Bela Fleck & The Flecktones to Perform at The Smith Center, 3/12

The eOne Music Group today announced that Bela Fleck & the Flecktones have garnered a GRAMMY nomination for best instrumental composition for "Life In Eleven," off their hit 2011 record, Rocket Science and will perform at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts on March 12 at 7:30 p.m. The much anticipated reunion record marked the original founding members of the Flecktones' first recording together in 20 years and immediately jumped to #1 on both Billboard's Jazz Charts and Soundscan's Jazz Charts upon its release.  

Tickets for Bela Fleck & the Flecktones in Reynolds Hall start at $26 and are available now at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts by calling (702) 982-7805 or by visiting www.thesmithcenter.com.  Tickets can also be purchased in person at The Smith Center ticket office at 361 Symphony Park Avenue.  

The final US tour with the original lineup of the Flecktones launches on March 1^st in Madison, WI and rolls across the country through the end of April, culminating with a performance at the W. L. Lyons Brown Theatre in Louisville, which is the city where the band played their first show together on The Lonesome Pine Special.  Other stops include San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and Nashville. 

The collaboration of Bela Fleck (banjo), Howard Levy (piano/harmonica), Victor Wooten (bass), and Roy "Futureman" Wooten (percussion/Drumitar) has been leaving audiences mesmerized, surprising fans with groundbreaking compositions and nontraditional improvisation.  After a recent show at New York's legendary Town Hall, Relix Magazine commended the group's "incredibly impressive and well-executed" musicianship, noting "the crowd was silent throughout the majority of the show, only erupting into applause between songs and after impeccable solos."

Rocket Science has been met with wide critical acclaim.  Jazz Times was impressed by the compositions, which "are all quite bold, showcasing everyone's versatility and highlighting the collective power of the band," while All About Jazz declared "Rocket Science recaptures everything that made The Flecktones so fresh, so innovative, so important." Popmatters called it "an album of stirring ingenuity from musicians rediscovering each other and having tremendous fun doing so," whileDownbeat praised, "Together, these are four of the finest musicians on the planet.  They push, pull and complement each other to create a sound that is unmistakably their own."