The Spirit Of Music - Victor Wooten - #304

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Victor Wooten. He's one of the greatest bass players of all time, a five times Grammy Award winner, and an all-round fascinating human. After a career of writing, teaching and performing at the highest levels on earth, Victor has come to gain some insights around how music affects us, and what we might be losing if we don't properly nurture it. So today, expect to learn how Victor deals with his internal critic, what he does to open up his students' creativity, what fast food and modern music have in common, how Victor overcomes nerves when performing, and much more. I think there's a lot to learn from people that have risen to mastery within their chosen fields, no matter what it is. And Victor has literally redefined bass playing over the last few decades. He has this really wonderful melodic tone to his voice and this sort of beautifully spiritual approach to life. He's a phenomenal guy, a very, very lovely human. And you're going to really enjoy this one. But now it's time to learn about the spirit of music with Victor Wooten.
Victor Wooten, welcome to the show.

**Victor Wooten** (1:29)
Thank you, Chris, thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:31)
Pleasure to have you here, man. As a champion of the power of music, what is it that you can communicate in a book that you can't communicate in a song?

**Victor Wooten** (1:43)
Well, a book, people can take their time through it. Where a song is meant to be heard, not note by note, where a book can be read literally word for word, and it goes at the reader's speed. A book is meant for you to hear my vision in its entirety, whether it's three minutes or 10 You take it on my journey at my time, my speed. But they both have their pluses and their minuses. With the book, you can go at your own speed. You can read a word and put it down. Come back, read another word if you want, but you'll still get the same story.

**Chris Williamson** (2:25)
Why were you compelled to write this one?

**Victor Wooten** (2:27)
Because it reaches people in different ways. Yeah. Just to be able to take these messages. I could put these messages in a song, but a song is meant to give one message. You have what they call now a hook. You have your chorus line and then you describe that line. But the book is allowed to take you on a story. That's like a movie. It can take you, a book can span years within its pages where a song is usually a message.
A small story might help describe that message, but a song is meant to be shorter, a shorter message, more concrete, more fixed on a message where the book is a journey, is a bigger journey.

**Chris Williamson** (3:24)
What's the story of The Spirit of Music then?

**Victor Wooten** (3:29)
It's my call to people, not just musicians, to really connect with music again, and to raise an awareness that we may be losing that connection and we may be losing. It's like if the only thing we ate was fast food, someone would need to remind us that there's food from the ground, from a garden, there might be healthier food. Someone would need to remind us of that. What I think we've entered into the age of fast music, and I'm trying to put out the reminder and even the warning signs of where we could be headed.

**Chris Williamson** (4:12)
What are we talking about here? I know that you break down in the book about the quality of music and you do some comparisons.
But, I mean, are you talking about the way that it's distributed, the reason that artists are making music? What are your issues here?

**Victor Wooten** (4:27)
My issues are the same as what we're facing right now with the pandemic. Chris, imagine if we couldn't touch each other anymore, shake hands, see our family. We had to communicate from now on like this. We get used to it. This isn't really that bad, is it? It's only that bad when we realize what we've lost. If I can't hug my wife and my kids, if I can't shake your hand and give you a hug and feel your energy anymore and it has to be done like this, we're feeling the effect of this pandemic and not being able to even shake a hand. But what if we didn't notice? What if the next generation came and then the next generation came and they grew up like this and this is all they knew, and they thought this was normal? Us old timers will be saying, no, no, you need to touch a person. Well, what is that? What do you mean? I can touch you. So music is kind of the same way right now. Our kids are growing up thinking that an MP3, which I describe in the book as a quarter of an inch, where we started with a foot, and I just made up these numbers. We started with the foot, now we're down at a quarter of an inch or less, and this is what our kids are growing up thinking as normal, so we're not receiving music in its entirety anymore. We listen to music by ourselves. We don't even listen to an artist's whole album.