Béla Fleck was born in New York City on July 10, 1958, and named for three composers his father admired: the Hungarian Béla Bartók, the Austrian Anton Webern and the Czech Leoš Janáček. His father left the family when he was a year old, and the two did not meet again until Fleck was in his forties. Two pieces of American popular culture pulled him toward the banjo: Earl Scruggs's playing on the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies and the radio hit "Dueling Banjos." At fifteen he was given a banjo his grandfather had found at a garage sale, and a stranger waiting for a train tuned it for him and told him to learn from Pete Seeger's instruction book. At the High School of Music & Art in New York he played French horn until he flunked out of it and was moved to the choir, and he spent most of his time on the banjo, working through Pete Wernick's Bluegrass Banjo and taking lessons from Erik Darling, Marc Horowitz and Tony Trischka.

After high school he joined the bluegrass band Tasty Licks, which made two albums, and in 1979 he released his first solo record, Crossing the Tracks, which readers of Frets magazine voted the best overall album. He played on the streets of New York with the bassist Mark Schatz, and with the guitarist Glen Lawson and the mandolinist Jimmy Gaudreau formed Spectrum in 1981, the same year he appeared with Tony Trischka and Bill Keith on the Rounder album Fiddle Tunes for Banjo. Sam Bush then asked him to join New Grass Revival, the progressive bluegrass band, and Fleck stayed until the group ended in 1989. His showcase "Seven by Seven" earned a Grammy nomination for best country instrumental, and his 1988 solo album Drive was nominated for best bluegrass recording. In 2020 New Grass Revival, with Fleck among its members, was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

The band that made his name in jazz circles began in 1988, when he was invited to play on the PBS series The Lonesome Pine Specials and gathered a group for the taping: the bassist Victor Wooten, who auditioned by phone and put forward his brother Roy "Future Man" Wooten, who plays a drum controller built on a SynthAxe that he calls the Drumitar, and Howard Levy on harmonica and keyboards, whom Fleck had met at the Winnipeg Folk Festival the year before. Fleck kept the group together as Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Their debut came out on Warner Bros. in 1990, and the second album, Flight of the Cosmic Hippo (1991), reached No. 1 on Billboard's Top Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. Levy left in December 1992, and the Wooten brothers and Fleck carried on as a trio until the saxophonist Jeff Coffin joined in 1997. Outbound (2000), on which guests including Jon Anderson, Shawn Colvin and John Medeski overdubbed parts after the quartet had recorded, won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Jazz Album at the 2001 ceremony, and The Hidden Land (2006) won the same category in 2007. The holiday album Jingle All the Way (2008) took Best Pop Instrumental Album. Levy returned for Rocket Science (2011), the band announced a hiatus in 2012, and it reunited for shows from 2016. In 2018 the Montreal International Jazz Festival gave the Flecktones its Miles Davis Award, the first time the prize had gone to a group. In late 2025 the original four, joined by Coffin and the Tuvan throat-singing ensemble Alash, toured the Jingle All the Way repertoire from November 26 to December 20.

His clearest jazz partnership was with Chick Corea. Corea was among the guests on the Flecktones' live album Live Art (1996), and the two made the duo record The Enchantment in December 2006 for Concord, released May 22, 2007, which won the Latin Grammy for Best Instrumental Album and reached No. 6 on Billboard's jazz albums chart. They toured as a duo, and in August 2017 the Flecktones toured with Corea's Elektric Band. Two (2015) is a live duo set, and Remembrance (2024), assembled from their 2019 concerts and from files they exchanged during the pandemic lockdowns, includes three previously unreleased Corea compositions and five short improvisations. Corea passed away in February 2021, and Remembrance won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album on February 2, 2025. Fleck also played banjo on three tracks of McCoy Tyner's Guitars (2008), alongside the guitarists Marc Ribot, John Scofield, Derek Trucks and Bill Frisell, recorded with the bassist Ron Carter and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. He made Across the Imaginary Divide (Rounder, 2012) with the Marcus Roberts Trio, and in 2005 formed the acoustic trio Trio! with the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and the bassist Stanley Clarke.

