Victor Wooten on his musical family, his new record and the value of music

On Saturday, September 3, bass virtuoso Victor Wooten (of Flecktones fame) made his way to Jimmy’s on Congress Street for a pair of performances. Seacoastonline caught up with him between tour stops to check in on his new record with Bass Extremes, how he wound up meeting Bela Fleck, his deep musical roots with his family band The Wootens, opening up for Curtis Mayfield at the age of five, and so much more…

Seacoastonline: Let’s start with the quote that precedes your bio: “The world needs more than just good musicians. We need good people.” – Mama Wooten

I appreciate her sentiment and I’m sure, given the opportunity, she’d forward it on to any path a person takes with their life. Tell us about your mom. How does she inspire your approach to music and life?

Wooten: That’s one something my mother would always say to us, her five boys. I’m the youngest of the five, and all of us would play music growing up. I won’t say our parents didn’t care whether or not we played music, what they cared more about was who we were as people. That was number one. They wanted us to know who we were. It’s very, very important. My older brothers were born in the '50s, I was born in the mid-'60s, 1964, and our parents are products of the '30s. As you know, it was a different America back then. Especially for people of color, and our parents knew what we were facing. So, they wanted to make sure that we knew who we were, because society might try to tell you differently…

So that was number one. They wanted to grow and cultivate good people. And if they were successful in that, it didn’t matter what we chose to do. Because we would be doing it from a good place. And for us, it just happened to be music. So, they supported us. Totally. 100%.

Let me give you the whole quote though:

“What does the world need with just another good musician? We have plenty. What the world needs is more good people.”

It’s not that there’s not good people. It’s that we need more of ‘em.

Seacoastonline: In general, why music? Why do you seek it? Why do you create it?

Wooten: Sure, so, one reason is, and it’s the easiest way for me to put things in perspective, is that it’s the easiest way for me to reach people. As I mentioned, I’m the youngest of five and before I was born my brother Reggie, the oldest, already knew I was a bass player. Because he was playing guitar, Roy, also known as Futureman, he was playing drums, Rudy was playing saxophone, then there was Joseph after a three-year gap, then me. In some kind of way, the older three began playing music at the same time—before Joseph and I were born. When I was born, I know that Reggie is already teaching Joseph how to play keyboards, and as soon as I was able, he was teaching me to play bass at the same time. My earliest memories of this were when I was about two years old. What’s funny is, while I thought Reggie was a grown man teaching me all these things in those earliest memories, he was only eight years older than me. He was 10!

When I’m five, that makes Reggie 13, and the rest of my brothers were 13, 12, eight, and then me at five, we were the opening band for Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly tour on the West Coast. We were opening for War, the Temptations … And while people lose their minds about that, I say this… By five you’re learning English and you can speak it, not great, but you’ve got it because everyone around you is doing it (laughs). But we were good, man. We were good. But can you imagine being 10 years old and teaching your brothers music well enough that you were on a national tour at five years old?

Seacoastonline: I was gonna say… Man, my kid is 10 and I can’t imagine him teaching anybody much of anything. And that’s not a knock, it’s more a way of saying that Reggie must’ve had some serious virtuosic tendencies not only as a musician but as an educator as well.

Wooten: Right!? To be an educator, to have the love, the empathy, and the care not to beat up his younger brothers, but to make them better. To see where we went with it? I mean, I feel like I get a lot of the credit, but the real story is my brothers. It’s Reggie. He’s the man that deserves the credit, not me. I was just born into it.

That’s a long answer to your question, but that’s it, it was just a way for me to belong with my brothers. Every little kid looks up to their older siblings. And I had four of ‘em. And they treated me as an equal. And they gave me one of the strongest roles in the band, which is the bass. Right? It’s amazing man. I feel so fortunate. I’ve always felt so fortunate.

Seacoastonline: Yeah, I was definitely gonna ask what your initial introduction to the bass was to the bass, but I’ve got my answer. And I’m sure sentimentally it’s obviously great and everything But I am curious if there was ever a time when you thought you’d might want to try something else, or was the bass always it?

