Fresh off of his latest sit-in with The Roots on The Tonight Show, Victor Wooten is relaxing at the Relix office. “They’re always cool,” Wooten says of Jimmy Fallon’s house band. “They learn a few of my songs, and it makes me feel right at home.” The five-time Grammy winner’s newest record TRYPNOTYX came out this September, and he’s about to fly home to Nashville before jumping back on tour. With a calendar full of solo dates, and a few shows with longtime bandmates Béla Fleck and brother Roy “Futureman” Wooten as the Flecktones trio, he’s as busy as ever. After treating the Relix staff to a late-morning improvisation (over 15-minutes of grooves and sonic experimentation with no warm-up) Wooten took some time to discuss TRYPNOTYX, his musical philosophy and his affinity for bands like Snarky Puppy.
You just gave me a copy of your book, The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music. Tell me a little about it.
For 18 years I’ve been running music camps. Because of how I learned to play music, my thinking is a little different. I don’t claim to be better, but it is different. And so when I share music, most of the time people haven’t heard it put that way. The students were saying, “You need to write a book!” Which is what I didn’t want to do [laughs]. I didn’t want a “Wooten Method” or something that I’d have to defend. So I stayed away from it for years, until the idea hit me to write a story, to write a novel. The same way Avatar or Star Wars can be fictional, but with truth inside of it. You listen to Yoda talk about the force and all of that stuff. There’s some stuff in there if you really pay attention.
It’ll be 10 years old next year, believe it or not. So I’m writing the sequel now. The coolest thing about it is the book is in five languages now. They’ve been using it at Berklee and Stanford, and a bunch of different places like that. I didn’t expect that.
Wow. So I guess the Wooten Method is still kind of coming through?
The cool thing is that people treat it as more of a philosophy. Which is a little bit lighter than, “Oh, I’ve got to do this or that.” It’s just a way of thinking.
Would you say that’s maybe how you approach music—more from a philosophical standpoint than a rigid standpoint?
Yeah, but we all do. We all approach it from how we think about it first, and that thinking may tell us we have to practice eight hours, or something like that. But for me, I look at it just like talking. If you think about how you learned to speak English, that’s my approach to music. Exactly how you learned—nobody taught you. No one said, “Here’s what you have to practice first.” You learned the words you wanted to learn first. Up until you were at least five years old, no one even corrected you when you said things wrong. If you said words wrong, like “blankie” instead of blanket, your parents would start saying it wrong too. So you’re always made to feel free with however you talk. You get to do it your way and learn what you want first.
But in music, it’s backwards. We tell you what to learn first. You have to learn our way first, before you can express your way. That locks most people up. Most people play now out of fear of messing up, rather than freedom. We’ve got to work back to that freedom.
I learned to speak English at the same time I was learning to speak music. And more importantly to me, is in the same way, the way my brothers taught me, or the way they didn’t teach me. And that’s how the book is approached. It’s more of a natural approach. Some people call it a spiritual approach, but for me it’s just more of a natural way, because it’s the way you learn to talk.
Definitely. And even the way you just performed here at _Relix_—you just kind of woke up, sat down and played through the ebbs and flows of your day. It was amazing.
Exactly! Exactly right. None of us wake up and practice our ABCs before we go talk, you know? You just talk, and you don’t have to figure out what you’re going to say first.
For me, playing music is just like speaking. I can warm up while I play. I don’t have to start complicated and do all of that stuff. I don’t have to start off sprinting. I can walk first. And walking is sometimes even more beautiful than sprinting. So I don’t mind not warming up before I play.
I want to pick up something you said earlier about your camp. Obviously, you’re teaching your students, but I’m curious what they teach you?
Most of our camps are 15 and up. But we do a few camps a year that go below 15, down to 10 or 8—I can’t remember. But we get a lot of adults. All ages, all instruments, all levels. There’s no audition. You just go to my website, and register.
