When it comes to electric bass, it doesn't get much better than Victor Wooten. He's a longtime member of Bela Fleck's band The Flecktones, a five-time Grammy winner, and he was named Bass Player Magazine's Best Bassist three times.
Wooten got an early start in music. When he was barely old enough to walk, he recieved his first instrument, a guitar from his brother, which Wooten played like a bass by removing the two higher strings.
"I'm so lucky. I'm the youngest of five brothers who, when I was born, they were already playing, and they needed a bass player, and so I was literally, literally born into it," he said, during a 2018 visit to the KNKX Studios with saxophonist Bob Franceschini.
Wooten learned a lot about music from his older siblings. They taught him that the bass is like the spine of a band, it's the instrument that keeps the players together in a musical conversation. They also taught him how powerful that conversation can be.
"Music brings people together with the purpose of agreeing, right? Whoever doesn't agree with the concert didn't come, they're at home, right? And music brings people together. To play music, we have to listen to each other," Wooten said.
When Wooten and Franceschini come together, it's the sound of a good time—something Wooten says our world sorely needs. He thinks our society greatly undervalues music.
"Countries spend literally trillions of dollars to make bombs, to threaten each other and threaten other countries and literally kill each other and flex our muscles," he said. "And I wonder who's spending that much money to work on something that makes people get along and come together?"
Wooten takes the power of music to heart. He founded the Victor Wooten Center for Music and Nature in Nashville in 2007 to help students reclaim their naturalness in music and in life. In 2008, Wooten wrote a book on music philosophy called The Music Lesson: The Spiritual Search for Growth through Music.
"And literally, at the beginning of each measure of the book, there's a handwritten measure of music. So if you read the whole book, put all the measures together, you get the song," Wooten said.
Wooten also considers himself a lifelong student. He is a master of the electric bass, but Wooten takes every opportunity to improve his skills on acoustic.
"A couple years ago, I got a major gig on on acoustic bass, and I felt inadequate, but I did the gig and I felt pretty comfortable. I mean, no, that's not true. I didn't feel comfortable, but I felt happy with the end result," he said.
Wooten called his electric base his first love, and considering how long he's played it, that's an impressive long term relationship.
Songs heard in this episode:
- "Liz & Opie"
- "The Lesson"
- "Funky D"
