Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Little Worlds.

Little Worlds is the best album I’ve bought in a long time. As the editorial review says, the musicianship of the Flecktones is simply astounding. They experiment with a variety of styles here — Latin jazz in “Latitude,” hip hop in “Ballad of Jed Clampett,” blues-rock in “Snatchin’,” and so on — and conquer them all with ease.

While Little Worlds does take the band in new directions, the Flecktone sound is still there. Fleck’s apparent obsession with odd meters remains obvious on this album; “New Math” manages to fit a 5-beat pattern and a 3-beat pattern into the same time signature, “The Leaning Tower” contains a Celtic jig in 5/4, and “Next” switches meters several times a minute, for example. The overall effect is that no two songs sound alike.

There is also an overabundance of guests — somewhere between 20 and 30, I think. Many of them bring new colors to the music; Derek Trucks adds that trademark Allman Brothers slide guitar sound to “Pineapple Heart,” for example, and Jerry Douglas adds country-bluegrass dobro and lap steel to “Poindexter.” A good portion of the guests appear on the album’s 12-minute centerpiece, “Sleeper,” a haunting tune that degenerates into a massive cultural mishmash at the end. A couple of the guests do go unnoticed, though — Bernie Williams provided little more than name recognition, and I still haven’t even heard Congar Ol Ondar’s Tuvan throat singing.

My only big complaint is that Little Worlds seems like a two-CD album stretched into three CDs. “Longitude,” “The Fjords of Oslo,” “Prequel,” “Return of the Mudslingers,” and “Flunky” are all short, silly tracks that could easily have been left off. They attempt to add a sense of continuity, but they just take up space and give the listener cause to start skipping tracks. Even so, the album represents a fantastic bunch of musicians at their finest, and is a must-have.