The interesting thing about BEATrio is not that it assembles three world-class instrumentalists — that happens with some regularity on the touring circuit — but that it assembles three instrumentalists who have each, in their own domains, fundamentally changed what their instruments are understood to be capable of. That is a different proposition entirely.
Béla Fleck has spent four decades systematically dismantling the assumption that the banjo belongs to any single tradition. He has taken it through jazz, classical, African music, and improvised contexts so varied that the instrument itself reads differently when he plays it — not as a vessel for a particular genre, but as a tool capable of whatever harmonic and melodic conversation is currently in front of him. Edmar Castañeda has done something comparable with the concert harp: an instrument whose formal identity is essentially fixed has, in his hands, become something with the range and spontaneity of a bass guitar in one moment and a percussion instrument in the next. Antonio Sánchez, whose drumming underpinned Pat Metheny’s work for years and whose solo score for the film Birdman demonstrated what a drummer can do when given a full narrative canvas, brings rhythmic intelligence that operates at a level most musicians are simply not playing at.
Together, they form an ensemble without a conventional anchor. There is no chord instrument providing harmonic scaffolding in the traditional sense. What BEATrio does instead is distribute all of those functions simultaneously across three players whose vocabulary overlaps in ways that have to be heard to be understood.
Kleinhans Music Hall is one of Western New York’s premier performance spaces, and its acoustic design makes it a particularly good room for an ensemble this textually detailed. BEATrio performs on April 24 at 8 p.m.
Tickets at the Kleinhans box office.