Tedeschi Trucks Band, Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Tuesday, June 28, 8 p.m. as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival. For more information visit coastaljazz.ca.
Derek Trucks taps into history every time he picks up his guitar. The nephew of Allman Brothers’ drummer Butch Trucks he grew up in an environment saturated in southern myth and the legend of Duane Allman.
Trucks began performing as a professional musician almost as soon as he could hold an instrument and in his teens was already sharing the stage with the likes of Bob Dylan and Buddy Guy. It wasn’t so much a vocation for the young slide guitarist as a way of life played out 24/7.
With the Tedeschi Trucks Band, the powerful ensemble he formed in 2010 with his wife Susan Tedeschi, Trucks follows in the footsteps of the two-drummer Allman Brothers and other southern juggernauts such as Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. Bands put together like extended families with accompanying horn sections, backup singers and a soulful camaraderie forged on the road.
The Tedeschi Trucks Band plays a blues-based rock which can and usually does take off in a number of other improvisational directions bringing in jazz, gospel, country roots and Indian classical influences as well. A soulful southern stew prepared by 12 masterful musicians.
Trucks talked to the North Shore News earlier this week about the band and their upcoming tour which takes them across North America through the summer. They will finish up with a six-night stand at New York City’s Beacon Theater in October, something the Allman Brothers Band did annually for many years and Tedeschi Trucks intend to keep that tradition alive.
North Shore News: You seem to have been born to make music. Does it seem that way to you? Did you ever consider anything else?
Derek Trucks: Not really. It definitely feels that way at times. I started playing at nine years old and didn’t really think a whole lot about it at that time. You kind of do what you do but since I’ve started playing I never thought about doing anything else. It’s been a good twenty-something years of being on the road and trying to carry it on and keep the flame lit in a lot of ways. Keep the intensity and not let up.
NSN: Canada played a part in the very early part of your career when you travelled to Toronto for a gig. How did that come about?
Derek Trucks: I think the first show I ever played outside of Jacksonville was the Toronto Jazz and Blues Festival. Maybe 1989, I think that sounds right. That was a whole new world. I hadn’t travelled too much outside the city or state at that point. It was an exciting road trip. I think I rode in the front of the RV the whole way, just watching the highway pass by. I’ve gotten used to those roads quite a bit since, though.
NSN: What was the name of the band you were playing with?
Derek Trucks: It was a blues band out of Jacksonville, Florida at the time. The lead singer was from Oklahoma. His name was Ace Moreland and the band was called Ace Moreland and the West Side Story. I think the club we played at the time was called Downtown Brown’s. It was this little club that was underground right across from the park. The main festival was across in the park and we played in this little club and I would sit in for two or three songs a set.
NSN: You do have sports in the blood as well through baseball pitcher Virgil Trucks. Is sports still a part of your life?
Derek Trucks: Oh yea, we’re big sports fans. My son is a baseball player, a great pitcher and third baseman. He’s 14 now so he keeps that alive. Big sports fans, I mean we have Jaguar seasons tickets. It’s been slow going the last few years but we’ve seen a few of the Seahawks Super Bowls too – we were there for the win and the loss unfortunately.
NSN: Duane Allman pops up a lot in connection with you and your music. When did you first become aware of him as a kid?
Derek Trucks: As far back as I can remember. I remember my dad putting me and my brother to sleep by playing vinyl in our room. It would be the Fillmore East and Eat a Peach and those records. The Layla record. That music was always there long before I was playing. Really my first musical memories are of those albums spinning. (NSN: Almost like lullabies). Totally and looking back on it I remember when I finally joined the Allman Brothers and starting to learn those tunes a lot of it felt second nature. It was all in the subconscious I had heard it so much growing up that it really did feel like it was second nature.
NSN: What does Duane’s legacy mean to you?
Derek Trucks: He was an important figure. I think the fact that he went out so young. He had just this incredible integrity and fierceness to his playing – and certainly being around for the 15 years that I was in it, his leadership from the early days still loomed large over that group. He was a powerful character. You could see with my uncle and Gregg and Jaimoe he was almost a religious figure for those guys. He was a serious leader. I think his vision for that group and that it was very much a band, not him and his brother and some sidemen, that’s big reason that music has carried on. A lot of other things have come and gone but the forcefulness of that music has transcended everything else.
NSN: Improvisation plays a big part in your sound. How did you get interested in Indian classical music and jazz? Two vast categories in themselves.
Derek Trucks: I guess I was 13, 14 years old – I was touring with Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit. The Colonel is sort of this southeastern musical guru kind of like a Zappa figure but a bit different. He turned me on to (John Coltrane’s) A Love Supreme and Giant Steps and Sun Ra records when I was really young. Just the way he would speak about music it really opened up a lot of doors. A drummer I was playing who also played with the Colonel, Jeff Sipe, turned me on to Ali Akbar Khan and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Just amazing musical traditions, both of them.
You know you are always searching for the deepest part of the well. I think when it comes to Indian classical, someone like Ali Akbar Khan certainly occupies that space and I think John Coltrane in jazz is one of those characters so I kind of went down both of those worm holes and you know you never stop listening, you never stop learning from those things.
NSN: What a musical education you got there on the road.
Derek Trucks: Absolutely. A lot of what we do is certainly meeting the right people at the right time that kind of sets you off on different paths and I was kind of lucky to run into that crew when I did.
