Memories grow hazy after 50 years and millions of miles traveled, but with the right prompt a song can be reborn. For the Wooten Brothers, an unexpected email during the early months of the pandemic led to the rediscovery of an early 1970s demo recording that captured them as precociously funky kids.
Now the Wooten Brothers — bass guitarist/vocalist Victor, keyboardist/vocalist Joseph, guitarist/vocalist Regi, and percussionist/vocalist Roy “Futureman” Wooten — are featuring some of those long-lost songs on the Sweat Tour that brings the siblings to Berkeley’s UC Theatre on Saturday, Jan. 20 (with guitar great Stanley Jordan playing an opening set) and Santa Cruz’s Rio Theatre on Sunday Jan. 21.
“Hearing that music again was amazing,” said Victor Wooten, whose 35-year tenure in Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and solo career have made him the best known of the brothers. “We went back and learned three of the songs and we’re doing short versions as a medley.”
The family had recently settled in Newport News, Virginia, when rock ‘n’ roll impresario Don Kirshner sent a talent scout to check out the budding brother act around 1973. He left with a demo tape that he held onto until the early months of the pandemic. Trying to raise money to pay his wife’s medical bills he was going to sell the cassette online, but contacted Victor Wooten first.
“That was really stand-up,” Wooten said. “When we finally talked on the phone I told him to hold on, conferred with all my brothers, and we paid him more than he was asking.”
Hearing the music again was both revelatory and somewhat mysterious. “We realized we were in a real studio, but we don’t know when or where. And we realized there must be a real 2-inch tape somewhere, which was the format they used then.”
Searching through an old storage unit, they managed to locate the masters and plan to release several songs in the coming months, along with some new pieces they’ve recorded (starting with the abidingly funky “Sweat”).
They’re dedicating the new and vintage music to Rudy Wooten, the middle brother who played saxophone and died in 2010. An essential part of the Wooten Brothers’ sound, he wasn’t well-featured on the old demo tracks, “which fade out too soon,” Wooten said. “That’s when Rudy would really start to blow. He was always a quiet person, but he was brilliant at creating arrangements and soloing. We called him Quiet Storm.”
It’s hard to overstate the early momentum the Wooten Brothers attained with their flammable blend of jazz, funk, soul, and rock playing alongside big-league acts such as WAR, The Temptations, Frankie Beverly and Maze, and Mongo Santamaria. In 1972, when Victor, the youngest brother, was 5, and the oldest, Regi, was 14, they set the stage for Curtis Mayfield as the opening act on the Superfly Tour.
Heady stuff for a bunch of kids growing up in a working-class military family, “but we didn’t think we’re special,” Wooten recalled. “It’s just how it was. My parents didn’t think we were special. Their attitude was, as much as they do music, they should be good at it. What was special for me was growing up with four superheroes. I had four older siblings that never treated me as the younger one.”
Many sibling acts contend with rivalries and conflict. Not the Wootens, who’ve all settled near each other in Nashville. Their parents both hailed from huge families, with 13 and 14 kids on either side. Moving around frequently as their father was stationed on different bases, the brothers formed a self-contained unit.
“My parents’ rule was you could not fight each other,” Wooten said. “We grew up with that. We were not allowed to argue. We could discuss and have a disagreement, but you talked it out. We still know how to get along.”
The brothers all have their own musical projects, and when they come back together as a group new sounds and influences get integrated into the volatile mix. It’s been that way ever since “a bad record deal led to us working separately,” Wooten said. “Some brothers were in New York and some in Virginia, where we started working at this amusement park in Williamsburg playing country shows, Italian and German shows.”
It wasn’t the hippest setting, but that’s how Victor’s path first crossed with rising banjo star Béla Fleck in 1987, when they hit if off jamming together. Fleck had a major television special coming up in Nashville and recruited Wooten for the gig. “Béla said, ‘I just need a drummer, do you know any drummers?’ Indeed he did, bringing brother Roy into the coalescing Flecktones. It wasn’t long before the Wooten Brothers were on the road together again.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].
VICTOR WOOTEN WOOTEN BROTHERS
When & where: 8 p.m. Jan. 20 at UC Theatre, Berkeley; $35, theuctheatre.org; 7:30 p.m. Jan. 21 at Rio Theatre; Santa Cruz; $42- $73; www.kuumbwajazz.org
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