We do a camp every month—I have to work it around my touring schedule. I’m there 100% of the time at every camp, but I’m not the only instructor. If I wanted people to only think like me, I’d be the only teacher. But I want people to have choices. So there are a lot of people. There are people there that say exactly the opposite of what I say, which is cool. That way you have to decide for yourself what works for you. And it’s fun. We share what we might call normal things, which is like music theory, techniques, but in a lot of cases we go about them in a new way—a way that makes it easy. We like to follow Einstein’s quote that says, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t know it well enough.”
So even a second grader can learn music theory the way we teach. It’s nice seeing people’s eyes open wide, and their brains kind of free up. I love it.
Is teaching always something you’ve imagined yourself doing, in addition to touring?
No [laughs]. No, the teaching thing came as a result of touring, and being in magazines like Relix, or Bass Player magazine. When you start getting known, people think you must be good. So that leads to people wanting to know how and why you do what you do. That’s what led to the teaching. But I had never taught anything. I didn’t know how to teach, so when it started happening, I started looking at how people were teaching, and what people were teaching. And I liked it, but I also realized that what I felt was the real good stuff was being left out. A lot of times in music, they just teach us notes. And we call it music theory. But music theory deals with 12 notes. And that’s almost it. Meaning scales…key signatures, notes, chords, harmony, mode…
…and mechanics.
Not even the mechanics yet, maybe the mechanics of notes, but it’s not the mechanics of what makes you you. And when I bought my bass, I bought the same notes that all my heroes have. My heroes aren’t so good that they get extra notes. It’s all the same. So I can buy the notes. But how come when I play what my heroes play, I don’t sound like them? It lets you know that there’s something else there. And it’s that something else that interests me. And that interests me because when I researched teaching, most people weren’t teaching it.
A little earlier, you mentioned your heroes. Who are your musical heroes?
There are a lot. It starts with my brothers. I’m the youngest of five, and literally when I was born, my brothers knew that I would be a bass player. Especially my older brother Reggie…he started teaching me right away. But again, teaching me in the same way that you were taught or not taught to speak.
They started speaking music with me, and allowing me to freely speak back. That’s how it started. They put a toy in my hands, and they would play. I looked up to my four older brothers, and I would sit down and play too. I was just strumming on a toy. Because you really couldn’t play with everyone else. I was strumming along in the same way a baby would baby talk with the family. It’s not about English, it’s about communicating. We don’t care if they use the right words; we just care if they communicate.
That they’re part of the conversation…
Exactly. We know that it’s going to come together later. So my brothers would just give me a toy. It wasn’t about playing the bass, and putting my fingers in the right place…
Like a toy bass?
It was like a Mickey Mouse wind-up guitar. A ukulele type of thing. It was just about feeling the music, strumming, and learning music with an instrument in my hand. The same way a baby is learning a lot about communication when we don’t realize it. Like how you could say the same words, but in one case it’s a question that could also be a statement. How do you explain that? You’ve never had to explain that, but you know it very well. You learn it organically. A lot of times in music, we’re learning things we don’t know yet. I could learn a C Major scale, but I don’t even know how to play a song in C. That’s backwards. That’s like learning to spell apple, but not knowing what an apple is. That process does work, it just takes a whole lot longer, in my opinion.
So, my brothers—long answer to that question—my brothers were my first heroes. They still are. But as I grew, I started listening to all the music that was on the radio in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, which was a lot of Motown. And at the time, I didn’t know who those bass players were. I didn’t care. I just had to learn their parts. But those bass players helped shape my style, because that was the music I grew up on. I was much, much older when I found out who they were. So bass players like Chuck Rainey, James Jamerson, Carol Kaye, Anthony Jackson…I can name a bunch of them. And then as I got a little older, I started getting into the jazz world, with Stanley Clarke, Jaco Pastorius, Marcus Miller—people like that. Fortunately for me, because my brothers were playing different instruments, and they were listening to different musicians around the house, I was hearing a lot of great musicians like Chick Corea, Charlie Parker’s saxophone, and even the Grateful Dead and other rock.
