I have no idea what to say. I don’t want to go overboard, but the Wooten’s are unfreakinbelievable.
Note to anyone who plays an instrument: Check out this show. If you can appreciate musical talent, then you will be incredibly impressed by all of the acts.
IMHO, this blows a Bela Fleck show out of the water. As Rufus has already said, Victor is a showman. He went all out the entire time, which ended up being around 3.5 hours.
Here’s the breakdown:
Vic’s band comes out and starts playing a funky jam, including Reggie Wooten on the 10 string bass (not a 5 double stringed, but ten separate strings!), the lights go dark after a bit, and Victor appears at the top of a built up area of the stage slappin the inlays right out of his bass as one would expect.
The show features a lot of new material, very funky in nature of course. Vic lets everyone get in on the action with some incredible soloing by each artist in the band. He joins most of them at some point for a little jam on the side before rolling right into the next tune, a la Bela Fleck.
The highlight of the show, and this will suprise you, was…Reggie Wooten on the guitar! Holy Shit. This guy is other-worldly. He does on the guitar what Victor does on the bass, literally. He actually was slapping and popping with Vic’s style on the guitar perfectly. He then went off on an incredible solo. I have seen many guitar players blast through a solo, but he was doing things, technically, that I had never seen nor imagined.
The band reappears to join Reggie, and the get into a tight, heavy riff. Imagine the crunchy guitar noise now: juh, juh. juh, juh. juh,juh. and so on, until they go right into Cashmere! They somehow morph this into “Get Up” then “Dance to the Music” and one other 70’s funk tune that I can’t recall at this time. The band leaves again, Reggie burns a damn hole on the neck of his guitar, playing faster than I have ever seen, and they come back out and go back into Cashmere and the place almost burns down!!! God, it was great!
If you go, don’t leave early. They came back on the stage after the first exit, and played for almost another hour. This is where you will get the classic Vic lines like “Me and My Bass Guitar”, “Sinister Minister (only a sample)”, “You Can’t Hold no Groove”, and so on. All of these were run one right into the other in incredible fashion.
Vic then leaves the stage, and the lights go out again while the band jams. He reappears on the built up portion again, but this time he has 8 arms! The 8 arm thing was sort of the theme of the show as they had shown a movie clip at the begining about the assertion that Mr. Wooten could only play all of those notes if he was blessed with 8 limbs.
I know this has been long, but I am still in awe. Questions?