Wooten: We were always encouraged to try other things, but we still had gigs on the weekends (laughs). I was gigging before I was going to kindergarten. So, it wasn’t necessarily something I thought was going to be a career. That’s like saying you know, you get up every morning and make your bed; that’s not gonna be your career, it’s just part of your routine. You just do it, you know. So, I always thought, as a little boy in the 70s—well all of us really—we all wanted to be a fireman or a policeman. I can remember saying that’s what I wanted to do when I grew up, but when I was in 7th or 8th grade, my three brothers, who were in college, were allowed to drop out with the support of our parents. That’s when it hit me, ‘what do you mean? I can just play music for the rest of my life? Really? I don’t have to go to school?’ And I don’t publicize that lightly. School is invaluable. But when my brothers got to college to learn music, they wound up doing a lot of the teaching because we had been doing what they were supposed to be learning our whole lives. But you know, we played sports, we were encouraged to enter a lot of speaking competitions. My parents wanted to ensure we were good public speakers and good writers. That was very important to them. They knew what we were facing, and they didn’t want us to be speaking like we were simply from the 'hood, that we could speak in front of anybody and know what we’re talking about.

Seacoastonline: What did you parents do for work?

Wooten: Survive (laughs)! Yeah, you know dad was one of 14 kids, my mom was one of 13, growing up poor in North Carolina, living on farms. So, for men, the way out was the military. So, my dad joined the army. Fought in the Korean War. And again, different times, you’d fight for you country and then come home and have to drink out of a different water fountain… Mom made herself get through school. She put herself through college after making sure we all got good grades. But, yeah, we were a military family. All of us kids were born in different states.

Seacoastonline: Can you reminisce for a moment more on your family band The Wootens? You guys put out a single major label release back in 1985. What was the experience like in signing with a major label? How were you guys “discovered”? The record has a definitive '80s feel to it, but it definitely foreshadows your career in knocking down the walls of preconceived “genre” labels.

Wooten: That was all about some good and some bad. The good was being to meet and hang with a lot of great musicians. It was a great label, and it was fun “getting groomed” and all that stuff, but the bad was having it all fall apart. There was a lot of heartbreak there. A lot of hard learned lessons.

The discovery was definitely in the fact that we had been opening for such huge bands for our whole lives basically. The Curtis Mayfield stuff happened when we were in California, and then when the family moved to Virginia, we did the same thing playing with Stephanie Mills, a great R&B singer and Broadway actress. She was going to “discover” the Wooten Brothers the same way they say Dianna Ross discovered the Jackson Five. That didn’t quite happen. But her keyboard player at the time—a guy named Kashif. He became a bigtime producer in the 80s. He was one of the producers that helped Whitney Houston with her very first record. Roy and Joseph were on that record. But, anyhow we wound up on Arista through Kashif’s production company.

We had a big budget, but we were young and Greek, and didn’t know anything about making records and thus our entire budget was spent by Kashif, but it didn’t feel like it was spent on our record. We just found out we were over budget and we didn’t even have four songs completed. But we didn’t know anything. The overall story is, we got it done, but spent a lot of money. The record was released by Arista but had zero support. It didn’t sound like us. It sounded like Kashif. There’s some good music on there. Some good writing. We got some credit, but we never saw any money. The producer took all of that. So, we came out with experience (laughs). What also happened, was it caused all five of us brothers to come out of that experience not playing together. That’s a longer story. In the end it made us better musicians because we all had to learn to play with other people and not just my brothers. That’s what led me to meet this banjo player, Bela Fleck, blah blah blah (laughs).

Seacoastonline: I love the blah blah blah there at the end, but I’d love it if you could go a little more deeply into how you met fellow genre-bender, Bela?

Wooten: Absolutely. So, what happens is I find out that Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia has a music department, and they need a fiddle player. I was 15. You had to be at least 16 to work in the live entertainment department there. Reggie was working there, as, are you ready for it? The bass player (laughs). He called me and said, ‘you think you can play fiddle? They need a fiddle player.’ And I was like, ‘sure.’ He got me an audition, I borrowed a fiddle from my high school, learned a few tunes real quick and won the audition. So, there I was, playing fiddle at an amusement park. I played some bass too, as it turns out. But, in the country show, during one of the breaks, I pick up my friend’s banjo and start fiddling around on it. Banjos are tuned weird, man. So, when I played my normal bass stuff, thumb stuff, two hand tapping, all this crazy stuff, my friend was like, ‘yo man, you sound like Bela Fleck.’ And I was like, ‘who plays banjo like this? I’ve never heard anyone that plays anything crazy like this…’ So, he brought in some New Grass Revival recordings… Blew my mind. One of my other friends, who also played fiddle, Curt, he knew Bela. So, to make a long story shorter, I went and visited Curt in Nashville a few years later and he introduced me to everybody. He’d been telling Bela about me and my brothers, and how we played all different types of music which included bluegrass. These black kids, you know? (Laughs.) So anyhow, he introduced me to Bela, and we wound up jamming together in his kitchen for about two hours. He hired me to play on this television show which wound up being the original incarnation of the Flecktones. That was like ’87. We recorded our first record in ’89. We’ve been doing it ever since.

