hypersongs

Sinister Minister

Track 5 of the debut, a Grammy-winning Flecktones signature and a frequent encore.
Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, from Béla Fleck and the Flecktones (1990)

Fleck is credited as the sole writer. The studio original, "The Sinister Minister", runs 4:38; it was the debut's only single, and its video, the first Flecktones video, got airplay on VH1, BET and Country Music Television and heavy rotation on MTV, later featuring on Pop-Up Video. The Grammy it won at the 39th Grammys in 1997, for best pop instrumental performance, went to the live version on Live Art (disc two, track nine, 7:30), with Sam Bush on fiddle and Paul McCandless on soprano saxophone per one discography site. American Songwriter lists Wooten's bass line among landmark bass lines of the 1990s, and a jazz.com review calls it immediately infectious, fun sinister, like the Munsters, leaning toward blues more than bluegrass. Fleck told Relix in 2018 it is a classic arrangement built on interlocking bass and banjo parts with harmonica melody on top, that it doesn't need to be reinvented, and that the improvisation differs as the players have grown.

It closed the Town Hall show in New York on November 16, 2011, where Wooten quoted "Pop Goes the Weasel", and was the encore at the State Theatre in New Brunswick on December 6, 2019. We found no source on what it is about, no setlist count, and do not know which version our upload is.

On stage

  • 2011-11-16, Town Hall, New York Closed the show.
  • 2019-12-06, State Theatre, New Brunswick The encore, with stuffed hippos.

Sources

  1. Béla Fleck and the Flecktones (album), Wikipedia
  2. Live Art, Wikipedia
  3. The Sinister Minister, jazz.com
  4. Béla Fleck and the Original Flecktones, Town Hall, PopMatters (2011-12-12)