Banjo master Béla Fleck plays traditional and progressive bluegrass, jazz, classical, and world music. He served in the progressive bluegrass outfit New Grass Revival before forming Béla Fleck & the Flecktones, an innovative, hybrid fusion outfit who wed jazz, funk, country, bluegrass, and jam band improv. Throughout the '90s and into the 21st century, the Flecktones released seminal albums including 1992's UFO Tofu, 2000's Outbound, and 2006's The Hidden Land. Fleck simultaneously released boundary-pushing solo albums including Tales from the Acoustic Planet (1995) and Baroque Perpetual Motion (2001). He toured China with fellow banjoist (and later spouse) Abigail Washburn's Sparrow Quartet. He traveled throughout Africa, recording with Toumani Diabaté and Baaba Maal. The married banjoists released 2016's Grammy-winning Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn. He slid into eclectic bluegrass on 2021's star-studded My Bluegrass Heart and released the improv-based As We Speak in 2023.