Victor Wooten trades his funky soul for a spiritual one

With a new album, "Palmystery" and book, "The Music Lesson," Victor Wooten taps the traditions of his African ancestry. (Stephen P./headsup.com)

Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – + By Siddhartha Mitter

Globe Correspondent / March 28, 2008

Mystical visitations are much on the mind these days of Victor Wooten. In addition to a new album, "Palmystery," out next week, the Nashville-based contemporary bass guitar hero is also releasing a book, a work of fiction titled "The Music Lesson," in which a young player learns wisdom well beyond musical technique alone from a chance encounter with a spiritually advanced stranger.

"I Saw God," a song on the new disc, advances a similar theme. "I saw God the other day/ She looked like me, he looked like you," the chorus incants over a fluid African rhythm made more so by Richard Bona's backing vocals and Wooten's own playing of the kora. A life lesson follows, as to the nature of belief and the way to live, amiably didactic and undeniably groovy.

Sunday evening Wooten makes his own visitation to the Berklee Performance Center, not as a mystical stranger but as something of a cult figure in certain circles. He's revered by bass players - for his virtuosity and innovations of technique that have had him cited in the same breath as the sainted Jaco Pastorius - but also by funk and jam-band fans, who admire his many years working as a charter member of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

But perhaps Wooten's broadest appeal dwells in that he makes pure groove-based music, manifesting a tradition with roots in the working bands of a James Brown or a Sly Stone and in the toil of countless session musicians for whom the groove was paramount.

"There used to be the best musicians playing the highest quality stuff and you'd hear it all in one place, on the same radio station," Wooten says from a tour stop in Durham, N.C. "Now it's a little more segregated, more calculated and formulated and computer-driven."

With his regular band and a host of guests like Bona, guitarist Mike Stern, or Soulive's Neal Evans on the Hammond B-3, Wooten sets out not so much to turn the clock back - this is music of today that doesn't eschew a wide range of electronic effects - as to break down psychic barriers in service of a higher purpose. His is an ecumenical creed, as evidenced by the text of the songs that have vocals, but musically as well, in which such heresies as combining three drummers on one track ("Left, Right & Center") come out smooth and crystal clear, with nary a trace of overload.

And a song called "The Gospel" is less profession of faith than old-time mystical healing, anchored by an impromptu recording of Wooten's mother delivering a spiritual in the Southern, rural Primitive Baptist Church tradition.

"I just put her on speakerphone and recorded it," Wooten says. "The way she sang it, it just put the song where it needed to be." Later he went and recorded other family members in chorus, resulting in a beautifully textured piece that may be the record's greatest highlight.

As a band leader whose previous albums include "Soul Circus" (2005) and "Yin-Yang" (1999), Wooten possesses the unique perspective of the bass player, which disposes him to a kind of productive generosity.

"The reason bass players have the potential of making incredible band leaders is that our role by nature is supportive," he says. "We make people comfortable, and people will do anything for you if they are made comfortable."

It's that same instinct - not to drive home musical or moral dogma, but to teach by creating the conditions for artistry - that animates his desire to write fiction, he says. It's an approach to learning, through story and parable, that Wooten traces right back to his African ancestry.

"I like expressing ideas and views in story form. You, the reader, get to put the truth into it. Not me," he says. "The things the teacher says [in 'The Music Lesson'], the reader doesn't have to attribute to me. And I don't have to defend it. I like that mode of communication. It makes it a lot lighter."

Ultimately, he says, the point is that the mystic visitation can come from anywhere so long as we are attuned: "A bird sings a song, it's a mystic visitor. All the thoughts you have, those are mystic visitors. Everybody is a mystic visitor."