¡Viva México! Mariachi Herencia comes to the Capitol Theater

                                                photo courtesy of Mariachi Herencia

“Sin mariachi no hay fiesta,” they say in Mexico – without mariachis, it’s not a party. Happily, the big fiesta that caps Overture Center’s Latinx Art Fair on Saturday, Oct. 12 is a performance by Mariachi Herencia, in Capitol Theater at 7:30 PM. Herencia means heritage, and the name is perfect, since the members of this large (16-18 piece) group – amazingly – are high school kids from Chicago’s barrios who represent the future of their rich musical heritage. Mariachi Herencia got a Grammy nomination for its debut album, Nuestra Herencia, recorded in 2017.

Right now, the group is touring its third recording, Esencia, released this past June. The album pays homage to Mexico’s golden age of cinema. These flicks – black-and-white masterpieces from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s (some would say into the Technicolor ‘70s) – have mariachi music woven into their plots, testimony to how integral this sound is to Mexican culture. As the icing on the cake, the tunes on Esencia were arranged for Mariachi Herencia by maestro Rigoberto Alfáro, one of mariachi music’s grandest figures; his arrangements of the classics are the ones everyone knows from recordings by great mariachi deities like José Alfredo Jiménez, Vicente Fernández, and Juan Gabriel.

César Maldonado, president and founder of the Mariachi Heritage Foundation, was born and raised in the Windy City to Mexican immigrant parents. Mariachi Herencia is his brainchild, and in anticipation of the group’s Madison appearance I interviewed him on the phone a few weeks ago.

CulturalOyster: You’ve done this amazing thing, taken high schoolers and gotten them involved to the point of grammy-nominated albums and performances with artists like Lila Downs and Los Lobos – with mariachi music! – while most of their peers on both sides of the border don’t even listen to norteño or banda any more; they’re into hip-hop, or Thalía-style pop. What motivated you to do this, and how did you manage to pull it off?

Maldonado: Actually, my background is in finance; I had a career in investment banking. But I see myself in these kids. Growing up on Chicago’s Southwest side with blue-collar parents who worked 12-hour days in factories and only had a few hours to have dinner and sleep and get up and do it all over again, I was lucky to have the opportunity to seek higher education and a career. It was always important to me to come home and help the kids who were growing up the way I did. I wanted to get a little creative, to marry my passion for mariachi music with my passion for service. I came up with the idea of using mariachi not only to teach music to the highest standards but also to use it as a bridge – to engage the kids in school, and to introduce their families to school life (most of the parents lack communications skills in English). 

Nati Cano from Los Camperos [the Los Angeles mariachi band that played Overture’s Capitol Theater in the fall of 2010] gave me the idea. We started promoting it in Chicago, producing mariachi shows – we’d bring Los Camperos and other groups in to play downtown, where they’d never really had Mexican artists before, and we noticed that the audiences were our parents’ generation – what was missing was the presence of youth. So Nati Cano tells me the only way to change it is to teach the kids, and that’s exactly what we did.

CulturalOyster: Tell me about these kids.  How close are they to their Mexican roots?

Maldonado: Almost all of them are first generation – their parents were born in Mexico. Some are still undocumented. They just have this natural, authentic passion for the music – they’re like sponges. They absorb everything and do it with such passion at their age, it’s unbelievable. On the last album in particular you hear that oomph that you can’t teach – it has to come from inside and these kids have it. That’s what distinguishes them – this passion and pride for what they do. 

CulturalOyster: How do they learn to play mariachi instruments like guitarrón y vihuela? Do they teach that in Chicago public schools? 

Maldonado: Our approach was this: four and a half years ago I went to the Chicago Board of Education and said we need an alternative to traditional band programs – we need to try out mariachi. We picked five schools on the Latinx side of the city that didn’t have music programs and I drafted a curriculum to fit the new art standards that were being adopted across the US. We set up a full-time program of teaching mariach as part of the school day – not as after-school, which isn’t taken as seriously. After a year we could see that these kids, who’d never been exposed to music education before, had an amazing amount of talent. We had 1,100 students or so – and so much talent that we started an all-city program. We opened up 90 seats to meet for class on weekends, and we took the cream of the crop – out of the 90 the 20 most advanced students became the elite group.

