Victor Wooten & The Wooten Brothers On Tour

After their widely successful 2023 Australian debut left audiences and critics alike calling it one of the live highlights of the year, Victor Wooten & The Wooten Brothers are back in the country for another massive tour. Four brothers with ten Grammy Awards between them and a lifetime of shared stages that began long before any of them had a driver’s licence. Regi (guitar), Roy “Futureman” (percussion), Joseph (keys), and Victor (bass) bring a rare musical chemistry forged in the clubs of Virginia and honed alongside legends from Curtis Mayfield and WAR to the Steve Miller Band, Béla Fleck & The Flecktones and beyond.

This is no ordinary family band. It’s four master musicians each a master in his own right, speaking the same unspoken language they’ve shared since childhood, now enriched with freshly recorded material and long-vaulted 1970s/80s Wooten Brothers tracks featuring the unmistakable saxophone voice of their late brother Rudy. From deep funk and heartfelt soul to jaw-dropping jazz and rootsy grooves, every performance is delivered with warmth, humour and telepathic interplay that only blood and decades on the road can produce. Victor and Roy Wooten talk to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Great to be speaking to someone so legendary as yourself, huge honour. Are you stoked about returning to Australia in this month for another massive tour.
Victor: Thanks, buddy. Excited is too small of a word. It was fun last time. We will have a new record that’ll be coming out later this year. So we might let out some new music out of the bag a little bit. It’ll just be fun to be back in your country.

Being able to do this with your brothers as well, that just must take on even greater meaning and greater importance for yourself?
Victor: Absolutely, I’m the baby. I’m the youngest of the brothers. Yeah, there’s five of us, but we lost one of them in 2010. We lost our middle brother, Rudy, our saxophone player. But for me, this is just how I grew up, playing with my brothers, and it’s good to be back doing it.

Are these shows almost going to be a little bit unique in their own ways with the level of improvising and just going where the music takes you?
Victor: They would totally be unique. It would be just like after we finished this interview, and maybe you lost the recording, and we had to do it again. It’d be the same, might be the same questions, but it would be unique. So it doesn’t mean that we’re going to come and play all new songs, we don’t know yet. But it’s definitely going to be unique.

Having a huge body of work to be able to draw upon how do you narrow that down to for two hours on tour?
Victor: That night’s a problem, yeah, and sometimes it is a problem.

Roy: Oh, yep.

Victor: Shorten things, cut out a song. But a lot of times, we will let the room kind of dictate what and how we play. If it’s a stand-up room, like a rock club, and people are drinking a little bit, we know that they’re ready to move, and they’re going to be a little bit more noisy. So the ballad stuff may not work as well there, so we may, we may change a set list in the moment. We might just go down memory lane with some old R&B or jazz songs, you know, play some Earth, Wind, and Fire, Sly Stone, whatever. We can totally be in the moment and change it. And often, that’s what we’re doing, is changing it to fit the room and the audience in the moment.

Is there much disagreement about the set list?
Victor: It’s rare that, especially because it’s a tour. If we don’t play it one night, let’s play that song another night. It’s rare that we can’t play all of the songs every night.

Do you enjoy the touring side of life more now than you ever have done before?
Victor: I guess if there’s something that, like I say, I like more is I like the fact that we can do it as the brothers. It was supposed to happen. In the 70s, with Curtis Mayfield was the first time. Then it was supposed to happen another time with Don Kirstner’s rock concerts came to our house, and it was supposed to happen another time with the whole Stephanie Mills thing. Then it was supposed to happen another time, so it kept almost happening. Then a forty-year hiatus. We haven’t recorded in forty years, where Roy and I have been with the Flecktones for about thirty seven years. My brother Joseph played keyboards with Steve Miller Band for well over thirty years. We’ve all kind of been separated, so it feels really good to finally come back together and bring all the stuff we’ve learned, life-wise and musically. We just have a lot more experience now that we can bring back, which makes the brothers stronger and deeper.

