An Evening with Roy "Futureman" Wooten: Drum Concerto Premier

Come Spend an evening with Roy “Futureman” Wooten as he premiers his Solo Drum Concerto featuring his own original instruments and original compositions. The night will also feature inspired conversation, stories & audience participation with long time friend and mentor Dr Wayne Kirby, dedicated to the intersection of Music, Art and Sacred Geometry.

Futureman presents a new kind of solo drum music that includes not only beats and rudiments but also enchanting melodies, original compositions and soundtrack soundscapes inspired by the universal language of art, math and music.

 Futureman’s new directions in musical drumming involve deeply organic rhythms, and tunings that defy normal categorization, and craft a highly personal musical journey

Prepare to be uplifted as Futureman embarks on a transformational experience that will resonate long after the night ends!

Roy Wilfred Wooten (born October 13, 1957), also known as “RoyEl”, best known by his stage name Future Man (also written Futureman), 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 his brother, electric bass virtuoso Victor Wooten. Born in Hampton, Virginia, Roy Wooten was raised in a military family and therefore traveled frequently. He is the second of five sons born to Dorothy and Elijah “Pete” Wooten. He graduated from Denbigh High School in Newport News, Virginia in 1975. He briefly attended music classes at Norfolk State University upon graduating from high school, and then embarked on his professional music career. He and his brothers moved to Nashville, Tennessee in the mid-1980s.

All of his brothers are musicians. The oldest, Regi, is a guitarist and much sought-after teacher in Nashville. Roy Wooten, Regi, and their three younger brothers, Rudy (1959–2010) (saxophone), Joseph (keyboards), and Victor (bass guitar), performed as The Wooten Brothers in numerous musical venues in the Hampton Roads area of southeast Virginia during the 1970s.

Roy 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. More recently, Roy has developed a new melodic instrument called the RoyEl, which resembles a piano but plays notes not found in the traditional western music scales. The new instrument tunings are supported by the "Serious Composer" software of Dr Wayne Kirby which enables any sampled sound to be tuned to any mathematical frequency or ratio.

Like the other members of the Flecktones, Roy has worked on various solo projects during his time off from the band. On his own he often wears the fashion of a revolutionary/ pirate and uses the pseudonym “RoyEl”, which is also the name he gave to one of the keyboard instruments he invented. Futureman's solo albums are uniquely experimental and incorporate diverse musical genres and concepts. On Evolution de la Musique, for example, Futureman infuses traditional classical works with the classic style of the Miles Davis " seminal jazz recording "A Kind of Blue", especially by merging extended solo improvisations to classical masterpieces.

Among other-musical influences, Futureman includes Pythagorean numerology and Vedic mathematics to influence many of his musical and visual works. For example, on Dorian Pi Lullaby the listener gets to hear the melody of Pi played (by Chris Thile on mandolin) as a soothing lullaby in the dorian mode and on "The Seamless Script" DVD & audio project the music is a "primitivism" soundtrack for animation and images evolving to the "irrational" number of "Pi" revealing itself as a melody line and script of chords evolving without end and unfolding a songline story of immense mystery and beauty. Futureman's relentless curiosity, highlights a balanced artistic and scientific approach to music and mathematics that inspires him to create original compositions based on Sacred Geometry principles.

Using Dr Kirby's "Serious Composer" tuning software allows Futureman the ability to tune any sound samples to any mathematical vibrations such as the Schumann Resonance, the periodic table of elements or the golden ratio as tones. Dr Kirby is a long time friend, researcher, educator, performer and collaborator with Roy "Futureman" Wooten and will also be a featured guest.

Dr Wayne Kirby, a bassist, guitarist and electronic musician, is the Paddison Distinguished Professor of Music at UNC Asheville. He played with Debbie Harry (Blondie) in New York before moving to UNC Asheville, where he became a close associate of the late Bob Moog. Wayne studied composition at Julliard and recorded two albums on Capitol Records, sharing the bill with Jimi Hendrix, Traffic, et al. Later, Kirby left the group to pursue work as a performer, composer, arranger and conductor in New York theater, television, and records. From the late 1960s until the early 1980s, Kirby wrote arrangements and conducted for television shows including the Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and Julie Andrews shows.