THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC

The renowned bassist takes readers on a loopy, decidedly unique tour of the enigmatic realm of music.

A founding member of the jazz-tinged bluegrass (or perhaps bluegrass-tinged jazz) group Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Wooten, a five-time Grammy winner who clearly thinks deeply about matters of art and philosophy, opens with the observation that people are recruited by an enigmatic force to make music: “Music is a living consciousness who is aware of each musician. She chooses us in the same sense that we choose our instruments.” Once we choose our instruments, we teach ourselves with a little generous help, as when Wooten tells a would-be acolyte, “I can teach you nothing because there is nothing to be taught. But…I can show you things.” The Yoda-with-four-strings moments come fast and furious, but the author scores more practical points when he writes about the reductiveness of a musical world in which the vast aural spectrum that a record captures is narrowed by the CD and then narrowed logarithmically further by the MP3. “That scares me,” he writes. “Literally, we are not receiving the same amount of Music that our parents did. The frequencies we hear today have been drastically diminished in just a few short years.” Nor are we sitting on our beds listening intently to an entire album with our friends, building a musical culture. Instead, we’re glued to our tiny, tinny phones. Part exhortation, part New Age–ish memoir, part philosophical treatise, Wooten’s book is full of surprising and illuminating lessons along with some learned guesswork: Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” wasn’t about a lady at all but a guitar; the Greeks were the first musical theoreticians; the note C is, in scientific notation, 256 Hz; Nashville is the Athens of the South “because it is exactly 256 miles away from Atlanta.”

A sometimes puzzling yet always rewarding delight for music fans of a mystical bent.