Futureman with the Black Mozart Ensemble
Words: Shawn Kyle
Photo: Maria Grazia Facciola

Appearing:
April 22, 2008
Skipper’s Smokehouse, Tampa

Roy Wooten – better know by his stage name, Futureman – is a musician, inventor and composer. While he is best known as a 4 time Grammy Award winning member of genre defying jazz group, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, his recent opus, The Black Mozart Ensemble, finds him taking the helm as the composer and conductor of orchestral instruments and spoken word urban artists.

The Black Mozart composition is dedicated to Joseph Boulogne, Le Chevalier Saint Georges, also known as “Le Mozart Noir” was a towering figure in 1700s French history renowned for being the first orchestral composer, conductor and violin virtuoso of mixed race African decent. As if those achievements aren’t impressive enough, he was also the country’s first black military colonel, and was widely regarded as its finest swordsman.

Equally enigmatic and experimental, this recent work incorporates classical music, history, and modern urban lyricism. It even expands the boundaries of musical notes and instruments as we know them.

 
“Somebody said people don’t make instruments anymore, but I didn’t get that memo,” Futureman chuckles. He just picked up one of the featured performers in The Black Mozart Ensemble fresh off the plane from Bombay, and is cheerfully preparing for the upcoming tour. 

 “The instrument that people see me playing with Bela Fleck is the drumitar. It’s a cross between a drum and a guitar, I didn’t really care for that name but it stuck. It’s basically an experiment to see if I could use my fingers like drumsticks. It allows those patterns to go through multiple phases. You become melodic really fast. It allows you to think of it in multiple layers.”

“With these ideas it forced me to create instruments to get me to the point that I was thinking of. An instrument is so personal when you get to this depth.”

Futureman’s music does indeed run deep. As one of the Wooten brothers, he is a member of one of the most renowned and virtuosic music families now residing in Nashville. As children in the 1960s, their parents encouraged them to play and perform. The youngest, Victor Wooten, is an internationally known Bass virtuoso, and also a member of the Flecktones.

“The secret was that our parents supported us, and allowed us to play clubs way before we were allowed to be in those clubs. Vic, for example, was five years old. By the time he was seven he was a pro. With that support there is confidence to try what it is you seek even if it is a path that you don’t know…”

This path has now led Futureman to not only create a new system of drumming, but also a new form of a piano, and even a new musical scale. His invention, known as the RoyEl, operates to give you four different notes per note you would normally play, depending on how hard you strike the keys. These notes are based on the golden ratio – the same mathematic formula used by Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, and architects of the Renaissance. It is a naturally occurring formula found in examples such as shells, the leaves and branches of trees, and the human body. Futureman believes that these equations are found naturally in music as well.

“When you hear jazz musicians hitting these notes, they hit two notes together trying to get the sounds in between. When I hear indigenous music around the world, I hear pitches that go off the normal scale. With The Black Mozart Ensemble, it represents the first really adventurous symphonic work that I have composed on my RoyEl piano and it has this edge of revolution. We go from the ballroom, courtly music all the way to the rhythm of the fields.”

futuremanmusic.com