Few shows on kids’ television have a soundtrack by banjo maestro Béla Fleck (top right), who collects Grammys the way Disney collects Oscars.
Saturday’s new episode of Miles From Tomorrowland, which airs on Disney Junior at 9 a.m. ET, does.
In this adventure tale of a family that lives in space, young Miles Callisto and his sister Loretta go hunting for a lost musical instrument called the plectrix.
Their search leads to a marvelous discovery: that music can become a common language through which people from different worlds can speak to each other.
It’s a galactic version of a notion Fleck has employed throughout a long career as one of the most versatile and eclectic banjo players in memory.
That made this episode of Miles a natural for him, even beyond one other relevant fact: His younger brother Sascha Paladino (top left) created and writes the show.
The specific concept for this episode of Miles, which is titled “Galactech: The Search for the Plectrix,” (top) germinated in an international musical tour Fleck took on behalf of the U.S. State Department.
The idea behind the tour, one the State Department has embraced for generations, is that music can become its own kind of diplomacy, promoting understanding by bridging cultural divides.
“We made a film about Béla playing in Africa,” says Paladino. “It was life-changing for me, to see how he would make connections with other musicians through the music.”
That led to a story in which Miles and Loretta find that same kind of connection while they try to find this seemingly extinct instrument as a gift for their grandfather.
The lesson works beautifully in the show’s animated world, Paladino explains, “because we can combine not just music, but space adventure” and other bells and whistles appealing to the young viewer demographic.
Paladino couldn’t have picked a better banjo-playing brother to provide this music because Fleck has taken the banjo well outside the bluegrass world with which most casual music fans associate it.
He and his banjo have been nominated for Grammys in folk, country, jazz, pop, bluegrass and classical categories, winning more than a dozen statuettes.
“Hearing [Lester] Flatt and [Earl] Scruggs on The Beverly Hillbillies made me want to play the banjo,” says Fleck. “But we grew up on the Upper West Side, so there weren’t a lot of local venues to explore it. I wasn’t from that traditional banjo world, so where would I fit in?”
Everywhere, it turned out.
“I went back to the history of the banjo,” he says, “which comes from Africa. It’s a sad story how it got here, with slavery, but the more you study it, the more you find it has historically been used not just in bluegrass, but in all different styles. You hear it on early Louis Armstrong records.
“That’s one of the really great things about what’s called Americana. So many cultures come together.”
That’s exactly what Paladino was thinking after the Africa film. So he wrote the Miles script and sent it to Fleck, “knowing he would come up with something really amazing.”
What Paladino didn’t know, says Fleck, “is that a month earlier, I got a call from Futureman,” also known as Roy Wooten, the percussionist in Béla Fleck (left) and the Flecktones.
Futureman, who likes the tech stuff, “started telling about this new machine,” says Fleck. “It’s like a floor unit for people who want to get crazy sounds.”
Since one of Fleck’s bucket list items is to get every possible sound from a banjo, he tried it out.
“I made a tape and sent it to Sascha,” says Fleck. “That’s just what it was, crazy stuff.”
Oh yes, and he’d also been playing with Chick Corea – you’re surprised? – which led him to experiment with other different sounds.
Net result: He brought an open mind and a headful of ideas to the Miles project.
“There was a lot of improvising,” says Paladino. “We hadn’t expected that, but it was really cool to have it happen.”
“I got to play what I wanted,” says Fleck, and the result is something his fans will definitely want in their collections.
And one more thing. Beyond this musical odyssey, there’s a feel-good fraternal story here.
By the time Sascha was born, Fleck was out of high school and moving to Boston, where he cut his first records with the bluegrass band tasty licks.
“For a long time we didn’t know each other,” says Paladino. “So while we’ve been working on these projects, we’ve also been getting acquainted. We found out we like each other, which is good.”
And they didn’t even need a plectrix as an intermediary.