This column is about modern jazz: its current state, its future and, if I may be so bold, its definition. And although I’ve talked about a different artist each week in order to support my point, I have still continued to make it. We can think of jazz however we want (it is a music of the people, after all), but some of these ways limit the future direction of the genre, while others enhance it.

Since part one, I’ve spent a lot of time explaining why jazz doesn’t need to sound like jazz. In fact, I’ve been so bold as to suggest that jazz is better, even more pure, when it doesn’t have a swing beat, walking bass and split-splat horn lines.

Musical progress has always been at the core of jazz music (Charlie Parker’s hyper bebop lines sounded nothing like Lester Young’s smooth big band sound), so it only makes sense the sound should continue to evolve today. Another mainstay of jazz, cultural relevance, sounds different today than it did in the ’30s or even the ’60s. Bebop was street music in the ’40s; hip-hop and electronica are street music in the 2000s.

I’ve been making my case since week one, but today, ladies and gentlemen, I’m presenting key evidence.

Béla Fleck (and the Flecktones, out of respect) is capable of turning any jazz traditionalist into a modern jazz activist. A banjo player and composer, Fleck has made brilliant music for fully two decades. Starting as a bluegrass, and then newgrass musician, Fleck ventured into jazz in 1990, putting together the now-famous Flecktones for a PBS television special.

The Flecktones are a rare, rare breed. The core (historically, at least) consists of brothers Victor and Roy “Future Man” Wooten. Victor is safely one of the world’s best electric bass players, probably the best. A muscular, athletic man who wears a bicycle jersey on stage (àla Carter Beauford), he of course has chops to spare — you can feel the power when you watch Wooten play. But he’s also a very tasteful player, demonstrating great musicality in everything he does and not letting his technical ability get the best of him.

Meanwhile, his brother Roy is a real oddity, playing percussion via a custom MIDI controller called a SynthAxe Drumitar. It resembles a guitar, but rather than strings the Drumitar has rows and rows of buttons, each one triggering a different percussive sound from a sampler off-stage. If you’ve ever played drums, you know that it’s much easier to play with your fingers and hands than with sticks. Future Man knows this too, and it shows in the complex, polyrhythmic parts he plays.

The third Flecktone is a reeds player, Jeff Coffin. He’s the new guy who joined the group five years ago to replace keys and harmonica player Howard Levy. In a group comprised of the world’s best, Coffin is certainly no slouch, either, switching effortlessly from tenor to soprano to alto saxophone, then to clarinet and even flute.

Coffin adds counter melodies and accompaniments to even the group’s oldest material, sounding as though he’s been there all along. Also impressive is the connection between bandleader Fleck and Coffin — 16th-note counterpoint lines sound easy on the recording, but that’s the point. This stuff is not easy, kids.

Jeff Coffin and the Wooten brothers are all top-notch musicians, but it is Béla Fleck (the big Flecktone himself) who has the vision and leadership for the group. While in high school, Fleck started adapting bebop lines to the banjo, beginning a history of genre bending that has served him well for over 20 years. Today’s Flecktones music features reinterpretations of classical works, jazz renditions of bluegrass standards and original pieces that are way out there.

Much of Fleck’s early career was spent in bluegrass and that influence is still very obvious. It’s impossible to play banjo and not sound a little bluegrass. But after forming the Flecktones, Béla took a step strongly in the direction of jazz.

The group’s defining early work was Flight of the Cosmic Hippo, an album that is truly as strange as the title suggests. The opening track, “Blu-Bop,” also sounds like the name. It’s part bebop, part bluegrass, and although it would be years before Fleck adapted Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo” into his own “Hoe Down,” the 1990 classic echoes this pseudo-classical vibe.

Another seminal moment came in 1994 with the release of Tales of the Acoustic Planet, in which Fleck transforms this wonderful fusion into beautiful acoustic music. He does so not with the Flecktones (although they do make appearances), but with bluegrass greats like Jerry Douglas and Sam Bush and jazz greats like Chick Corea and Branford Marsalis. These collaborations not only resulted in great music, but also solidified Fleck’s reputation as a cross-genre innovator, producing progressive music in the true jazz tradition.

To truly experience the magic of Béla Fleck is, to him and the Flecktones, in concert, and fortunately Live Art (1991) exists as an excellent example (there is also Live at the Quick from 2002, but it is recorded with the Flecktone Big Band and lacks some of the wonder of Art).

What to expect? Not only all of Fleck’s best work, but solo performances by Victor Wooten and Fleck that rival anything I’ve heard. Wooten’s solo arrangement of “Amazing Grace” for bass (although at times it’s more like a drum) is worth the price of admission alone.

Béla Fleck is not for the faint of heart. His music is different, and sometimes intimidating at first. But it is jazz, real and true (bebop was not easy to listen to, either). More than anyone else I’ve mentioned, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones are pushing musically, continuing jazz while not limiting themselves to the artificial constraints some have suggested we apply to the genre in order to keep it “pure.”