Victor Wooten To Release TRYPNOTYX September 8; First Album in Five Years Recorded With Dennis Chambers and Bob Franceschini…

Five-time GRAMMY award-winning bass player, producer, composer, author, and educator Victor Wooten will release his first album in five years, TRYPNOTYX, September 8. In support of the album, he will hit the road with the Victor Wooten Trio this fall following August dates with Béla Fleck & The Flecktones of which he is a founding member. A full list of dates is below.

Produced by Wooten, TRYPNOTYX features legendary drummer Dennis Chambers (Bootsy Collins, Santana), veteran saxophonist Bob Franceschini (Mike Stern, Paul Simon), and also features singer Varijashree Venugopal and comedian/voicetrumentalist Michael Winslow (Police Academy). The album is now available for pre-order.

From the sizzling “Funky D,” which features Winslow’s voice and sound effects and recalls the night a kindergarten-aged Wooten saw the Godfather of soul on stage for the first time, to “Cupid,” which features bucolic textures, a sylvan flute, and spoken word exchanges with Wooten and his children, themes from his life thread through the album, tying virtuoso performance and life experience together.

“Music is a great way – and a safe way – to teach just about any life principle,” Wooten insists. “To be in a band, you have to listen to each other. Bands are at their best when every instrument is different, not the same. Everyone takes turns talking. Everyone speaks their voice. A lot of times musicians might ask, ‘What would you like me to play?’ I say, “Listen to the music. The music will tell you exactly what it needs.”

Named “one of the Top 10 Bassists of All Time” by Rolling Stone, he has been voted “Bassist of the Year” three times by Bass Player magazine reader’s poll, and in February 2017 Huffington Post named him one of “50 Iconic Black Trailblazers,” pictured just after President Barack Obama.

The youngest of five boys, Wooten began playing music at two years old, and was playing gigs by the tender age of five with the family band, the Wooten Brothers, opening for Curtis Mayfield and War, among others. He first “wowed music heads” nationwide (Kansas City Star) in 1987, as a founding member of Béla Fleck & The Flecktones.

Not only an accomplished musician, Wooten is also an acrobat, magician, and skilled naturalist, who created Victor Wooten’s Center for Music and Nature, a 147-acre retreat in Tennessee for people of all ages. As an author, he penned a novel, The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search For Growth through Music, which is now part of the curriculum at The Berklee College of Music, where he is a performance scholar in residence, Stanford University, and other prestigious institutions.