Hannah Crooks
[email protected]
Though their tour hasn’t involved many surprises, Friday night, renowned bassist Victor Wooten, drummer Dennis Chambers, and saxophonist Bob Franceschini found themselves stranded in a broken down tour bus.
Hours later, another bus arrived to transport the musicians to Philadelphia for their next performance. Aside from this mishap, however, the members of the Victor Wooten Trio describe the tour as extremely positive.
“The other surprise is that we’ve had a lot of sellout shows,” Wooten said. “A few shows were sold out weeks in advance. That always feels good to know that there’s a lot of people who enjoy what you do.”
Fans of the Trio’s eclectic fusion of funk and jazz came, saw, and adored Wednesday night, when the group performed at the Englert Theater.
A winner of nearly every major award for bassists, Wooten ranks in *Rolling Stone* as one of the top 10 best bassists of all time. He is a five-time Grammy winner, partially for his playing in the band Béla Fleck & The Flecktones. The famous bassist has even been voted bassist of the year by *Bass Player Magazine* three times — two more than any other musician selected for the honor.
The youngest of five musically-inclined brothers, Wooten’s bass-playing dates back to the age of two years old. While his parents were not musical, they supported their son’s aspirations to play professionally, on one condition.
“They allowed us to be [musicians] and they made sure that whatever we did, we did it to the best of our ability and for the right reasons, not only for self gain,” Wooten said. “My mom… would say, ‘What does the world need? Just another good musician?’ She said that we had plenty of those. What the world needs is good people.”
Wooten appreciates this view of music and even compares playing in a band to the grand scheme of life and accepting diversity.
“Music is a great representation of how life can work,” he said. “In music, we know that the band is better if all the instruments are different. Life is really like that if we allow it to be. Many times in life we curse the differences, but on stage we bless the differences and we accept them and we understand the benefits of each musician being different.”
After admiring the instrumental work of both Chambers and Franceschini, Wooten contacted the drummer and saxophonist inquiring about forming a trio.
Chambers also began performing shows before hitting double-digits. Beginning at age four, he has now been playing drums for over fifty years.
“[The trio] has been a great experience,” Chambers said. “The set is pretty much the same, but the music is played differently every night. It’s refreshing.”
The stage was set up simply, with only the instruments and musicians on stage, allowing the music to speak for itself. Two minutes in, the funky tunes already had me tapping my feet and the audience cheering wildly.
Franceschini was full of surprises, delivering enormous sounds I had never heard a saxophone create before, and even bringing out his flute for one song. The flute melody floated beautifully over the lower sounds of the bass and drums.
Something about the blend of the low bass rumble, the high, soulful sound of the saxophone, and the steady, but never predictable drums makes it seem like these three instruments — and the musicians playing them — were destined to combined.
With the extraordinary talents of Wooten, Chambers and Franceschini, The Victor Wooten Trio spawns a jaw-dropping performance that anyone would’ve enjoyed–and that the more adventurous among us would’ve wanted to dance to.