The way we teach them is in line with classical; we focus on theory and technique. Mariachi is just about how you apply that technique. At first the kids weren’t singing – they didn’t understand the style – so we started training the elite group and at the end of the year we went into the studio as a lesson plan and recorded eleven songs that sounded great.  We released the recording independently on iTunes and it got nominated for a Grammy and Mariachi Herencia’s been a life-changing experience since then.

CulturalOyster: Tell me more!

Maldonado: The Grammy nomination was the key that propelled everything that’s happened since. It was totally unexpected. That first album was arranged by José Hernández [of Mariachi Sol de México] – he came and worked with the students.  We looked at it from the first session to mastering the album as a class project, and then three months after we released it, it got the nomination. It was just out of this world for me when it hit the students what was happening. We actually walked the red carpet in las Vegas. The events around the awards were designed for adults – it’s rare to see kids at these things, and Las Vegas is an adult location, lots of bars and things. The kids would walk in wearing their blue trajes de charro, looking like a group, and people would come up and say who are you? And we’d tell the story over and over. We didn’t mind ‘cause peoples’ jaws would drop and they’d ask the kids to sing on the spot.

That experience changed their mentality. I use the bubble metaphor for what happened. When you grow up in the barrio, because of the family routine, you graduate from high school and you’re still living in the five or six block radius that’s your world. It’s rare for Mexican families to go downtown and explore the city. We need to use the experience of music to explore the world – to do anything you want, I tell the kids.

Their passion just grew and grew after Las Vegas. They put in more and more time and they became much more dedicated to the group. There aren’t a lot of mariachi groups out there these days releasing albums consistently. When you search “mariachi” on Google, Herencia comes right up. I’m really proud of them. But it’s only possible because they just love it so much.

CulturalOyster: I’m from Chicago, and I’ve lived in Mexico – mariachi is Mexico to me. But the youth culture there is so estranged from that music, I’ve wondered if it can survive. Watching the release video for Esencia had me in tears – I had the sense that the home of mariachi is now my home town. Does that sound right?

Maldonado: I think it looks that way. The group was on tour in Mexico and you’d look into the crowd and see the older generation, and families with young kids, but not a lot of teens. Hopefully Mariachi Herencia appeals to a wider demographic than in Mexico – to youths their own age as well as to older folks and families.

CulturalOyster: Getting Rigoberto Alfáro to do the arranging for Esencia was quite a coup – how did you do that? 

Maldonado: He’s been a personal hero of mine – he’s the Michael Jordan of mariachi music. In the ‘50s he joined the most famous mariachi band of all, Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, and he did a lot of arranging for them and for others – his resumé is just enormous. I’ve known him for many years and he was always in the back of my mind for Herencia but I waited till I knew the kids were ready for his level. He did completely new arrangements of the songs the kids picked – they spent a couple of months watching mariachi movies with the great singers like Lucha Villa or José Alfredo Jiménez. They came up with a list of 50 or 60 sings and then worked it down to the ones they wanted most.

CulturalOyster: Vicente Fernández’s title tune from Los Mandados, with its defiant lyrics about crossing the border “let’s say 300 times,” is perfect for what’s going on today, even though the movie dates to the ‘70s. But how do you get a song like that – the lyrics are so important – across to an English-speaking audience?

