Victor Wooten is an absurdly proficient bassist best known for his work with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. There was a period in my life when the Flecktones’ music was my favorite thing in the world. That period is long behind me, but I have a lingering fondness for their amiably nerdy sound. Recently, I came across a TED talk that Vic gave, and it’s a good one.
Vic’s experience doesn’t necessarily generalize. Most of us aren’t born into families of professional musicians. Still, his central message applies: we do a much better job teaching language than teaching music, and we barely “teach” language at all. We learn to talk by being around other people while they talk, and by doing it badly a lot without anyone correcting us. Eventually, through real-life practice, we iron out the technical kinks, find our own voice, and in the process, barely even notice that we’re learning. What if we learned music this way? It would probably be more effective.
Vic’s wisdom about music education is undeniable. What about the wisdom contained in his actual music? On this, my feelings are mixed. If you aren’t familiar with Vic’s playing, here’s a representative sampling.
Mike Huckabee is a loathsome individual, but his show is the most convenient place to see Vic do his solo bass interpretation of “Amazing Grace.”
My favorite thing Vic has ever recorded is his bass solo on the Flecktones’ signature tune, “The Sinister Minister.”
This bass solo is so beautifully structured that it provoked my most vivid ever episode of musical synaesthesia. I saw it as pastel-colored neon tubes shooting out of the speakers and forming a geometric cityscape, over which I felt myself flying. Pretty cool!
Here are the Flecktones performing live in all their geeky glory:
I still like the idea of the Flecktones. But their music has not aged well on me. The same technical virtuosity that excited me as a young guy now leaves me cold. I know what kind of discipline it takes to practice as much as these guys do. You have to renounce a lot of other aspects of life. That level of single-minded drive does not usually come from a happy place. I don’t know any of the Flecktones personally, but I know their fandom, and I know my own mind. This kind of music can be energizing, but it isn’t necessarily all that joyful, or healthy.
I get two distinct kinds of pleasure from music. One is the slow, long-lasting satisfaction I get from all kinds of musical truthtelling, regardless of style and genre. The other is a kind of manic excitement that resembles joy but is mostly just adrenaline. When it fades, it leaves behind the same jittery bad taste you get from too much sugar. When I was young and unhappy, the manic sugar rush was the thing I thought I wanted from music. Now that I’m older and (sort of) contented, it doesn’t work for me anymore. I had a friend who once said that he’d take a bullet for any member of Strength In Numbers, an earlier band of Béla’s. That friend later took his own life. I’m not suggesting that chopsy jazz/bluegrass fusion caused his unhappiness, but it didn’t seem to help him much either.
The Flecktones are “good” at what they’re doing. The question is, should they be doing it? They’re full of good and interesting ideas. They’re also full of mediocre and bad ideas, and it all comes flying at you too fast to even really follow. I want to beg them to chill out, stop trying to impress me, to not throw so many notes around, to let me actually follow their train of thought from one idea to the next. Being dazzled by technique used to just leave me wanting to be dazzled harder. Being told simple musical truths makes me feel contented, at peace, and better able to function generally. Victor Wooten preaches a message of calm centeredness in his TED talk, but I’d wish for him and the other Flecktones to practice more of it in their music.
I’ve personally been against any pointless display of technique for quite some time now. Minor bands in certain technically oriented genres and subgenres (think prog, math rock, hardcore) are especially guilty of this, but plenty of famous guitarists are practically known for nothing but the speed of their fretting. What are they after? How does this music move them?
There’s a thing in masculine culture where we turn music into a competitive sport. It becomes about wanting to be impressed by feats of strength or dexterity or whatever. Watching Steve Vai is like watching Michael Jordan. I get that. But music isn’t a competitive sport, it’s a communications medium. If all that Steve Vai is communicating is “I practice the guitar a lot,” I lose interest fast.
I agree with your observation about the two distinct kinds of pleasure and would be interested to hear you elaborate on it sometime. My main question would be whether there is such a clear division between the two. For me, an example from Bela Fleck would be the track Big Country, which is full of jazz fusion cliches and virtuosic showmanship, but I still find uplifting, in a way that gives me a sense of pleasure even just to think about.
No, I don’t see a bright-line distinction between good technical musicianship and good musicianship generally. There’s plenty of music that I love that requires a lot of disciplined practice: Chopin, Coltrane, etc. But I’ve come to see technical complexity as value-neutral, rather than intrinsically good. At the peak of my Flecktones fandom, I found chopsiness to be a virtue in and of itself. Now it’s just a thing like tempo or key center; a feature of the music, but not one automatically related to its quality.
Coltrane is a perfect case in point. I love the sheets of sound and the tricky chord changes and all that. But that stuff works for me because a) Coltrane knows when to chill out and just play the blues, and b) when you slow down and scrutinize Coltrane’s lightning-fast runs, they turn out to be as melodic and emotionally rich as his slow melodies. Béla Fleck has beautiful ideas here and there, but his playing also contains a lot of empty calories, you know? And I’ve never heard him play anything that I’d describe as soulful.