What are you listening to now? Any newer acts?
There are a ton of newer acts. Because of social media, it’s hard not to see them and find out about them. I just finished a new record, TRYPNOTYX. When you’re doing that, you’re in it, so now I’m kind of trying to debrief, you know? But some of the bands out there that I really like are people like Snarky Puppy. They’re amazing. There’s another band that maybe aren’t as popular, but they’re called the Nth Power. Love those people. And then there’s this YouTube phenomenon solo guy, Jacob Collier. He does all this solo stuff. He plays almost every instrument, but I think he became popular by using an app to sing harmonies with himself. So there are a lot of great groups out there. And now that I have four young kids, they keep me up to date on what’s new [laughs].
You mentioned your new record TRYPNOTYX. Tell me a little bit about that.
Yeah, it’s a trio record with a great drummer named Dennis Chambers, who’s played on everything. And a wonderful sax player that lives in New York named Bob Franceschini. Bob is not as well-known name-wise, but everybody has heard him; he’s been on everyone’s record from Paul Simon to J-Lo to George Benson. But this record is called TRYPNOTYX. I put it out on my own label, Vix Records. It’s mostly instrumental, but we do have a few fun voices on there. I found a woman off of Facebook named Varijashree Venugopal from India. I’d never met her in person—just through the internet. She’s singing some Indian stuff on there, it’s amazing. A great comedian slash impersonator sound effects guy named Michael Winslow, from Police Academy…
Yeah! He’s doing some cool music stuff now…
Oh my goodness. He’s calling himself a “voicetramentalist.” So instead of an instrumentalist, he’s a voicetramentalist. And I’ve gotten a chance to play a few live shows with him. After that, I knew he had to be on this new record. So he’s doing some fun stuff. He’s really funny, but he’s so musical. So he’s on there, my kids are on there. My kids have been on every record since before my first daughter was born—I had her heartbeat on the record.
I just want to quickly talk about how you’re playing with Béla Fleck again. How does that feel? You guys have a bunch of tour dates announced, and you’re even going down south somewhere to one of those destination events, right?
Yeah, it might be the Snarky Puppy thing they’re putting on that we’re going to be a part of. It’s always fun. I think next year is going to be our 30-year anniversary with the Flecktones. And so playing with them all the time is like being back home. I don’t know if we’ve ever gone a year without playing, but we can go a long time without playing, and get back together and fall right back into it.
Béla is a genius, and I’ve learned a lot from him over the years. Not only about musicianship, but how to lead a band. He’s a great bandleader. The way he teaches us his songs—he calls himself “a leader among equals.” He knows that he’s the leader, but everyone has a say. I look forward to the time that we get to play together. And I know we have at least two touring periods next year. But it’s also fun now that everyone’s older, and Béla himself even has a child and he’s touring with his beautiful wife, Abby. Everybody gets to do their own thing, and everybody gets to really express different musical sides of themselves.
Obviously you have the TRYPNOTYX album, and Béla and Abigail are doing their thing. It’s super cool that you guys can separate and then come back together stronger…
Exactly. It’s better when we come back together after we’ve been away. It’s like when you’ve been on vacation and come back home, and home is nice again.
Last thing I want to ask about. You were here in New York playing one of the late-night shows.
I did it last night. I did The Tonight Show and had the chance to play with The Roots for the whole night, live.
How was playing with those guys?
The best. They’re so loose and free. They don’t worry, or it doesn’t seem like it. The way they do it—their process is really, really cool. It’s my second time doing it with them. But just the way they get in early in the day, and just jam through some numbers. And then when the show is going on and Jimmy is doing his monologue, they’re playing one of our jams in our ears. And I’m like, “Okay, yeah I remember that.”
So then you can just kick right into it?
Kick right into it! And then after the commercial, we play a little more, and then Jimmy starts his next skit, and the next jam is playing in our ears.
