Béla Fleck and the Flecktones bassist Victor Wooten puts his philosophy about life and music into a novel. And guess what? It's good.

Since 1988, Victor Lemonte Wooten has been regarded as one of the premier electric bassists on the planet. Whether as a member of the Grammy-winning Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, fronting his own funk/jazz group or working with jazz guitarist Mike Stern, Cape Breton fiddler Natalie McMaster or fusion supergroup Vital Tech Tones (with Scott Henderson and Steve Smith), Wooten is lauded in musical circles for his abilities on the instrument.

The Music Lesson (Vix Boox) is a distillation of concepts Wooten has developed, both over the course of his career and teaching through his Bass/Nature Camps. Wooten's students will recognize many of these ideas: 2 through 10, the notion of Music as a language, etc. But Wooten has placed all of these concepts in a novel.

The narrator is a 25-year-old bassist living in Nashville, Tennessee. His career is going nowhere, he's frustrated with his instrument, he can barely make ends meet, and as for having a girlfriend . . . forget it. While dispiritedly practicing his modes and scales, he falls asleep. Suddenly, he wakes up to see Michael, a bizarrely-dressed man, sitting in his living room.

"Who are you?" (the narrator asks).

"I am your teacher." (Michael replies).

"My teacher?"

"Yes."

"My teacher of what?"

"Nothing."

From there, the narrator is drawn into a dizzying world where the 10 aspects of music are laid out for him in vivid and surreal terms. One of the first lessons delivered is the idea of Music as a language, just like English or Chinese.

"If Music and English are both languages," Michael says at one point, "then why not apply the process used to get good at one of them to the other?"

Head-spinning stuff, but this is only one of the thousands of concepts unleashed in The Music Lesson. Wooten groups them all into what he calls the 10 Elements of Music. Here they are:

1) Notes: melody, harmony, etc.

2) Articulation: the duration of each note, how it starts and ends

3) Technique: the means to reproduce what you want to play as naturally as possible

4) Feel: creating emotion or 'energy in motion'

5) Dynamics: volume, or the lack thereof

6) Rhythm: finding the pulse of Music, or Life

7) Tone: using tonality to generate emotion

8) Phrasing: working around the rhythm

9) Space: the 13th note

10) Listening: how what you play works with what everyone else is doing around you.

These are some pretty esoteric concepts, but Wooten lays them out in an entertaining, folksy style. Along the way, he introduces the reader to a cast of characters that will be very familiar to anyone who know anything about Victor's career.

So why would you buy this book? Maybe you don't play bass. Or you don't play jazz. Maybe you don't even like Victor Wooten's music. However, the fact remains that he's able to make a pretty good living doing what he wants to do: playing the music that he wants to play. And Victor's giving you a chance to pick his brain, to take what he's learned as one of the top musicians in the world and apply it to your music. Doesn't that sound like a good idea?

You can order The Music Lesson through the VixBoox link on Victor Wooten's website.