Away from jazz, Fleck built two other bodies of work. With the bassist Edgar Meyer he made Perpetual Motion (Sony Classical, 2001), classical repertoire arranged for banjo, which won the Grammys for Best Classical Crossover Album and Best Instrumental Arrangement, and the two later wrote a triple concerto for banjo, bass and the tabla player Zakir Hussain, premiered by the Nashville Symphony in 2006 and recorded as The Melody of Rhythm (2009). His Concerto for Banjo premiered with the Nashville Symphony on September 22, 2011 and came out as The Impostor in 2013, and a second work for banjo and orchestra, the Juno Concerto, was issued by Rounder in 2017. In 2005 he traveled through Uganda, Tanzania, the Gambia and Mali to record with local musicians and look into the African roots of the banjo, a trip recorded in the documentary Throw Down Your Heart (2008), directed by his half-brother Sascha Paladino. The album Throw Down Your Heart: Tales from the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3 - Africa Sessions won the Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album, its sequel of unreleased material won the same award a year later, and in 2020 he released The Ripple Effect with the Malian kora player Toumani Diabatè. As We Speak (2023), with Meyer, Hussain and the flutist Rakesh Chaurasia, won Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, and its track "Pashto" won Best Global Music Performance, both at the 2024 ceremony. Hussain passed away in December 2024.

Fleck went back to bluegrass with My Bluegrass Heart (2021), which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, with guests including Billy Strings, Chris Thile, Sam Bush, Sierra Hull and Molly Tuttle. Rhapsody in Blue (February 12, 2024) set Gershwin's piece for bluegrass sextet, for banjo with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and for a bluesy quartet, and he played a solo banjo arrangement at the 2025 Grammy ceremony. BEATrio (May 16, 2025), with the harpist Edmar Castañeda and the drummer Antonio Sánchez, was nominated for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album at the 2026 Grammys. The Fiddle and the Drum, a folk-song album with the soprano Renèe Fleming that Fleck produced, came out on May 29, 2026, and the two are touring it through December, with a Carnegie Hall date on December 3. Live Heart: My Bluegrass Heart at the Ryman, recorded at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in January 2022, was released on October 16, 2026. Fleck has been nominated in more Grammy categories than any other musician, and his official biography counts 19 wins. He is married to the banjoist Abigail Washburn; their album Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn (2014) won Best Folk Album, and they have two sons, born in 2013 and 2018.

Fleck's foundation is the three-finger bluegrass roll of Earl Scruggs, and the bluegrass and newgrass side of his work is not a phase he left behind: he came up in Tasty Licks and New Grass Revival, returned to the form for My Bluegrass Heart in 2021 and a live Ryman set in 2026, and the Flecktones always kept the banjo at their center. The jazz shows in the improvised solos, in the harmonic range of his compositions, and in the bands he built, with a bass guitarist who solos like a lead voice, a harmonica player who works in jazz, and later a saxophonist. The critic Geoffrey Himes heard the early Flecktones sending the banjo far out into jazz improvisation and minimalism while always bringing it back to rural American tradition, and that tension, rather than a settled fusion, is what the group's best records document. The band's own shorthand, "blu-bop," points at the same mix.

The record that most directly tests his jazz credentials is the duo work with Chick Corea, where he is the second voice in a pianist's repertoire (Corea's "Señorita" and "Children's Song No. 6" alongside Fleck's "Spectacle" and "Waltse for Abby"), and the Grammy for Remembrance is a jazz-category award. His other lineages are stated plainly in his discography: classical commissions and arrangements with Edgar Meyer, the Indian classical tradition through Zakir Hussain and Rakesh Chaurasia, West African music through the Africa Sessions and Toumani Diabatè, and American folk song with Abigail Washburn and Renèe Fleming. Subgenre tags here cover only the jazz fusion and crossover side of that range.