line. He really feels that way."