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Not about the Notes
Talking bass with Victor Wooten.
By Andy Barrett '05
Berklee.edu Correspondent
June 29, 2005
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Victor Wooten performs for students. |
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Photo by Phil Farnsworth |
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They say that when working at a computer for an extended period of time, you are supposed to take a break every 15 minutes to blink, rest your eyes, take several deep breaths and stretch; the same could be said about watching Victor Wooten, the bassist for Bela Fleck's band the Flecktones and a musician whose playing at a recent visiting artist clinic came across as effortless, inspiring, and technically mind boggling. It was a combination so impressive that watchers might have felt like they wanted to take a break, but then they would undoubtedly have missed something great.Wooten's reputation preceded him, as the mad rush of students who scrambled to obtain a very limited number of tickets indicated. But it doesn't take a Berklee education to recognize Wooten's extraordinary talent on his instrument, which is more of a statement than one might realize. After all, true to the jokes, the bass player is usually the least recognized musician in the band. With the Flecktones, it's arguably the opposite. In spite of this fact, Wooten knows well his role in any musical situation.
"If you can groove, if you can make the other people sound good, if you can support them, that's what the bass is for," Wooten said. "You may not get the attention...the foundation of this building is the strongest thing about this building, but when's the last time you thought about it? That's the way it's supposed to be. The bass is the foundation. The drums are on the rhythm end, everything else is on the melodic end, the bass is right in the middle between both of them, holding it all together."
Between answering questions and asking students a few of his own, Victor dazzled the crowd with his jaw-slackening abilities. Employing his Boss RC-20XL Loop Station, Wooten displayed one of his most impressive techniques by looping individual phrases to create full arrangements. First laying down a simple bass line, Wooten would record and loop that particular phrase. Then, as the initial line repeated, he added additional harmonies, melodies and even rhythmic figures to compliment the original part. Along with spinning his bass entirely around his body and catching it all in time with the music, this looping technique is one for which Wooten has become famous, and after witnessing it in person, it isn't hard to see why.
Wooten's experimentation and showmanship notwithstanding, the first thing you'll notice is just how fluent he is on the instrument. His skill is no accident, but rather the culmination of a lifetime of practice, the tireless pursuit of innovation, both technically and musically, and constant exposure to music from a very young age. Growing up with four musically inclined older brothers, the youngest Wooten would jam along with them on a one-chord toy guitar, soaking up the skills that he would later refine.
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Wooten trades licks with performance major and bassist "Jersey" Dan Haase '07.
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Photo by Phil Farnsworth
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"I wasn't worried about playing notes, I was learning all the other stuff. We put 90 percent of our attention on the notes, but they're only one small part," said Wooten. "So I was learning all the other things first, the same way a baby learns language. They don't learn the words first, they learn all the other things first, like what it means if the pitch of your mother's voice raises. Or the pitch of your dad's voice lowers. You know all this stuff from a young age: urgency, loving, hurt, you know all this stuff before you ever know the words. So by the time you can actually use your instrument to form the words, it's easy because you know the other elements, just like technique. We get so proud about our technique. Anyone can learn that, but music is where it's really at. It's like, 'I'm proud because I can say big words, or say them fast.' What does that mean if you don't have anything to say?"
Listen to Wooten's new studio album Soul Circus and you'll learn that despite having written and performed music for more than 30 years, he has more to say than ever before. This might be due in part to the overwhelming number of guest musicians that appear on his album, an emphasis on collaboration that he proclaims is absolutely essential to growing and developing as a musician.
"Music will never be as natural to you as it could be until it becomes a part of who you are. You don't think of speaking as something separate. You don't go into the woodshed to learn to talk, you go into the world.... Now the woodshed can be beneficial to close out everything else and work on this one little thing, but you have to quickly get back out into the world. Because the woodshed does this," he says, as he makes a narrowing motion with his hands, "and the world does this," his motion expands.
Wooten returned often to the idea of learning language as a metaphor for learning music, and he encouraged the music students and teachers in the room to search for ways to apply language acquisition approaches to studying an instrument. At one point, he cited the fact that children begin learning how to speak from adults shortly after birth. Applying that concept to music may be easier said than done, Wooten admitted, but it would have a remarkable impact.
"With music, the beginners get stuck in the beginners' class. Again, I'm not saying this is wrong, I'm just checking out the differences," Wooten said. "When the beginners get a little better, maybe they go to the intermediate class. Then, maybe after that, they get to go to the advanced class and once in awhile, play with professionals. In English, it's an everyday thing. So when you reach 4 or 5, you're jammin'. You're improvising. Now I don't know how to provide that for music, but you can imagine, if we had it, we'd have seven year olds playing like Wynton [Marsalis].
Or for that matter, Victor Wooten.
Andy Barrett is a seventh-semester student from St. Louis, Missouri, majoring in Music Synthesis.
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