Victor Lemonte Wooten, né le 11 septembre 1964 est un bassiste américain de fusion (jazz-rock et jazz-Funk).

En 1988, il va à Nashville et est immédiatement recruté par le chanteur de blues et soul Jonel Mosser. Un an plus tard, il est pris en charge par le grand joueur de banjo Béla Fleck. Avec le claviériste et joueur d'harmonica Howard Levy, ainsi que son frère Roy Wooten (alias Future Man), ils forment le groupe Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Ils vont devenir célèbres pour leur style de jeu fusionesque hésitant entre le jazz et la funk.

Wooten a également été membre de plusieurs groupes de fusion et de progressif, dont Bass Extremes (avec Steve Bailey, Derico Watson et Oteil Burbridge), The Vital Tech Tones (avec Scott Henderson et Steve Smith), le trio Extraction (avec Greg Howe et Dennis Chambers), et le fameux saxophoniste Bill Evans. Il a également souvent été en tournée avec d'autres groupes comme le Dave Matthews Band.

Les standards de plus en plus élevés dans la construction des basses électriques modernes ont permis à Wooten de développer des techniques jusque là inconnues. La plus célèbre est celle du double aller-retour au pouce (Slap aller-retour), où il utilise son pouce comme un médiator ou encore son jeu de tapping impressionnant.

Ressource

--English Version—

Victor Lemonte Wooten is an electric bass player. He is known for his technical virtuosity and his skills as musician and composer. Wooten has won the "Bass Player of the Year" award from Bass Player magazine three times in a row, and was the first person to win the award more than once. In addition to a solo career and collaborations with various artists, Wooten has been the bassist for Béla Fleck and the Flecktones since the group's formation in 1988. In 2008, Wooten joined Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller to form SMV. SMV released a CD called Thunder and a tour in support of the CD starting in August 2008.

Modern improvements in electric bass guitar construction, such as a lowered string "action" and additional strings, have brought the bass closer to the electric guitar, allowing new playing techniques that were essentially impossible on a bass in the 1970s. When he was a child, Wooten's older brother Regi helped him develop his double-thumbing technique which was first created by Larry Graham. This technique, also utilized by such bassists as Marcus Miller (and Larry Graham too in "Release Yourself", 1974) uses the thumb to strike the string both downwards and upwards, similar to a guitar pick. Victor is also lauded for his Stanley Jordan-like two-handed tapping and "trademark" open-hammer-pluck technique. He utilizes all of these techniques to achieve an amazing array of sounds during live performance, from growling funk to machine-gun cascading arpeggios more reminiscent of Eddie Van Halen or Steve Vai.

Source