Roy: When you’re storytelling, they’ll say the protagonist of the story, or the hero of your story, the focus of your story, has what they want, and then what they need. See what I’m saying? So, like, yeah, we want to get out there, like the Jackson 5, when they got out there. But if we would have got out there then, maybe Vic wouldn’t have developed all the stuff that he’s done to revolutionize the bass. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought of all the ideas that I’m doing to push the drums. So, through all the development, you just see development, you know what I mean? Like, we’re not, quote, out there yet, but look at all the development. I remember coming back from New York when we were recording, and Joseph and I were working with Kashiv, we come back home, Vic says, look, I can thump “Paganini” on the bass. You know what I mean? There’s a journey that’s going on that’s so rich, and so if you have a family like the Neville brothers or something, I think the Wooten brothers have a very unique story in that regard. It’s taken this long to develop, and to get through what we had to get through, to develop what we had to develop. I think that’s the richness of the story that we’re telling. Like you say, night after night. What story are we going to tell? Well, let’s go back to this tune that Reds wrote when you were here with this crazy bass part. Like, Rez wrote a bass part that’s so crazy for Lil’ Victor to play. It’s like James Jamerson, I don’t want to say more than James Jamerson, but it’s in that kind of field, where it’s all over the place. This is the fun of it, the journey has offered so many jewels, and we’re able to come and share those jewels now. Night after night, we say, which one… what are we going to show tonight? What are we going to do tonight? How are we going to tell the story tonight?

With all that combined experience that does make creating an album easier?
Victor: Yeah, easier and harder at the same time, because an album can only contain so much stuff. I’m the baby, and I’m sixty-one and I’ve been playing since I was about two, so fifty nine years. And almost from the beginning so there’s, you know, there’s a good fifty years’ worth of original music to choose from. To figure out what’s going to go on a record with maybe ten songs or something, that can be tough. It’s a fun toughness and we have each other, so we can go through it together. But when we found some old recordings that we had forgotten about. It was like, oh man, this has to be on the record. It’s like, all of it has to be on the record, but we have new stuff, too, you know? So it’s a fun challenge to have.

Roy: I think I like the way we addressed the challenges, we made the record, like, a really special collaboration between where we are now. Where we were then, and we’re both… it’s like we’re inspired by both ends of the spectrum. So, you’re going to hear our young voices, and then you’re going to hear the older voices collaborating with that, like how Natalie Cole sang with her dad as a collaboration. I don’t know if a band’s ever done it, where they collaborate with themselves from a whole other era and generation. That’s what we’re doing to make it fun. We’re taking songs that we wrote then, and said, you know what? We never added a bridge to it. Reg, you wrote the tune, so Reg said, this is the bridge now, you know? I think that’, for me, that’s fresh. To see the authors who were young authors be met by their older selves and said, okay, you guys did a good job, now check out this, where it’s going now, you know? And so, to me, that makes it very unique, a very unique experience, so we want to share some of that.

Was that hard keeping a lid on that creativity?
Victor: Everybody’s so creative, we just have to figure out which part of it we can use to make a cohesive record.

Roy: Tell a story.

Victor: Boom! We don’t just want to make a pop record or a funk record. We want to make sure that the audience, the listeners feel our journey and know that we’re serious musicians, at the risk of sounding egotistical. You know, that we’re serious musicians, there’s depth to this, so there’s going to be some serious playing on it, but it’ll all be accessible. The only thing I was going to say is that when we say Reg, that’s short for Reggie, our oldest brothers. When we start talking, we just called them Reds, you know?

Is there more likely that there will be more than one record?
Roy: Yeah, the journey can definitely continue. Netflix series.

Victor: Yeah, and we live in an era now where you don’t have to do albums.

Roy: Exactly.

Victor: So, you know, we could just keep putting out songs.

Roy: Like James Brown used to do.

Victor: Exactly, man.

