The Spirit of Music

Starred review from November 23, 2020
Wooten (The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth), bassist for Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, delivers a remarkable fable in which music is dying. It all begins when Wooten wakes up one morning feeling no longer connected to the music he plays. Looking for advice, he visits his parents, who remind him that real musicians don’t just play instruments, they “listen to everything and listen to their hearts,” and suggest he try teaching music to lift his spirits. When Jonathan, his first student, mysteriously disappears, Wooten embarks on an epic journey to find Jonathan and save music from “the Phasers,” mysterious villains who wear special headphones that “cancel all music in the surrounding area.” In Wizard-Of-Oz–like fashion, he meets up with and befriends fellow musicians along the way and at story’s end discovers that the only way to defeat the Phasers is through the passion and spontaneity of live performance. This allegorical foray into the power of music is both heartfelt and wildly imaginative. Music lovers will adore this sparkling manifesto.

January 1, 2021
The renowned bassist takes readers on a loopy, decidedly unique tour of the enigmatic realm of music. A founding member of the jazz-tinged bluegrass (or perhaps bluegrass-tinged jazz) group B�la Fleck and the Flecktones, Wooten, a five-time Grammy winner who clearly thinks deeply about matters of art and philosophy, opens with the observation that people are recruited by an enigmatic force to make music: "Music is a living consciousness who is aware of each musician. She chooses us in the same sense that we choose our instruments." Once we choose our instruments, we teach ourselves with a little generous help, as when Wooten tells a would-be acolyte, "I can teach you nothing because there is nothing to be taught. But...I can show you things." The Yoda-with-four-strings moments come fast and furious, but the author scores more practical points when he writes about the reductiveness of a musical world in which the vast aural spectrum that a record captures is narrowed by the CD and then narrowed logarithmically further by the MP3. "That scares me," he writes. "Literally, we are not receiving the same amount of Music that our parents did. The frequencies we hear today have been drastically diminished in just a few short years." Nor are we sitting on our beds listening intently to an entire album with our friends, building a musical culture. Instead, we're glued to our tiny, tinny phones. Part exhortation, part New Age-ish memoir, part philosophical treatise, Wooten's book is full of surprising and illuminating lessons along with some learned guesswork: Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady" wasn't about a lady at all but a guitar; the Greeks were the first musical theoreticians; the note C is, in scientific notation, 256 Hz; Nashville is the Athens of the South "because it is exactly 256 miles away from Atlanta." A sometimes puzzling yet always rewarding delight for music fans of a mystical bent.

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March 26, 2021
This is not your typical music book. Instead, Wooten, a founding member and bassist for B�la Fleck and the Flecktones, has fashioned a parable of sorts on the importance of music in contemporary culture, especially in today's perilous climate, where live music is facing an uncertain future. "While music used to be experienced in groups, currently, listening is mostly a solo experience," he writes. He laments days gone by when reading liner notes and listening to an entire album was the norm, unlike today, where people prefer their own solo experience, which repudiates the vision of the artist. In this gentle book, Wooten writes about the impact of teachers and mentors in his life as well as the lost art of listening. ("[L]istening first is the best way to learn any piece of music.") One of the many professions and experiences he discusses is teaching. "Teaching," he says, "completes the circle of knowledge." Music brings people together. He also acknowledges the importance of failure. Failure is not necessarily a bad thing, or, as he says, "If at first you don't succeed, fail again," since mistakes, in his view, are a welcome part of the natural process of learning. A conversational and commonsense meditation on spirituality, dreams, time, and, of course, music, among a plethora of other topics.

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