Maldonado: Ever since Herencia started touring they’ve been able to communicate with their audiences. It comes from them – they have a maturity well beyond their age level. I have cousins their age and I realize how mature my mariachi kids are – they’re very cognizant of what’s going on in their community and their society. Even before we came up with the movie concept this song was on their radar and it was the first one we asked Rigoberto to arrange. A lot of times we do perform in areas that don’t have a huge Mexican population. Isaías López, who sings it, is 14, but he looks like he’s 20. He goes up there to present that song and tells the story of his family to introduce it so even if you don’t speak Spanish or you’re not tuned in to what’s going on it still brings you to tears and then you see the video backdrop and the performance and you will get the message.

CulturalOyster: Your last thoughts for my readers?

Maldonado: A lot of times you hear a kids’ group is going to perform and your natural reaction is ok, it’s just kids – just students – but with Herencia people should prepare for a high-level, professional musical experience. What these kids do is truly amazing, from the way they command the stage to how they take the audience through the experience of Mexican music. This is beautiful music. Tell people in Madison to get ready for one of the best mariachi shows they’ve ever seen.

       ______________________________________________  interview by SK

A Conversation with Eduardo Vilaro, Artistic Director of Ballet Hispánico

Línea Recta  © Paula Lobo, courtesy Ballet Hispánico

Ballet Hispánico, that venerable and resilient Big Apple cultural institution, has spent nearly half a century empowering diversity in a country that, despite growing ever more diverse, clings desperately to its dying dominant culture.  The company, last seen in Madison in 2010, appears at Overture Hall on Thursday, May 9.

Ballet Hispánico was founded in 1970 by Tina Ramírez, the Venezuelan-born, New York-raised daughter of a Mexican bullfighter and a Puerto Rican teacher. When she retired, a decade ago, the artistic directorship was taken over by Eduardo Vilaro, who left his native Havana for New York in 1969, when he was six. Vilaro grew up to become a principal dancer with the company before moving on to found and direct Chicago’s wonderful, and, alas, now defunct, Luna Negra Dance Theater; his return to Ballet Hispánico, in 2010, brought his career full circle.

Ballet Hispánico came to Madison that year with a worn-out repertory of older works by non-Latin male choreographers working – directly or indirectly – with Latin themes, though set, fortunately, on a largely Latinx company.  Today, a decade into its rebirth under Vilaro’s direction, the company’s caught up with the challenges of the twenty-first century.

CulturalOyster: When you were still at Luna Negra, you told me once that “When we come to the States we fuse, we change.  I’m not 100% Cuban any more.  In Cuba they tell me ‘tu no eres cubano.’  I’m like damn, who are we in this country?  Can we celebrate who we’re becoming? 

That was 2008, so 11 years ago; it was a different company, a different time, and the issues of immigration, cultural fusion, and identity have become much more visible and emotionally charged since then. I think you’re basically still coming from that same place – celebrating fusion – but how has your thinking on identity and dance evolved over the last decade? 

Vilaro: You know, yes, I still believe we become something else.  We live as a hybrid. This nation is a hybrd nation; it is not, contrary to popular belief, a white nation, although that’s the structure that’s been allowed to play out.  So I’m very interested in exploring cultural intersectionality. Some important cultural institutions [like Ballet Hispánico] were born between the ‘50s and ‘70s to say “I’m here, I belong.”  And now it feels like we’ve come to another moment, another catalyst to make that claim and update it: “Not only do I belong, but I’m part of the fabric, and I’m a leader in this fabric.” 

It’s so important to make works that celebrate our Latinx lives.  We are also waking up to the fact that the cultures in our own countries of origin are facing issues of nationalism and supremacy versus diversity and acceptance of race, color, gender.  So [directing Ballet Hispánico] is a warm, exciting, difficult, full-of-challenges opportunity and I feel that if I don’t take the bull by the horns we’re going to get further behind.

CulturalOyster: The choreographic idiom of Ballet Hispánico is polyglot, too –how do your dancers train?

