The turning point in Victor Wooten’s career came in a place better known for its tofu than for its live music. It was the late 1980s, and the musician had moved to Nashville to become a full-time bassist for Jonell Mosser’s band, Enough Rope. He had more time than money in those days, so he started scheming ways to add to his income. People around town didn’t yet know about his incredible talent as an instrumentalist. He couldn’t get booked as a solo act in nightclubs—certainly not on bass—and he wasn’t getting invitations to back other musicians on recordings. He didn’t want to join another band, afraid that it would lead to conflicts with Mosser’s regular weekend bookings.
So Wooten thought perhaps the best way to earn more money during the week was to find a situation where he could provide background music for diners. He approached the management of Slice of Life, a health food eatery that sometimes featured solo musicians in the evening. When asked what instrument he played, he said guitar. “It wasn’t really a lie,” he says now with a chuckle.
The restaurant might have been skeptical when Wooten returned with a bass for his audition. But it didn’t take long for him to prove that he was no ordinary rhythm keeper. “They said I might be just what they’ve been looking for,” Wooten recalls. He started performing solo every Thursday night. Within weeks, he was drawing a crowd that came for the music rather than the tempeh burgers or the rice-and-veggie plates. The restaurant eventually began asking for a minimum table charge for those who didn’t want to eat.
“That was really the first time I performed solo for audiences,” recalls Wooten, who recently released his first solo album, A Show of Hands, on Nashville-based Compass Records. “I had sat around the house working on solo songs for years. But it was at the Slice of Life that it dawned on me that I could pull it off. Those shows really helped motivate me. It let me know that there was a potential audience for it. And it was also something I really enjoyed doing.”
The performances also spread word within the music community about Wooten’s remarkable talents. Several famous visitors who came in for a bite ended up staying to take in entire shows. James Taylor was among those who offered words of praise and encouragement. So did the occasional jazz star, including drummer Jack DeJohnette, trumpet player Michael Brecker, and the guitar-vocal duo Tuck and Patti.
Another supporter was John Cowan, bassist and singer with New Grass Revival. Wooten and Cowan had met through engineer Curt Storey, who helped the latter record a solo album of rhythm-and-blues songs. When Cowan heard Wooten play, he called New Grass bandmate Bela Fleck; he recognized that both musicians were experimenting with tunings and sonic textures.
“John put me on the phone with Bela, and he said, ‘Play something,’ ” Wooten recalls. “This was over the phone.” Fleck, suitably impressed, invited Wooten over for a visit. The two talked, exchanged ideas, and wound up joining each other in an impromptu jam session. “I had a great time,” Wooten recalls. “Bela is such an incredible musician.”
Not long afterward, Fleck was invited to put together a band for a live broadcast on The Lonesome Pine Special, a public television program taped in Kentucky. He recruited three musicians who were all pushing the possibilities of their particular instruments: Howard Levy, a harmonica and keyboard player from Chicago; and two Wooten brothers, Victor and Roy (who now goes by the stage name of Futureman). At the time, Roy Wooten had been working with the drumitar, an instrument he’d invented. Fleck wanted to use the adventurous musicians to improvise around musical themes he had composed. “That was the birth of the Flecktones, although we didn’t know it,” Victor Wooten says. “We thought we were going to do one show and then go our separate ways.”
For Wooten, playing with open-minded, progressive musicians was something he’d grown up doing. The youngest of five brothers, he was born into a musical family. He was 3 years old when his brother Regi taught him to play bass—even though his hands were too small to grip the fretboard. By age 5, he’d joined his four brothers in the Wootens. They performed hits by Stevie Wonder, War, Sly & the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and others, going from sock hops and rec center dances to regular gigs at the Busch Gardens amusement park in Williamsburg, Va.
Unlike The Jacksons and The Osmonds, The Wootens developed their instrumental skills as well as their ability to sing, dance and entertain. “I was real young when I started learning to solo and improvise,” Wooten says. “We’d do a thing in our show when I was 7 or 8 where Regi would introduce me and I’d go through this solo routine. I’d play while lying on the floor. I’d play behind my head. My brothers were into these kind of things, so I felt like I had to keep up with them. I was influenced by them so much.”
Wooten credits his early start for his open-mindedness about music. “Children don’t have any limits,” he says. “When you’re older, you’re more laid-back. You’re more hesitant to try something because you’re afraid it will look wrong or come out wrong. You’re more self-conscious. As a child, that doesn’t matter. We’d try anything. We’d do anything we could think of to try and duplicate the sounds we heard on records. I’d learn songs one note at a time, just moving the needle back. Playing the bass was like learning how to talk for me. It was just another language I was picking up.”
The bassist also figures that he benefited from learning music during the ’70s. He learned to play by figuring out how James Jamerson of the Motown studio band and Larry Graham of Sly & the Family Stone (and later Graham Central Station) created their sounds. “I was lucky that I learned to play when what you heard on record was actually being played by a musician in the studio,” he says. “In the ’80s, things became more electronic. Now you don’t have to be as competent as a musician to record. You can develop through midi and studio effects. We never had much money, so we didn’t use electronic effects. We had to come up with a way to make the same sound without the effect. It gave us imagination.”
Imagination, musical adventurousness, and an openness to different styles all run through A Show of Hands. The songs vary from challenging compositions that draw on jazz improvisation and classical themes to an R&B ballad to a rap song about peace. “I tried not to play it safe,” Wooten says. “I wanted the record to be fun and accessible to people, but I wanted some improvisation on there too. A few of the songs weren’t finished until I recorded them. I sort of wrote them on the spot by playing. To me, music’s never been about definitions. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s jazz or pop or whatever. It just comes down to what it sounds like. It’s all about getting your feelings out, and having a good time with people.”