What’s your thoughts on Spotify and the way people consume music? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing?
Victor: I think everything has a good side and a bad side. The thing I hate the most is that the artists are not getting paid for it. You can hear their music or our music, but we’re not getting paid for it. But somebody is, and it’s not the people making the music. Somebody’s making a ton of money, I mean, millions and probably billions of dollars, but it’s not the artist. I remember hearing many years ago, on a radio show that the average person, the average artist makes twenty five dollars a year on Spotify, which is awful. That was just one story that I heard. But that’s the main thing, is that as artists, we’re not making money. I do like the fact that people can find the music that they want to hear. But I do miss the fact that we listen to music solo now. We don’t sit around as a group and listen to music together as a norm. I listen to what I want to hear in my ear, and even, like, sometimes with my own kids, I’ll say, have you heard this new whatever record? And they’ll say, yeah. But they haven’t! They’ve just listened to the songs they wanted to listen to. I’m like, wait a minute, it’s like going to watch a movie, and you just pick the scenes you want to see, you watch them out of order, and you say you saw the movie. But you didn’t. Usually when an artist makes a record, at least when we used to, there was a story, not so much a storyline, but there was a reason that we put this song first, this one second, and things like that. That seems to have been, for the majority of us, lost. The big problem for me is that artists, that’s not how we make our money. Used to be we made money from making records.

Roy: Yeah, yeah. If I added one more main thing, for me anyway, and for a lot of musicians, is that a lot of platforms, with Spotify especially, is they’re telling you that they’re taking your creativity and feeding their AI so that their AI can regenerate your ideas without compensating you at all for it, and they’re telling you up front that this is what their business model is now. And so they’re creating fake bands and stuff that are a composite of ideas that they’re getting from you. For me, the big question that’s going to be for the future is, do you want to participate in that kind of organisation that’s doing that, and so we’re starting to see other platforms address this, where this is not their business plan, to take your ideas and feed an AI. So there’s a company called The Flow, there’s another French company Jeff and his wife were telling me about, and you’re starting to see artists pull their catalogues from there. I think your question is a deep question, you know what I mean? It’s a good question for this age, and I think you’re going to see artists addressing it in different ways not giving and then taking your ideas.

In context of, you know, this interview, I think that’s what makes it even more special to see a family of brothers. We’ve known each other since, I remember when Vic came home from the hospital, you know what I mean? And shortly after that he had a bass in his hand. There’s a real story here. This is not fake musicians, there’s a real story. I think as we go, those real stories will end up being something making it even more special. That you’re getting a chance to feel someone’s journey, the struggles that they went through that only made them better. See what I’m saying? Like, Michael Jordan, you think about Michael Jordan, right? But he got cut from basketball that made him say, you’re not going to ever cut me again. See what I’m saying? We’ve gone through stuff like that where it’s like, ugh, and that journey just made us keep going, outlast all the obstacles. This is not a fake band right here. I think that’s going to be more special and juicy as we go. So that energy is what we bring. When we come to Australia that’s what we share, we’re sharing that energy back and forth.

What excites you the most about coming back for the second time?
Victor: One of the things for me is that we don’t get to go there that often. So that excitement is kind of built in. From both sides, we’re excited, and we think the audience is going to be excited. But, at the risk, again, of sounding egotistical, the brothers know that we have something special. Just the fact that we are brothers, and brothers who get along who have been doing it together nearly sixty years, we’re not new at it. We get to share our lives, our experience. You’ll feel it. Whether you like the music or not, you’re going to feel something, and you’ll know that it’s real. To me, one of the most realest places that we get to visit is Australia. The history, the indigenous culture, what the country’s been through, seeing people getting their land back, things like that. It seems like Australia’s trying to do the right thing, and it’s a place where our country could learn a lot from. I know I’m happy to get to go back there.

Roy: Yeah, yeah, it’s something about going a long way to play for people who are very receptive. When you go a long way away, there’s a certain energy that you’ve come from so far to share your message, and then when you’re in a new place, your message even takes on a different kind of connotation, because we’ve come from so far. People didn’t grow up with the same circumstances that we went through to develop what we have developed. I think it’s just something about that journey, and Australia has always been a very special place.

Interview By Rob Lyon

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