Vilaro: It’s funny – this is going to be another hybrid discussion.  I have dancers trained classically and I enjoy a classical line or the ability to get as close to classical as we can but our dancers are hybrid themselves in terms of their training.  One guy trained in Havana with Ballet Nacional but also grew up as an Afrocuban learning Yoruba dances – and that changes the way you approach the movement quality and how it translates in your body.  We have a young man from Tampa with ballet training and a tap and hip-hop background.  The ladies all have very classical backgrounds, but some of them come from Juilliard so they bring a deep contemporary mixture, and that’s perfect for our company because we’re showing fusion. The hybridization, for us, is richer, it makes for stronger utilization of the folk forms a choreographer might want to expose.  You can’t do that with pure classicism – it looks forced, not real.

CulturalOyster: During your first year as artistic director of Ballet Hispánico the touring program was a celebration of the company’s 40-year history.  Only one work by a Latin choreographer – Pedro Ruíz’s (2000) “Club Havana” -- was on the bill.  The program looks a lot different this time.  From the press kit, it looks like all of the choreographers you’re working with now have direct Latin heritage. How has that changed the company, from the one you inherited to the one you’ve been leading for almost a decade now?

Vilaro: What we’re bringing to Madison is our all Latina program – three works, by three women – Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Michelle Manzanales, and Tania Pérez-Salas.  It represents the evolution of my curatorial tenure at Ballet Hispánico. When you first come in you have to work with what you have. It’s taken the decade I’ve been artistic director to scope out and develop the right kinds of artists and works for my vision. I think the program you’re seeing is the actualization of that vision in its totality.  When I first came in to take over the range from a powerful Latina founder who had a very different immigrant experience than I did, I had to start shaking off some of the things from the past to help the organization walk into exactly this moment. And it’s excellent – it couldn’t have happened more gracefully.  We’re now finding and nurturing young Latinx dancers and choreographers.  The idiom is clearer.  You’ll see work that’s clearly about fusion.  López Ochoa’s “Linea Recta” has some derivatives of flamenco, but contemporizes it and brings it forward – there’s partnering, the costuming is deconstructed, and there’s an electricity that shows the original folk form in a new way. It  answers the question ‘Who is the fused flamenco artist?’ – and that’s what this company can do.

The Manzanales piece, “Brazos Abiertos,” is a true homage to who we are as immigrants – how we feel doing our identity mambo as we go back and forth.  ‘Who am I and how does that affect my identity as a woman?’  As a company we reflect that and make statements of advocacy and invite the audience into the conversation. 

Pérez-Salas is still living and working in Mexico City, and she’s saying ‘My culture doesn’t define me.’ Her piece, “Catorce Dieciséis,” is the least culturally accessible – it’s about ‘I am mexicana and that means my piece is mexicana.  I wanted to meditate on the mathematical concept of pi and that’s what I did.’

The piece is visually stunning.  As artistic director I need to show that we don’t just look a certain way or dance a certain way.  I wanted to end the program with this piece because I want Ballet Hispánico to empower the audience to think differently about codifying culture.

CulturalOyster: What about your own work?  I’ve always been a fan of your choreography – you did a piece for Luna Negra that the company performed here in 2008 – a piece with deep Cuban sensibilities set to Sephardic music, “Deshár Alhát,” that’s still one of my all time favorites.  I hope you’ll bring some of your work next time!

Vilaro: Thank you for that!  I just created a new work and I’m trying to bring back my choreography.  It’s hard finding time when you’re taking a different kind of leadership role – it impinges on my artistic work, but there aren’t a lot of our voices out there and we all need to step up.

CulturalOyster: Eduardo, is there anything else you want to mention?

Vilaro: I guess I’ll just mention that in January, 2020, we start the celebration of our fiftieth year.  It’s a milestone – and it’s interesting that we’re not alone. The other companies that made a stand around the time of the cultural wars of the ‘60s are also celebrating.  Dance Theatre of Harlem is also 50, and the Ailey company just celebrated 60 years.  But there aren’t a lot of Latinx organizations turning 50 here in the US.  I’m honored to have this opportunity.

                              __________________________  interview by SK

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.