As anyone who has seen him play knows, Victor Wooten is a wizard with a bass guitar. Whether he’s playing with his brothers Regi, Roy, Rudy, and Joseph; collaborating with Steve Bailey in Bass Extremes; backing banjoist Béla Fleck in the Flecktones; or contributing to such special projects as SMV with Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller or the prog-metal band Octavision, where he shares the bass duties with Billy Sheehan, Victor always brings his technical command, versatility, ingeniousness, and — above all — musicality to everything he does. He’s also a skillful and empathetic teacher at his workshops and camps and at Berklee College of Music, where he’s a performance scholar in the Bass Department. Victor has written a method book called Bass Workshop: The Language of Music and How to Speak It [2017, Hudson Music] that comes with four hours of online video instruction, but his most innovative concepts are captured in two unique volumes, The Music Lesson [2008, Berkley Books] and its follow-up, The Spirit of Music, published by Vintage Books early this year in both print and audio versions. In these books, Victor goes way beyond standard music-education texts to offer profound insights into life and music through the teachings of a mystical sage named Michael. Not long ago, I connected with Victor by phone at his home in Nashville to talk about his books. It was a fascinating conversation — here are some highlights. What inspired you to write The Music Lesson? It started from teaching at camps. I had come up with the idea of splitting music into ten equal parts. The students were like, “This is cool. You need to write a book.” And I kept saying, “Nope. I like giving you tools and pointing directions, and then you can find your way.” Then, when Steve Bailey and I were working on something for Bass Extremes, I flew into Myrtle Beach. Steve picked me up at the airport, and he had a copy of one of my favorite books, Illusions by Richard Bach [Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, 1977, Dell Publishing]. I had read it when I was 14 or 15. It’s about a teacher and a student, and that’s when the light bulb went off — don’t write a lesson book; write a story about a teacher and a student. Put the lessons in there, but people don’t have to get into that, they can just enjoy the story. So, that book gave me the way to do it, as well as what I had learned from one of my nature teachers, Tom Brown Jr. I got into nature after reading his book called The Tracker [The Tracker: The True Story of Tom Brown Jr., 1978, Penguin Books], which is about his teacher and him. A teacher and a student was the way to do it. Michael teaches by asking questions, which is the Socratic Method. Did you study that in school? My wife told me it was the Socratic Method. I learned it from my nature teachers as Coyote Teaching, where you answer questions with questions, so the students arrive at the answers themselves after lear