A Conversation with Victor Wooten

The last time we saw legendary bass player Victor Wooten in Madison it was March, 2012, on Bela Fleck and the Original Flecktones’ knock-it-outta-the-park farewell tour show at the Wisconsin Union Theater (now Shannon Hall). As I wrote about it then, Wooten’s funky, funky bass mirrored the collective heartbeat of both the band and the cheering, full-house crowd. The Flecktones were one of the greatest, most musical, most genuine – and generous – bands ever, making music with the kind of unfettered joy I usually associate only with my dog. Wooten is everything the Flecktones were on his own, and he brings all of that delight to getting people – top-shelf pros, passionate beginners, and everything in between – to make their own music. You’ll see what I mean when he takes the stage at Shannon Hall on Thursday, April 18, with a very different kind of show – the Wooten Woods Experience Tour.

Wooten’s got a very Zen philosophy of music that stems from his remarkable background; he’s the youngest of five brothers, including Roy “Futureman” Wooten, also an Original Flecktone. As the story goes, the brothers started a band when they were just young kids, but they lacked a bass player. So when Wooten was two, his oldest brother, Regi, put a toy guitar, missing the two top strings, into his hands, and that was that. Wooten learned to play bass the way most babies learn their first language, and I leave you to his TED talk for more on that.

The way he learned (if you watched the TED talk, above, you already know this) is the way he teaches. He’s on faculty at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, but most importantly this year marks the twentieth anniversary of his first holistic, interactive music and nature camp and the tenth of the founding of Wooten Woods, a retreat for musicians that he and his wife own on the Duck River west of Nashville. There, joined by a faculty of prominent players including his brothers and a slate of guest artists to die for, Wooten runs a variety of summer music camps so enticing I’m ready to go myself.

The Wooten Woods Experience Tour brings a taste of the place to Shannon Hall. I got to ask Wooten about it on the phone last week.

CulturalOyster: Thanks so much for taking my call. Last time you were in Madison was during the Flecktones’ farewell tour, so it’s been a while since we’ve heard you live. And this is a very different kind of concert. What should the audience expect from the Wooten Woods Experience tour?

Wooten: Yeah, it’ll be very different from a Flecktones show, except you’ll still experience a high level of musicianship and you’ll be able to tell we’re having fun onstage. A couple of my brothers are on this tour – not Roy “Futureman,” but Regi on guitar and Joseph on keyboards – plus my quartet, some teachers from the camp, and five or six students. We’ll perform together and showcase the students. We’ll also address the audience and show them some of our approach to teaching music, and how we make it easy for everyone. We’ll include the audience, too – we want to give people a taste of who we are and what we do.

CulturalOyster: Let’s move on to you. These days everyone wants to talk about your philosophy of music and teaching, and we’ll get there in a second – but musically you sort of defy description, and I want to take a stab at it. You’re a master of many styles and techniques, and whatever you call the style you’re playing at any given time – is it jazz, is it funk, is it fusion, is it funky bluegrass? – doesn’t matter. But whatever you play, it’s inevitably funky, it’s always spontaneous, unselfconscious – there’s a “dance like nobody’s watching” spirit – and it never feels aggressive or mean-spirited in the way that some rock and especially post-bop jazz – like, say, to use another bass player, Charlie Mingus – can feel. Did I get any of that right?

Wooten: Sure, absolutely. There’s enough mean spirit in the world. I don’t want to add to that. I will say this – my style can be aggressive, I can hit the bass pretty hard, but from experiencing the whole picture you know my attitude is not aggressive in a mean-spirited way. I understand what the black jazz musicians of the ‘60s were going through, I really do, but I’m not living that, so I don’t express myself that way.

CulturalOyster: You’ve gotten a lot of Grammys, a lot of accolades – but what stands out most in your lifelong history in music, the way you see it?

Wooten: Wow, that’s a good question – a big thing I get a lot of fulfillment from and I’m very prod of is running my music camps. I have four kids. My whole attitude – what drives me – has changed. It’s not about what I can do but more about helping people find out what they want and to succeed at what they’re doing. It’s more the teacher / parent / mentor role than the performer role and I feel fulfilled every time I get to teach and share – I love it.

CulturalOyster: As a teacher, you seem pretty fearless. You’ve gone where no musician has gone before, at least not in public – deep into the zen proposition that music is something everyone carries within and can access. You’ve talked about how you were born into a band, and learned music the way we all learn our first language – but how do you get people who weren’t born with a toy bass in their hand to access that natural musicality?

Wooten: By convincing them that they don’t have to do it right. That’s the problem – you’re learning that if you play wrong they slap your hand, and no child wants that. But I’ve been able to get people to play their best literally by asking them to play their worst. I get students at Berklee – they’re trying so hard to sound good playing jazz and they do sound good, but there’s no emotion at all. It’s like listening to a politician speak. So I’ll say that was good, now let’s have a contest to see who can play the worst – and all of a sudden you can feel the joy and emotion. Finally the listener feels something. It’s really amazing to witness. That spirit gets lost a lot of times because of the way we learn and what we’re told to learn. We’re copying somebody else’s lifestyle. Mingus and the musicians of his generation were different because they played the way they lived, but usually we’re not taught to play like that. We’re taught that we have to learn Chopin and Bach – someone else’s language. But in speaking, your first words are your own – which is why you have your own voice. You speak just like you. The process is easy and you have no trouble doing it.

CulturalOyster: I’ve been critical of formal jazz programs in universities because of that – because blues and jazz didn’t come out of the academy and academic jazz has no real soul. I’ve said I think they should kick those kids out on the streets and let ‘em learn to play the way the old jazzmen did.

