Victor Wooten
Victor Wooten |
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Victor Lemonte Wooten (born September 11, 1964 in Hampton, Virginia) is an electric bass guitar player. He is highly regarded among his musical peers for his extraordinary technical virtuosity and his skills as musician and composer. Wooten has won the "Bass Player of the Year" award from Bass Player Magazine three times in a row, and was the first person to win the award more than once.[1] He is currently ranked #1 on DigitalDreamDoor's (digitaldreamdoor.com) “Most Skilled Bassists” list.
Life
The youngest of five brothers, he was taught by his older brother Regi to play bass at age two, and by age five Victor could hold simple bass lines and play gigs. The Wooten Brothers band (Regi, Rudy, Roy, Joseph and Victor) played for many years in the 1970s around Williamsburg, Virginia as well as opening up for Curtis Mayfield and War. Victor also played bass in the country show at Busch Gardens before moving to Nashville. While in Virginia, Victor met his longtime wife, Holly.
After moving to Nashville, Tennessee in 1988 Victor was immediately recruited by blues and soul singer Jonell Mosser. A year later he was hired by banjo maestro Béla Fleck, along with keyboardist and harmonica player Howard Levy and Victor's brother Roy Wooten (a.k.a. Future Man). Their group, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, became famous first by playing a mixture of jazz, funk, and bluegrass, then later becoming one of the most stylistically free-swinging bands of the modern era. (Levy eventually left the group and was replaced by saxophonist and horn virtuoso Jeff Coffin.)
Wooten has been a member of several fusion and progressive supergroups, including Bass Extremes (with Steve Bailey, Derico Watson and Oteil Burbridge), the Vital Tech Tones (with Scott Henderson and Steve Smith), the indian jazz fusion guitarist Prasanna, and the "Extraction" trio (with Greg Howe and Dennis Chambers). He recorded with renowned Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster on her 2003 album Blueprint. Victor has also been on tour with many other bands including the Dave Matthews Band.
Victor currently tours with his solo group, and still with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. He resides near Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and four children.
In Mid 2006, Victor Wooten teamed up with fellow bassist Steve Bailey and RBD Studios (http://www.rbdstudios.com) to create The Bass Vault (http://www.thebassvault.com). The Bass Vault is a membership based site that allows other musicians and fans to have exclusive access to content and live chats with various artists. Wooten and Bailey frequent the site and can often be found on Bass Vault live video chat.
Techniques
Modern improvements in electric bass guitar construction, such as a lowered string "action" and additional strings, have brought the bass closer to the electric guitar, allowing new playing techniques that were essentially impossible on a bass in the 1970s. As a child, his older brother Regi helped him develop his double-thumbing technique to help imitate the basslines of such greats as Larry Graham. This technique, also utilized by such bassists as Marcus Miller (and Larry Graham too in "Release Yourself", 1974) uses the thumb to strike the string both downwards and upwards, similar to a guitar pick. Victor is also lauded for his Stanley Jordan-like two-handed tapping and "trademark" open-hammer-pluck technique. He utilizes all this technique to achieve an amazing array of sounds during live performance, from growling funk to machine-gun cascading arpeggios more reminiscent of Eddie Van Halen or Steve Vai.
Instruments
Wooten is most often seen playing Fodera basses, of which he has a signature model.[2] His most famous Fodera, a 1983 Monarch Deluxe which he refers to as "number 1", sports a Kahler Tremolo System model 2400 bridge. Fodera's "Yin Yang" basses (designed/created for Wooten) incorporate the Yin Yang symbol - which Wooten often uses in various media - as a main focal point of the top's design and construction. It is often mistakenly thought that the Yin Yang symbol is painted onto the bass, but in reality, the symbol is created from two pieces of naturally finished wood (Ebony and Holly, for example), seamlessly fitted together to create the Yin-Yang pattern.[3]
Though Wooten's beautiful and impressive basses receive much attention, his most frequent and consistent response when asked by his fans about which bass is best, etc. ..., is that "the bass makes no music ... you do".[citation needed] He'll often go on to state that the most important features to look for in a bass are comfort and playability. During a question and answer session at a 1998 concert, Wooten stated that "If you take a newborn baby and put them on the instrument, they're going to get sounds out of it that I can't get out of it, so we're all the best."[4] This philosophy seems closely related to another fundamental truth about Wooten's stated approach to and experience of bass and music in general, which is that music is a language. According to Wooten, when speaking or listening we don't focus on the mouth as it is forming words; similarly, when a musician is playing or performing the focus shouldn't be on the instrument.
As well as playing electric bass (both fretted and fretless), and the double bass, Victor also played the cello in high school. This is the instrument to which he attributes his musical training.
Discography
- A Show of Hands (1996)
- What Did He Say? (1997)
- Yin-Yang (1999)
- Live In America (2001)
- Soul Circus (2005)
Bibliography
- The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music (2006)
References
- ^ Elig, Jenny. He has been called the continuation of Jaco Pastorius, also incorporating numerous techniques to the legacy of Jaco's already immense prowess."Famous bass player to visit the Swindlefish tonight", The Post (Online Edition), 1999-10-11. Retrieved on December 25, 2006.
- ^ Fodera Guitars "Victor Wooten '83 Classic", Fodera Guitars website, Retrieved on January 10, 2007.
- ^ Fodera Guitars "Victor Wooten Yin-Yang 4 String", Fodera Guitars website, Retrieved on January 10, 2007.
- ^ Victor Wooten. (1999). 'Victor Wooten Live at Bass Day 1998' [VHS]. Hudson Music.