Ten From Little Worlds is a sort of a sampler of
Béla Fleck & the Flecktones' three-CD-long concept album,
Little Worlds. While the full work seems a little disjointed and too expansive, the ten-song collection is a little more digestible. The idea for the project seems to have been to record an album that sounds like sitting in a car and flipping through radio stations -- hearing snippets of hip-hop, Chinese opera, Irish folk, Hawaiian ukulele, mid-'80s funk, and, of course, bluegrass and jazz, then expanding that experience out to three entire discs. If any group on the planet could pull this off, it could only be
Fleck and his
Flecktones, but the concept (being as convoluted as it is) makes for a rather uneven listen. The bright and jazzy "Puffy" neatly bridges the gap between contemporary jazz and new acoustic music, but the unfortunate hip-hop version of
Flatt & Scruggs' "Ballad of Jed Clampett" never needed to be recorded.