Wooten: I don’t think kicking ‘em out on the street is the answer, ‘cause you wouldn’t do that to your baby child. It’s just about allowing them to express what they want to express. We don’t sit our babies in a room and tell them to practice their words. A baby doesn’t know it’s a beginner. It’s about the process of guidance, of allowing them all the freedom in the world to make mistakes. It’s the same with teaching music.

CulturalOyster: So you’re teaching music in this gentle, egalitarian way – and yet people, or at least a certain set of them, are doing their best to murder nature, and that natural musicality you say everyone has is constantly getting beaten to bits by bad parents, bad music teachers, poverty, war, drugs, charlatans in politics and elsewhere – so how do you transcend that?

Wooten: The main thing is that when I started being asked to teach during the early Flecktones years I had to figure out how to teach as well as what to teach. I’d never taught anything and I compared the way I learned to play to how everyone else seemed to be teaching and found a big disparity. I realized that although the traditional approach was good I found it very lacking because it was squeezing the individuality out of the musician until they learned someone else’s method. If they keep at it, eventually students are asked to find themselves again, but a lot of times they give up along the way. The way I learned was like learning your first language, where you never lose yourself and neither do you lose interest – you never say “man, I’m giving up on English,” and quit.

CulturalOyster: Are students surprised when they first experience the way you teach?

Wooten: Yes, very surprised, which is why I wrote my novel, “The Music Lesson.” For years my students were asking for the information I was giving them in book form and for years I resisted, until the idea hit to write a story and put the instruction into it. But yes, it surprises people all the time.

CulturalOyster: When you do your Wooten Woods shows you sometimes ask people who aren’t musicians to get up onstage with you. Is it terrifying when you ask people with no formal training to just play?

Wooten: Oh yes, most people are terrified the first time. They’ll get up onstage and don’t know where they’re going or what they’re doing. If you come to our show you’ll probably see it. Every time I’ve done this I’ll ask who in the audience has never played an instrument before and we’ll pull someone up onstage and I’ll hand them a bass or a guitar with no instructions. And every time, they’ll put the strap around their neck and stand there looking like a professional, so I always point that out to the audience – “look, this is not a beginner...”

CulturalOyster: When you do that can they just play, sort of like autonomic writing?

Wooten: Of course not correctly, but is it correct emotion? Yes. A baby can speak, but it’s not correct so people discount it. The same thing happens with bass or guitar – people discount it until it complies with the rules and they can understand it. But I’ll have you look at that one different way. Let’s say a ten-year old comes to take piano lessons. Here’s what most teachers will do. They’ll treat that ten-year old as a beginner, which is normal – but if you think about it, that child has been listening to music for almost eleven years already. If a song comes on the radio, whether it’s Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift, that ten-year old will know that song better and faster than the teacher will. They’ll know the lyrics and likely sing it in the right key.

What the child doesn’t know is how to play the right notes on the piano. Most teachers are teaching the kid to play the instrument, where what the kid really wants is to play music. When we teach them to speak we don’t start with grammar, but that’s the process most music teachers take. That works, but it’s slower. So my process, that I learned from my brother Regi, who taught me, is to get straight to the music – we’ll get to the instrument later, ‘cause if you can make sound you’re playing rhythm and if you’re playing rhythm you’re playing music – and we’ll fill in around you and it’ll sound good. People can start playing right away, ‘cause everybody has rhythm.

CulturalOyster: But eventually you have to learn notes and chords, right?

Wooten: I’d say no. My dad loved to sing and hold a guitar and strum while he was singing and he never learned a chord. He strummed the guitar for feel. What’s right or wrong is up to the listener. Do you ever have to learn notes and chords? If you want to fit in the box that most Americans call good, then yes. But if you have a one-year old, every note she plays will sound good to you. You also have to remember that what we call good in America may not be good in another country.

CulturalOyster: But if you want to play, say, a blues, or a folk song, you have to learn how to make it sound right.

Wooten: We get there with our students, but starting there makes it hard. Learning correct English takes time – it takes years to learn to ask mom for more milk. But a baby can ask the same thing with pure emotion and the mom learns the baby’s way, and that just takes a few minutes.

CulturalOyster: How did you figure all this out?

Wooten: I figured it out because Regi never told me anything I did was wrong, and then as I became a teacher I started watching him. He’ll tell a student “that’s great, but let’s learn it another way, too.” So when I started paying attention to that, as well as having such a love for the students, I discovered that the individual way I needed to get through to a particular student would just show up on its own. My teaching is not about my teaching. I’m more invested in the student than I am in my method, and like a jazz player who has to go outside themself to play what the music is asking for, I to go outside myself to find what the student needs.

CulturalOyster: ‘Cause you’re very receptive.

Wooten: Yeah. That’s what a high-level musician is.

CulturalOyster: So – the Wooten Woods Experience Tour is short. What comes next for you?

Wooten: Bela Fleck and the Flectkones will be next – that’s all of June.

CulturalOyster: I thought that was over?

Wooten: We’re doing it again [it’s a thirtieth anniversary reunion tour, according to Google]. It’s the original lineup – Howard Levy, Futureman, Bela and me. Also, I teach every month at Berklee, so I go up to Boston. And soon it’ll be music camp season. But right now it’s all about this tour – it’s a twelve-city tour and I’m really looking forward to it. We have some people who’ve never toured before – students of all different ages and playing levels. I want the audience to see a wide variety of what we do and to show you that you don’t have to be a virtuoso to play great music.

  _____________   interview by SK. Parts have been slightly edited for clarity.