He might be one of the most famous and influential electric bassists of modern times, but Victor Wooten didn’t have much say when it came to which instrument he was going to play. That call was made by his brothers, especially guitarist Regi, who wanted to start a band.
“He said I had ‘bass fingers’ when I was born. But he wasn’t even 8 yet, so I don’t know how he knew that, but he taught me bass,” said Victor.
In the intervening six decades, those Wooten Brothers have gone on to play with everyone from Whitney Houston to Ginger Baker. Victor and drummer Roy (known as “Futureman”) were charter members of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, and keyboardist Joe was a longtime member of the Steve Miller Band. In recent years they’ve gone back to frequent touring as a funky family foursome that plays the House of Blues Sunday.
Next spring the Wooten Brothers are releasing what could be called their long-overdue debut (although crate diggers might occasionally come upon a mid-1980s Arista release credited to the Wootens). After the family was signed by Clive Davis, Victor said he and his brothers realized the prolonged recording process “was just a way for the producer to get our big budget.”
Eventually they managed to get Arista to release the disc — and release them from their contract — “but it’s not really our sound. It’s the producer’s sound,” said Victor.
“There’s barely any electric bass on it at all, and my brother Rudy [a saxophonist, who died in 2010] isn’t on there at all,” he added.
The brothers discovered some raw tapes that included Rudy, and are using modern technology to make what Victor called “the record that we should have made back then. … It will be a thousand percent us, playing funky, jazzy, fusion-y, rock.”
As the sons of a working-class military couple, the brothers were taught that “you don’t have to like what you’re doing, but you should still do a good job at it,” Victor said. Early in their careers the brothers got work playing in the house country/bluegrass band at a Virginia amusement park. Victor played the fiddle.
“It was not where I wanted to be,” he admitted, “but I learned to love bluegrass.”
One of Victor’s bandmates told him about Fleck, and soon he and Roy were playing, respectively, electric bass and “drumitar” (Roy’s own invention) in a band led by a banjo player.
“So for me, the moral of the story is life knows better than we do what we need, and if we can learn to go where life is pushing us, things will turn out better,” said Victor.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Victor’s landmark LP, “Show of Hands,” one of the few albums built around solo electric bass with no instrumental overdubs. Victor found that prospective labels “liked it, but they didn’t know what to do with it.”
It ended up finding a home on Compass, the label owned by banjo player Alison Brown and bassist Garry West, and has been streamed millions of times.
“I would guess that between one-third and half of our students started playing bass because of Victor Wooten,” said Steve Bailey, chair of the Bass Department at Berklee College of Music (and Victor’s bandmate in the Bass Extremes project). “He’s someone who can play at a virtuoso level and be authentic and be entertaining, and be someone that makes people want to play the bass, instead of scared to play the bass.”
Many of those students have gotten to study directly with Victor, who, as a visiting scholar, spends about one week a month in Boston most of the year.
It’s part of Victor’s dedication to education that also includes multiple books and ongoing bass camps near his home in Nashville. For a young bassist, the prospect of studying or jamming with one of the greats might seem intimidating, but Victor said music “is like a baby who is starting to talk. The baby doesn’t go ‘I’m not good enough yet, I have to go practice.’ Everyone has a voice, so let’s just improve upon it.”
Now Victor’s educational mission also includes sharing his experience with a movement disorder known as focal dystonia.
“It affects different people in different ways,” he explained. “For me, it affects my fingers. My hands work perfectly, but as soon as I pick up the bass, three of my fingers want to curl into a ball.”
Victor said recent Zoom sessions with a specialist have been helping.
“For some people, they would choose to end their careers. But I didn’t choose that. If I’ve got to play with one finger, I’ll do that.”
Reflecting on Victor’s medical circumstances, Bailey noted that he “still stood in front of the Boston Symphony Orchestra” and performed at Symphony Hall in 2021.
“A trained bassist can see the difference in his fingering, but for most of the audience the rhythm and musicality is so strong they’re not going to notice it,” Bailey said. “He’s given a lot of people the courage and resilience to press on, and talk about their successes, and failures, and to try to get through it.”
Noah Schaffer can be reached at noahschaffer@yahoo.com
THE WOOTEN BROTHERS
At the House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St., Sunday, Sept. 20, 8 p.m. Tickets: $35 and up. crossroadspresents.com