Swing Time: The Fearless Flyers
photo credit: Walter Goyen
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In the late fall of 2017, Vulfpeck bandleader Jack Stratton had an idea. He wanted to create a band that utilized all three guitar ranges—standard, baritone and bass—along with the barebones drum setup of only a kickdrum, snare and hi-hat. Stratton immediately went to his Vulfpeck collaborators, guitarist Cory Wong and bassist Joe Dart, to pitch the idea.
“He had the vision,” Wong says. In fact, Stratton’s plan extended even further than the instrumentation—he specifically asked for each guitar to be placed on a stand, rather than having the players wear a strap, and he dubbed the band The Fearless Flyers, a nod to Trader Joe’s sporadically published newsletter. Charging Wong with bandleader duties, Stratton asked Dart to play bass in the outfit and enlisted drummer Nate Smith.
“He is an incredible visionary,” Wong says of Stratton. “He understands the internet, he understands how things work together. And I helped him get all the things to happen. He asked me to kind of lead The Fearless Flyers. He and I consult back and forth all the time, and we end up producing the stuff together. It uses both of our strengths really well.”
As a final piece, Wong filled out the lineup with guitarist Mark Lettieri, who had made name for himself by dropping a series of “Baritone Funk Thursdays” videos on Instagram.
“I could tell that he feels time the same way that Joe and I do,” Wong says of Lettieri’s playing. “It’s very metronomic but driving. It feels like a freight train going forward. It’s very articulate, but it’s also very much in time. So I thought, ‘Oh, easy. Let’s get Mark.’”
With the lineup in place, the band met up in the studio to record their eponymous debut record. Besides Dart and Wong, none of the musicians had ever met, let alone played together. Despite that, Wong’s hunch that Lettieri would mesh rhythmically proved true. The songs they crafted quickly flowed organically and efficiently—building on ideas brought in by Stratton and Wong—and the four players synthesized perfectly.
“One of the things that makes it work really well is the fact that we all listen to each other while we’re playing,” Wong notes. “We’re very intent on listening to each other, and we’re very intent on finding where each person is placing the subdivision. That’s what we’re doing every 16th note of every song. I’m paying attention to and thinking to myself, ‘Where is Joe placing this? Where is Nate placing this? Where is Mark placing this?’ While we’re playing, we’ll self-adjust. It’s like watching the Blue Angels flying in the air and correcting to stay on the whole thing. I knew going into this band that it would be like that. I just didn’t know how fun it would be to actually execute it.”
During the session, The Fearless Flyers also recorded what would become a signature offering: performance videos of the tunes with each member donning a jumpsuit.
“Jack had a vision for the outfits—it’s a visual thing, an internet thing,” Wong explains. “We had to kind of convince Mark and Nate, like, ‘Jack knows what he’s doing, we know what we’re doing here— it’s going to work. It might feel weird, but just go with it.’ Once the album came out, they were like, ‘Oh, OK now we get it.’ You can sense and feel the internet buzz around something.”
Indeed, the buzz was palpable. As of early August, the Flyers’ first video, “Ace of Aces,” has nearly 2.5 million views on YouTube. Since their first record dropped in March of 2018, the band has released three more albums, including The Fearless Flyers III, which dropped this past spring.
Despite the band’s consistent output, Wong notes that they haven’t played live together very much. They made their official live debut at the 2018 North Coast Music Festival in Chicago, offered a short surprise set at a Vulfpeck gig at Red Rocks in 2019 and turned in an opening spot for Vulfpeck at Madison Square Garden later that year. “Those are really the only three gigs that we ever did [before now],” Wong notes. “We’ve played together very few times.” The Flyers initially decided not to make performing live a focus. However, Wong says that their attitude has slowly changed and that live performances may very well become a bigger part of The Fearless Flyers’ story.
“It’s the sort of thing where we’re now excited to just kind of get in the cut,” he says. “It’s funny because we’ve accomplished a lot by doing very little. A lot of that is attributed to having an ‘Olympic-team feel.’ We’re all from these different bands, [so] it’s like putting together The Avengers or something. It feels really special when we get together. We don’t do a lot, and that’s somewhat intentional, but we’re now kind of in an era when we’re realizing, ‘OK, we should do a little bit more.’”
