Bela Fleck, Michael Feinstein performing during opening week of The Smith Center

New, yet possibly familiar.

There might be a sense of deja vu for Bela Fleck or Michael Feinstein, the first two open ticket-sale acts to inaugurate The Smith Center (they come after Randy Travis thank-you shows for construction workers last week, and Saturday's big private gala for donors and invited guests).

An opening week of electric-banjo fusion and swingin' big-band standards may exemplify the diversity of bookings at the new performing arts center.

But as fate would have it, Fleck says he also was the first performer in Nashville's Schermerhorn Symphony Center, which was designed by the same architect and acoustician as the new Las Vegas center.

"This is a pretty crazy coincidence, to play the opening of Smith. It's unlikely!" Fleck writes by email. "If the Smith is anything like the Schermerhorn, you guys are going to love it. It has improved the quality of life in Nashville."

Fleck and his reunited Flecktones play Monday, followed on Thursday by Feinstein bringing "The Sinatra Project" to the 2,055-seat Reynolds Hall.

Feinstein is no stranger to that new-concert-hall smell, nor to the work of architect David M. Schwarz. He is artistic director for the Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel, Ind., still another Schwarz-designed center which opened about this time last year.

"I have been through the whole process that is happening at The Smith Center," Feinstein says. "It's very exciting. It sure looks to me like they're doing everything right."

It might bear repeating that Feinstein and his big band are in the main concert hall, not the adjacent Boman Pavilion that will host a new "Cabaret Jazz" series in a 258-seat venue.

Feinstein's career has been synonymous with intimate cabaret performance, though he now only plays that small a room when it's his own Feinstein's at Loew's Regency in New York.

Still, The Smith Center website promotes its new series -- which launches March 17 with the SF Jazz Collective -- as "a little bit of Dizzy's, a little bit of Feinstein's and a lot of sophistication."

So it was fair game to ask Feinstein to comment on the room he won't be playing, by explaining the appeal of "cabaret" as a genre previously scarce in Las Vegas.

"It's a very powerful means of connecting with people. Because it's immediate, it's close up and it's honest," he says. "The performer can see the faces of the people and the audience is close to the performer, so there's no artifice."

FUTURE MAN RETURNS

It's an important distinction that Nashville's Schermerhorn is a dedicated symphonic hall and that Fleck has performed works such as his original "Concerto for Banjo" there.

But The Smith Center is multipurpose, converting from a "harder" sound for unamplified music into a "softer" hall for Broadway shows or concerts with the deployment of curtains and the raising of an acoustic band shell.

Monday's show is fully "plugged" in with Fleck's reunited Flecktones. That was the genre-straddling band that took wild excursions when the banjo sound was melded to the synthesized drumming of Roy "Future Man" Wooten.

Last year, the Flecktones reunited for the album "Rocket Science."

"This is a very special tour, since we have reunited with Howard Levy (on keyboards and harmonica) and the original lineup is intact again, for the first time in 17 years," Fleck says via email.

"This band was designed to be Victor Wooten, Future Man and Howard Levy," he adds, "and there is a quite amazing chemistry that has returned.

"And since we are only doing this one year together, every show is very precious. At the end of April, the band goes back into hibernation. I'm sure we'll return someday, but we don't know when."

A legit concert hall is a far cry from the rustic outdoor stage of Spring Mountain State Park the Flecktones played 20 years ago. Fleck says he's leaving room for inspiration from the new Reynolds Hall.

"We are very aware of the sound of a room during our sound check," he says. "Since I make up the set list right before the show, the feeling of the room (albeit when it's empty) does impact what we choose to play."

NOT STANDARDS(S) ISSUE

Where better for Feinstein to perform songs from "The Sinatra Project, Vol. II: The Good Life"?

His band will be assembled by Las Vegas-based arranger Vince Falcone, so he says that "probably means it's inevitable" that some of the players onstage backed the actual Chairman of the Board in the showrooms.

Feinstein is a scholar and custodian of American standards; he has a book coming out in the fall about the Gershwin brothers.

"The big band sound is part of the joy of doing a Sinatra tribute," he says. "He and Nelson Riddle and Billy May and all the arrangers that worked with him, revitalized the big-band sound and made it fresh. And it still sounds fresh today."

But Feinstein doesn't like to copy the Sinatra arrangements. "That to me is folly," he says.

So his new album plays a clever game instead: Doing "Begin the Beguine" as if Nelson Riddle had arranged it the 1950s, or "The Way You Look Tonight" as if it had been included in the Sinatra collaborations with Antonio Carlos Jobim.

"It absolutely evokes Sinatra, so much so that people have told me they remember the arrangement. They're sure they've heard it before," he says.

Feinstein has known The Smith Center's top administrator Myron Martin for years, and says he has a new respect for the business side of show business in his new job at the Indiana venue.

"Now I understand why people hate agents," he says, with only a trace of humor in his voice.

"Being on the other side, negotiating with some people is extremely difficult and I find performers are not always represented in the way they think they are, or want to be. That's been an eye-opening experience."

OPENING EVENTS CONTINUE

■ The Canadian Tenors. Supporters of Andre Agassi's Grand Slam for Children may have seen this "popera" quartet at the 2010 event, or perhaps you saw them as part of "David Foster & Friends" at Mandalay Bay. They'll celebrate St. Patrick's Day at the Smith Center on March 17.

■ The SFJazz Collective. Local favorite Clint Holmes will be the resident face of the new Cabaret Jazz venue, but this eight-man jazz collective breaks in the venue March 17 and 18, reworking the music of Stevie Wonder for horns and vibraphone.

■ Open house and tours. March 18 is set aside for what Martin calls "a simple, casual day" for the public to come down from noon to dusk and acquaint themselves with their new performing arts center, with free tours and performances on the lawn by local favorites such as the Lon Bronson band and Santa Fe.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.