... a kind of action-adventure fable involving Victor, Michael, and a number of other friends and teachers. Here is the premise: Music — always capitalized and given feminine pronouns, and understood as a living entity — is sick and may be dying ... Of what? Wooten doesn’t really specify. This is not that kind of book. What kind of book is it? It’s a bit like Carlos Castaneda’s shamanist tales, a bit like tween fiction, a bit like websites on, say, sonic healing through principles of sacred geometry and — at its best — an enactment of epiphanies told in the ping-pong dialogue of its predecessor ... Your happiness as a reader will depend on how open you are to insights that recognize no coincidences, some of them from the crystal-indigo-rainbow file, as well as proposed, though not explained, secret-knowledge theories ... By the logic of this book, a lot of music made without 'real' instruments — a lot of the music in the world right now, and some of the best — may start to look suspect. That’s too bad. Wooten is an includer, not a delimiter; he’s better at holistic teaching than veiled polemic.
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 ... 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 ... A sometimes puzzling yet always rewarding delight for music fans of a mystical bent.
a remarkable fable in which music is dying ... In Wizard-Of-Oz–like fashion, he meets up with and befriends fellow musicians along the way and at story’s end discovers that the only way to defeat the Phasers is through the passion and spontaneity of live performance. This allegorical foray into the power of music is both heartfelt and wildly imaginative. Music lovers will adore this sparkling manifesto.