Seacoastonline: What do you appreciate about collaboration? What do you get out of working with so many different musicians? How do these collective experiences inform your approach to your own music?

Wooten: Well, it really shows me how music, and food, really brings people together. Like, we’re gonna play music tonight. A concert. Wherever we are. And we’ll be seeing people of all walks of life. Different colors, different religions, different politics, different monetary status, different educations, and during the concert nobody cares about any of that. You don’t care who you’re sitting next to. You don’t have interview someone that say, ‘hey, you pray to?’ before you begin. ‘Who you vote for?’ Right? Music just erases all that for a little while. It’s beautiful. When you think about music and the role of a band, a band is best when all the instruments are different. Music shows that our differences are trivial. It shows that we need to listen to each other. Value one another. The power of music shows how life should be lived. That’s one of the things I’ve learned over the years. And that’s something Bela was doing. He didn’t care that we weren’t really bluegrass musicians or whatever. He liked the blending of the styles. He liked what we brought to his songs. He’d just start playing and wouldn’t tell us anything about it. He just let us have a first impression and then put our flavor to it, exactly how we heard it. That’s what gives the Flecktones our sound. Every band member has equal say. As my brother Roy said, we’re like four people out on a limb together (laughs). All out there together. Making some magic happen. It’s a special band.

Seacoastonline: Let’s talk about your new record “S’Low Down” with your Bass Extremes project. What were the goals for this particular recording? What do you appreciate about all the collaborations that fell into place for each respective composition present on the record?

Wooten: Bass is still an instrument that can surprise people (laughs). The general public still thinks that the bass player just stands in the back. And, I mean, if we’re doing it right, that’s what we do. Stand in the back, get no credit (laughs). But think about the foundation of a building. A foundation of a building has got to be the strongest part. But nobody walks in and compliments the foundation. So, the bass player is like that.

I met Steve Bailey during a photoshoot in the 90s. His brain works differently. He was immediately like, ‘hey man, we could make an instructional video and sell it.’ I was like, ‘yeah, right, I’ve heard that many times…’ But he made it happen! We did a project called Bass Extremes and that was the impetus behind all this. I can’t believe that was 30 years ago. After that instructional project we did a couple of records. We hadn’t done one in, maybe 15 to 20 years. But it’s always fun working with Steve. We teach together at Berklee where he’s the Chair of the Bass Department. So, we decided we’d do another record. We called it “S’Low Down,” because after our first project it was mostly just us playing most all the parts. We took our time with this one. Made the decision to invite all our friends to come along with us. So, there’s a lot of people on this: Bootsy Collins, Ron Carter, Marcus Miller, Jon Patitucci, Justin Chancellor from Tool, Billy Sheehan the rock god, Edgar Meyer, we’ve got people from all over and made a record we’re very proud of. Bela’s on there. Jeff Coffin. Mike Stern…

Seacoastonline: Obviously (given the name of the project), there’s a lot of bass happening here. Was it easy to gather all your partners in the low end to come along for the ride?

Wooten: Well, you know, the beauty of the pandemic is that we knew where everybody was at. At home! (Laughs.) That made it a little easier. And we kept it simple. We sent some tracks to people we wanted to get involved and told them to lay down whatever they were feeling. No preconceived notions, nothing. The ease of it was that people were available. Piecing it together was a challenge, but all the colors we had to work with were astounding.

Seacoastonline: You’re on tour right now in support of “S’Low Down,” which is to say, you’re never seem to be slowing down—always plodding ahead. What do you dig about being on the road and bringing this music to audiences near and far? Do you have a deeper appreciation for touring following the forced hiatus of 2020?

Wooten: We’re having a blast. People are freaking out. The sound is so full. It’s really nice to see people genuinely happy about music. We live in a world where our young kids have whatever they want at the end of their fingertip. They can push a button and see whoever they want for free. This young generation doesn’t expect to pay for music. When we were young television was free and we paid for music. Now it’s exactly reversed. We pay for a bunch of channels with nothing to watch, and we want our music for free (laughs). But the pandemic took live performance away from us. And people are ready and so happy to be in the middle of the sound again—not just in earbuds or a computer speaker—surrounded by it, live. It’s kind of a like a family reunion with folks you haven’t seen in a good long while. It’s so much fun. The old world is back, and it means a whole lot more to us. We needed that shift. Hopefully we’ve learned, and we gain from what we missed during the pandemic.

Visit www.jimmysoncongress.com and/or www.victorwooten.com for further information.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Victor Wooten on his musical family, his new record and the value of music