Victor Wooten & The Wooten Brothers

Victor Wooten & The Wooten Brothers

The Wooten brothers’ first public performance occurred in Hawaii in 1966 and established their identity as prodigies. Regi, the eldest son of Elijah "Pete" and Dorothy, was born in 1956. The first three sons arrived just a year apart—Roy in ’57, Rudy in ’58. Joseph was born in ’61, and three years later, in '64, Victor came. Victor learned to talk and play music at the same time.

Fast forward six years. REGI, still the leader of the family band, is 13 years old and Victor, the youngest, is 5, when the Wooten Brothers began opening a series of shows for R & B legends, “War”, and two years later for Curtis Mayfield, and many other national acts.Fast forward to the present, 2024. The Wootens have racked up 10 Grammy wins, and  26, yes, 26 Grammy nominations. And the youngest of the family, Victor, the brother who learned from all his older brothers, has been named by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the ten greatest bass players of all time.

Acclaim has come to each Wooten brother. REGI is a virtuoso guitarist, also renowned for his musical teaching skills. At the tender age of ten, Regi began teaching bass to his two year old brother Victor, while also teaching keyboard skills to his five year old brother, Joseph. Now, Regi teaches many students who travel from all over the world in various genres of music to learn from him. Regi is affectionately called "The Teacha", and he, similar to the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger, is a teacher to a global family.  

ROY also known as “Future Man”  has invented an instrument called the Drumitar that  is re-discovering the drumset, while helping to re-invent bluegrass and deconstruct jazz. Another instrument Roy invented, the RoyEl, is a piano shaped instrument and an homage to early pre-thirteenth century African-based music and mathematics, that derives rhythms and pitches from the golden ratio. With the insights gained from these new Instruments, Roy also serves as the creator and composer of the Evolution d’ Amour ballet and the Black Mozart Symphony, which introduces the legendary 18th century Black classical artist, Joseph Boulogne de Saint Georges, to the 20th and 21st century.

The late RUDY WOOTEN, who passed away in 2010, was inspired by the virtuosity and unique articulation of the legendary trumpet master Clifford Brown. He also mastered the playing styles of saxophone legends, Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane, and the blind triple saxophone playing master, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, so that his own double saxophone horn parts and solo’s became legendary!

JOSEPH came to Nashville as a singer but quickly became known as "The Hands of Soul" for his keyboard playing skills and songwriting genius. Joseph introduced his playing and songwriting mastery to a wider audience by re-arranging the Steve Miller classic "Fly like An Eagle" to include new spoken word lyrics. Since 1993, Joseph has travelled the world with Rock-in-Roll Hall of Famer Steve Miller in his Steve Miller Band, which has now sold over 60 million records—with a bulk of the sales  coming after Joseph  became a member of the band. And the extraordinary music making doesn’t just happen when the Wooten Brothers play all together or venture out singly-Victor and Roy, working together with Banjo master Bela Fleck, pianist and harmonica virtuoso Howard Levy, and saxophonist Jeff Coffin —well they earned a whole lot of those Wooten Grammy’s and Grammy nominations.

The Brothers' music bends and defines genres; amplifies centuries, and spans continents. The Wooten Brothers began in R+B. They evolved as teens into Jazz, Jazz Fusion, Classical and Country. Then, they emerged in 1985 on Arista records with an album called, "The Wootens", that combined Electronic, Funk, Soul, Disco, and Boogie—and offered only a sliver of the Wooten whole. The Wooten whole is all of that… and classical, and jazz, and country, and Rock-and-Roll. The Wooten whole is Prince before Prince. Maybe Clive Davis and the Arista team, who were focused on launching the extraordinary Whitney Houston, were not ready for that in 1985.

So many albums after that Arista album, as the Wootens go their separate ways, they play in giant arenas and in intimate clubs, crisscrossing the globe. They always come back to play together, sometimes close to home, sometimes a thousand miles away from their Middle-Tennessee homes.

Some of the best of times are in a camp Victor has established in a place called “Wooten Woods”, where people from around the world come to be inspired by Nature to learn to play with profound sound and silence to grow in new understanding and tones that are sweet and wise. Some of the other best times are in the jazz club named for the one brother who has passed on, Rudy.     Rudy’s Jazz Room is a live jazz club in Nashville with a growing jazz scene.The Wootens also play jazz and everything else in it, entertaining and inspiring  a growing Nashville music scene and city. The Wooten Brothers have even been known to play heavy metal in their unique Wootinish—way.

What is “The Wootinish-way”? It’s honing your craft, taking the diamond and cutting it just right, and polishing it bright. It’s not just the in-born genius. It’s not just the wisdom and insight that comes from inspired and gentle living close to nature, close to art, close to each other. It is a disciplined commitment to the craft of making sound in community and sharing sound with community—born of knowing sound and the precious space of silence, — a true, good, and saving thing.

And so they create new instruments, they revive compositions of dead composers, they leave the families they love, to bring the world they love the sounds they love. And they keep creating, performing, and recording  new music.

As a family band, they are second to none. But they are comparable to other notable family bands: The Beach Boys, the Allman Brothers, The Neville Brothers, and the Jackson Five.  Sonically inventive, soulful, musically driven, blood kin, that fill the dance floor, tickle the brain, and rock your world-- they are comparable to the best of the best family bands. The Wooten Brothers are the family band you need to know that you don’t know, or the family band you know, and want the world to know. Connecting  musically deep past to musical future, the Wooten Brothers explode genres and build bridges across genres.  Bar by bar, in live performances and on recordings, they provide an exhilarating ‘connects-you-to-the-center-of-the-universe’ sound.

The final Wooten paradox? They make universal music, but they are not universally known. Time to change that.  They are recording new music!! They have discovered deep vault tracks that include their late brother Rudy!