Victor Wooten
USA | Funk / Jazz / Fusion / Progressive Bluegrass | 1964
Victor Lemonte Wooten is an electric bass player. He is highly regarded among his musical peers for his extraordinary technical virtuosity and his skills as musician and composer. Wooten has won the "Bass Player of the Year" award from Bass Player Magazine three times in a row, and was the first person to win the award more than once.
In 2008, Wooten joined Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller to form SMV. SMV will release a CD called Thunder and tour in support of the CD starting in August 2008.
Modern improvements in electric bass guitar construction, such as a lowered string " action" and additional strings, have brought the bass closer to the electric guitar, allowing new playing techniques that were essentially impossible on a bass in the 1970s. When he was a child, Wooten's older brother Regi helped him develop his double-thumbing technique which was first created by Larry Graham. This technique, also utilized by such bassists as Marcus Miller (and Larry Graham too in "Release Yourself", 1974) uses the thumb to strike the string both downwards and upwards, similar to a guitar pick. Victor is also lauded for his Stanley Jordan-like two-handed tapping and "trademark" open-hammer-pluck technique. He utilizes all of these techniques to achieve an amazing array of sounds during live performance, from growling funk to machine-gun cascading arpeggios more reminiscent of Eddie Van Halen or Steve Vai.