Victor Wooten
About this Artist
“Music is a great way—and a safe way—to teach just about any life principle,” Victor Wooten insists, one afternoon at a table outside of a Nashville cafe. “To be in a band, you have to listen to each other. Bands are at their best when every instrument is different, not the same. Everyone takes turn talking. Everyone speaks their voice. A lot of times musicians might ask, ‘What would you like me to play?’ I say, ‘Listen to the music. The music will tell you exactly what it needs.’”
Listening was always essential to Wooten. As the youngest of five brilliantly talented brothers, he listened to the music they loved and to the instruction his brothers offered as he began exploring the bass. He didn’t know it at the time but this sibling input helped free him from preconceptions.
Victor was just two years old when he played his first gigs with the Wooten Brothers Band: Regi on guitar, Roy a.k.a. “Futureman” on drums, Rudy on sax, and Joseph on keyboards. They opened West Coast shows for Curtis Mayfield, War, and other headliners, nearly scored a major label deal until someone decided there was room for only one five-brother act. The other act just happened to be the Jackson 5. But that didn’t stop the five Wootens from pushing against convention.
Settling eventually in Nashville, where he connected with the like-minded banjoist and composer Béla Fleck, Wooten has earned five Grammy Awards, been honored three times by Bass Player magazine as Player of the Year, and is included in the Rolling Stone selection for “Top 10 Bassists of All Time.”
What really matters, though, is the example Wooten sets in his dedication to music as a means to enhance the human condition even for those who may never master an instrument. “Music shouldn’t be just about music,” he emphasizes. “Music should be about something greater. If all you do is music, what is your music about? You’ve got to have a life. You’ve got to have experiences. You’ve got to fall in and out of love. Getting away from your instrument and out into the world, you can see how the little bird gets up and sings—not to get paid but just because the sun is rising. You go outside to get more inside who you really are.”