NSN: Did you study with Ali Akbar Khan?
Derek Trucks: I never got to fully study with him. Whenever we would travel out to San Rafael around San Francisco we would go visit his college and sit in on classes. I was always on the road I never got to jump fully in. It was certainly an education sitting in. He would make all the instrumentalists take vocal classes because his thing was you should be singing the melodies through your instrument. A lot of those lessons definitely took.
NSN: You play a wide range of music, including instrumental pieces, how does Susan’s vocals fit into your music?
Derek Trucks: I think in some ways it was full circle for me because growing up really keying in on records like the Fillmore East, Eat a Peach and the Dominos stuff it was always that balance between improvisation and these amazing instrumental sections and passages and great songs and a great vocalist.
That’s always where my roots have been and then as you’re growing and learning and going down different paths you’re experimenting and you’re trying all these different things. I think for me the perfect setup was always trying to find a place where you could wander as far as you wanted to musically but there was still a great song and a great vocalist there. This has been in a lot of ways all of that coming to fruition finally.
NSN: That explains the new album to a T. There is an organic nature to the band and that’s amazing considering how large it is.
Derek Trucks: It takes time gigging and playing together and learning each other to get to that point but I feel like when we started recording this record it certainly jelled. I feel like the band in a lot of ways came into its own around this time. Everybody wrote the songs together. I felt there was a lot of synergy and a lot of great music that appeared around that time.
NSN: How does the writing process work with the band? Do you set time aside in your home studio? Do you make time on the road?
Derek Trucks: We do it in different ways. Some of the ideas will come up at a soundcheck and we’ll record them and try and remember them. A lot of it is just spontaneous in the studio. Some of the songs will come in as sketches. Mike Mattison will have a sketch or me and Doyle will write a few tunes together and then we get together with the band and the songs expand from there.
A lot of times we’ll get the core of the band, the rhythm section, me and Susan and just play. A lot of ideas come out of that. At least this time around - it was pretty spontaneous the way the record came together. We were really getting together to rehearse for a tour and maybe work up some new tunes just to gig. There were so many new song ideas that were floating around we (changed things around) and turned it into a recording session. Once we started down that road there was no stopping it. It’s nice when it turns out that way. I could feel that the band was kind of chomping at the bit to get back in. It was really productive last go-round so everybody was ready to hit the studio and start the writing process again. I’m certainly ready.
NSN: What are the logistics of getting everybody together?
Derek Trucks: It’s a feat keeping 12 people on the road and all that goes with it. Generally we’ll fly the core of the band in first and get started with a smaller band, five or six piece, and then we’ll have the horn section come in and then the singers but it’s easier just to get started with the core. It seems to move a little more fluid that way.
NSN: How did the Mad Dogs and Englishmen concert come about last year at the Lockn’ Festival in Arrington, Virginia?
Derek Trucks: They’re always trying to get artists to collaborate, maybe a band and a solo artist, and they had come to us about Joe Cocker sitting in with our group at that festival. We were certainly into the idea, we had reached out to him and he was interested. About the time we started going down that road he got sick and then we heard he wasn’t going to be touring. The next thing we know he passed away.
That next year the festival asked us to do a Joe Cocker tribute. I didn’t feel totally comfortable doing it, we’d only talked briefly and I didn’t (know him very well). We talked about the Mad Dogs thing and I knew Leon (Russell). We’d just played with Leon and if he was into it we would certainly be a backing band for him and any of the Mad Dogs if it was something that he was interested in.
I didn’t think he would really be into it just because it was a one-time tour. You never know how people feel about those things but we reached out to Leon and to our surprise he was into the idea of doing it with our band. We started reaching out to Rita Coolidge and Claudia Lennear and Bobby Torres and Chris Stainton, who I played with in the Clapton band, and everybody was just excited to do it. And then people started reaching out to us who had been a part of the band when word started getting out. Our thing was whoever was there ‘Come on.’
We ended up having 22 people on stage between their band and our band it was a pretty amazing three or four days I’ve got to say. It was just this amazing reunion 40 years since they had done it and the music was better than I had even hoped. Those things can go a few different ways but that one exceeded everybody’s expectations. It really was a magical few days.
NSN: Would you ever do something like that again?
Derek Trucks: Maybe. It went so well part of me wants to leave it there. I feel if you keep on going back to the well it won’t have the same spirit. There’s something nice about it just ending on top at least our portion of it. It was so good I know it would be fun to do it again. My gut tells me it should just be a stand-alone thing.
NSN: Looking at your tour itinerary the Beacon Theatre looms large at the end of the summer. What does that venue mean to you?
Derek Trucks: In some ways I feel it’s a great way for the band to check in and it’s a great test for the band every year to go back to the same place. You have to make sure you’ve made significant progress from one year to the next. When you’re doing six nights you want to make sure you can make each one of the six nights different musically and work at a high level. I feel it’s like a self-imposed challenge every year to go in there as a band and raise the bar a little bit. I probably played 150, 175 shows with the Allman Brothers in that room. That room feels very much like home and in some ways we wanted to carry on that tradition. We moved it to a different time of year so it wasn’t fully tied to that. New York’s an amazing place that’s certainly something we gear up for every year. It feels like the playoffs. You’ve got to be on it when you hit the Beacon Theatre.
