CLEARWATER – Popular perception about the musical identity of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones depends on which Grammy bid is to be trusted, the banjo wizard jokingly suggested at Ruth Eckerd Hall on Thursday night.

Fleck and his bandmates, specialists in a particularly eclectic brand of jazzy fusion, collectively racked up three new Grammy nominations, in the categories of pop instrumental, contemporary jazz and country instrumental. “It’s quite possible that we’re some sort of a country outfit,” Fleck said. The truth, as proclaimed by a particularly boisterous patron in the crowd of 1,094: “So really you’re a bunch of Deadheads.”

That classification, too, is somewhat of a stretch, although it has its benefits: Jamband followers, attracted by the quartet’s musical hook-ups with the likes of Phish and Medeski Martin and Wood, represented a major segment of the Flecktones’ audience for the group’s first concert of the new year.

Last year’s “Outbound” CD provided a jumping-off point for the bulk of the 135 minutes’ worth of tightly structured passages and wild and wooly jams heard on the opening night of the tour.

“A Moment So Close,” one of several tunes featuring the remarkable playing and rhythmic vocalizing of tabla master Sandip Burman (an "Outbound" guest), built its appeal on elements of funk, Indian and Middle Eastern flavorings and a pop-friendly chorus. The group continued its globehopping with “Lover’s Leap,” a lilting ballad, edged with klezmer rhythms, with a melody passed from Jeff Coffin’s clarinet to Fleck’s electric banjo.

Victor Wooten easily affirmed his poll-winning reputation as one of the world’s greatest electric bassists, with a showstopping feature near the end of the first set. He opened quietly, strumming and plucking beautifully phrased lines and curlicues on his four-string before shifting into the artfully delivered finger tapping and chording of a funk section, and a harmonics-laden rendering of “Amazing Grace.” Wooten, at one point, played melody and rhythm parts simultaneously, ala Charlie Hunter.

The first set, at 50 minutes, was merely a warm-up for Act II, opened with an unaccompanied outing by Roy “Future Man” Wooten, master of the drumitar, a guitar-shaped electronic percussion instrument of his own design. Future Man, Victor’s brother, for his solo combined synthetic sounds, including African vocal samples, with pounding on an acoustic drum kit.

The Grammy-nominated “Zona Mona,” somewhat reminiscent of the Yellowjackets, with Coffin playing the pretty melody on tenor sax over Fleck’s cascading lines, was a center piece of the second set. The banjo man’s own solo segment, too, was impressive: Fleck, just back from a London recording session with guitarist John Williams, showed off some of the classical chops he’s acquired in the process of recording a collection of works by Beethoven, Chopin, Paganini and Tchaikovsky.

An imaginative reading of Aaron Copland’s Americana-laced “Hoe Down,” a far cry from ELP’s ‘70s prog-rock version of the piece, preceded the finale, the Latin funk of Victor Wooten’s “Imagine This” (from the bassist’s 1999 “Yin-Yang” CD). Those pieces, as nearly everything else, were played in a fashion that might be called overbusy. That’s our sole complaint about the Flecktones’ performance style: Too many notes, and not enough space for subtleties.