Respecting the Voice of Nature with Roy “Futureman” Wooten Part 2 (of 2)
“I knew that nature was the theory book”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM futureman
Roy Wilfred Wooten, also known as “RoyEl”, best known by his stage name Future Man, is an inventor, musician, and composer. He is also known as Futche to his fans. He is a percussionist and member of the jazz quartet Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, along with banjoist Béla Fleck, harmonicist Howard Levy, and Roy’s brother, electric bass virtuoso Victor Wooten. Wooten is a five-time Grammy Award-winning performer with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. For the Flecktones, he plays the Drumitar, a novel electronic instrument of his own invention, and occasionally performs vocals as well.
Nature As A Theory Book
“As I was taking this journey, I was taking myself almost into this place where you move your ego out of the way in order to let a higher part of yourself come in. So I remember while I was doing this, I would just say, Man, I don't know anything. I would just come and say, I don't know anything, but I knew that I knew something. But it was like, in my mind exercise, I'm gonna take what I know, and just put it on the bookshelf. And then, whoa, there was enough room for something to come through.
So I think what got me into the nature part was, there's a couple things. One, I remember I was really into Bruce Lee. And Bruce Lee would always yield to nature. But Bruce Lee made the statement that if you were interested in in something to go ahead and really embrace it. While we were growing up in age of specialization, use will say if I'm a musician, I'm not going to read about Leonardo da Vinci. But wow, Leonardo da Vinci, he draws stuff that medical people still use. Now I'm hanging with mathematicians, who are doing equations for me to to know how to split the the notes. We could take the periodic table and hear those those numbers as pitches, we just bring them down into the audible spectrum. And now I'm hearing all of this stuff, like way beyond what I would think of. So with nature, I knew that I needed a theory book. And I knew that nature was the theory book. So I would go to people like a Walter Russell, who wrote a book called The Universal One. And he said that nature is always doing one thing, but because of temperature, pressure, time…it'll look like a bunch of things. Like if you go to Alaska, water looks like concrete, and you can make buildings out of it. Then all of a sudden you see it in the ocean, same stuff, then if you leave it alone, it evaporates back the gas, because that's really what it is. You put electricity and then turns into plasma. So this concept of going to nature as a theory book.
So I said, I want to take this guy's book as a music theory book. So I'm looking at Walter Russell, people like that. Nikola Tesla, you know, the secret of three, six and nine. And I'm hearing how does that sound in music? Boom, I'm bringing it back to music. The main music guy is John Ernst Worrell Keely, his stuff is about vibration, and sympathetic vibration. And how the universe acts like music. The seven note scales, seven note colors in the rainbow seven. There’s music principles that show you that how these things unfurl, and I can bring it back to music. So nature, to me has always been the blueprint. Because we're walking around right here, and we're under estimating nature. We're looking out here to trees, you see Fibonacci, you see all kinds of ratios. You look at nature, it goes just like the veins and your arms, the trees and just like veins reaching into the blood in the atmosphere. Nature's showing you so much. And we're under estimating it. Look at how bugs fly. Look at their wings. Look at the goggles on a fly to I'm saying, nature showing you some profound genius all the time.”
finding balance in nature
“We want to stay in balance with that source. And so what happens is, if we stay kind of in balance with nature, nature is going to show us how to do it. But a lot of times if we're doing it on principle, then you're doing it, but you're killing yourself. Consider where we are now with cell phones. We can connect communication and network all around the world. But we need to understand that all of these frequencies as was heating up the atmosphere. Dr. Ibrahim Karim explains how we all get these frequencies, and it's chaos out there. But there's a solution, you have to use nature shapes, organic shapes, to help these frequencies arrange themselves out of chaos into some type of order. So it doesn't have to heat up the atmosphere, it doesn't have to be harmful for the biological organism. And as we move forward, we're going to kind of grow up with the technologies that we have. When humans are going in electric cars, humans are going to have to learn that the human organism can't be sitting on top of batteries, without something grounding and organizing those frequencies because it's gonna cause dehydration and all kinds of problems.
But here, we're honoring nature. We're just saying, nature look, you can do what you're doing. But you got to look at the whole picture. If I create an electric socket, we can use that but don't stick your finger and something metal in there. Because it's gonna knock you and it might kill you. And so nature is always something to be so respected. When we talk about human in flight, not only does nature show you that flight is possible, it gives you a whole array of principles of how it's possible. This includes how the clouds stay up in the sky and don't fall down. They defy Newton's law of gravity, just that he's sitting up in the sky that's supposed to be slowly coming down. They just defy the law, Newton's law right there. And it's like, what is that?”
life in wonder
“Yeah, I think one part of it is just looking at things with wonder. The first thing that came to mind is something simple, like when we look at numbers. And the way nature's looking at numbers. I got this from Walter Russell, again, the universal one. He said nature's not doing more than four and a half things. He said nature completes all it has to do after four and a half, right? Before four and a half, and four and a half is nine. So our thumbs is the half. And here's 1234. The thought the thumb represents that half point, the pivot point, and 1234, if you get 10 out of that, but there's a principle. And if you know that principle, I've been applying that principle to rhythm. I can teach you all the rhythms without going over four and a half things. So what's fun is like, I don't know if it's just people that know Fibonacci, you know. And the Fibonacci numbers is where the first numbers one, and then you add another one, and then one and one makes two, and then two, and one makes three, and then three, and two makes five, five, and three makes eight, and it's growing in a progression like that, right? But each one of those steps is telling us something that's so cool about rhythm. So one on one makes two, if I play that as a rhythm 1112 cut that down.
And every time where we're respecting the voice of nature, how nature is telling us how to do something, right. So nature is like, we get so natural that it becomes supernatural.”
letting the music talk
“Right now what I see is there's so much intolerance for people. They say, Well, if you don't agree with me, just unfriend me right now, if you have been both the way I voted, then just unfriend me right now. And it's just like, we don't have no tolerance. But sometimes it's kind of like that our music was a vehicle that could convince someone that saw you as less that maybe I was wrong. See what I'm saying? Sometimes you have to come if you are really right. Like my mom says you don't have to argue. You just do what you're doing. And it can convince someone of your side not. So music was a journey that we were on. And a lot of times it would pull the reset.
Like, I'm gonna give you a story. There's a guy who was going to law school. He's coming out of law school, he was going to go out, get some drinks, meet some women and stuff. He walked past a club, he heard the trumpet player, and he said it was just clearly genius. And it was Louis Armstrong. And he wasn't used to seeing a black person associating that with genius. And he just sat there all that night man listening to this guy. That guy ended up becoming a judge on Roe vs. Wade. So your point, you can have tolerance for someone who doesn't agree with you.
We did a once did a gig and Beyla said, “Look, guys, we're gonna do this game, but we don't have to do it. Because we noticed clan out there. There's some people ain't never seen no black people. They might not like the music, you know?’” And we said, “Man, we got to bring the music.” We were bringing the music in for that purpose to let the music talk. Music is greater than us. Music is greater than my opinion versus your opinion. We just got to let the music talk. And since when we did that concept, people came back said that music changed that whole area. They saw things. And so music is something higher than I argued. People can get an aha moment that they didn't know they had.”
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