{"id":858,"date":"2012-09-18T17:27:18","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T17:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=858"},"modified":"2012-09-18T21:13:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-18T21:13:00","slug":"is-the-tedeschi-trucks-band-the-best-american-band-working-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=858","title":{"rendered":"Is the Tedeschi Trucks Band the Best American Group Working Today?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Tedeschi Trucks Band. Photo courtesy http:\/\/www.relix.com\/blogs\/exposed\/2012\/09\/06\/tedeschi-trucks-band-at-red-rocks-a-gallery<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

When Susan Tedeschi joined forces with Derek Trucks their combined surnames hardly made for a mellifluous moniker. But this crew is doing some of the heaviest lifting in contemporary music today, and delivering the goods to fresh and fertile places.<\/p>\n

Their name\u2019s assonance may grind like a 16 wheeler, but The Tedeschi Trucks Band hauls loads of subtle artistry along with its pile of stylistic influences. And with the results, I say, keep on truckin\u2019.<\/p>\n

Is\u00a0Tedeschi-Trucks\u00a0the best American band on the road today?<\/p>\n

I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt compelled to ask such a question about a performing group, especially one who has only one studio album and one live recording.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s exciting to anticipate that they figure to have their best music ahead of them. Which is why, as they come close to the end of a long American tour (the final date is Oct. 27) it\u2019s high time to assess this group\u2019s startling impact. This sense of their fast ascendance is hardly just my impression or opinion. Consider the remarkably impressive average rating of the band\u2019s current tour: 4 and one half out of five stars in 756 customer reviews on Ticketmaster. And 91% of these said they would recommend the show to a friend. 1<\/p>\n

To fortify that live-concert poll, I\u2019ll consider material that my blog readers can refer to: the band\u2019s one studio album Revelator,<\/em> their live recording Everybody\u2019s Talkin\u2019<\/em> and a number of You Tubes of concert footage.<\/p>\n

Along with the extraordinary quality of the Grammy-winning studio recording, this group has become a phenomenon because of its in-concert range and dynamism. That\u2019s demonstrated on the two record set Everybody\u2019s Talkin\u2019<\/em> album, which may find a ranking \u00a0among extraordinary two-record live rock albums worthy of their length: Bob Dylan\u2019s The Royal Albert Hall Concert, <\/em>Cream\u2019s Wheels of Fire, <\/em>The Grateful Dead’s Live Dead,<\/em> Santana’s three-record set Lotus <\/em>and the Allman Brothers\u2019 Live at the Fillmore East. <\/em><\/p>\n

I first got a sense of this group’s live potential when I saw them do Junior Wells\u2019 \u201cLittle by Little\u201d and Eric Clapton’s \u201cAny Day\u201d in the DVD of Clapton’s 2007 Crossroads Guitar Festival,<\/em> when the couple toured with the current band\u2019s predecessor, The Soul Stew Revival. http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=jiwktkw_rqE&feature=related<\/a><\/p>\n

It was clearly evident how these performers could revitalize classic material with their cross-vernacular spin. \u201cAny Day\u201d was right in their wheelhouse, being from the Layla<\/em> album by Derek and the Dominoes (a.k.a. Eric Clapton, Duane Allman and friends) which is a primary touchstone for guitarist Trucks\u2019 style. (Trucks was named by his father — original Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks — for the Layla<\/em> band\u2019s mythical \u201cDerek,\u201d and Allman is admittedly his main guitar influence, along with Elmore James.) Here vocalist Mike Mattison shows his singing chops by sharing the lead vocals with Tedeschi. Truck\u2019s solo climbs through vintage Allman Brothers licks — a hot melding of Duane Allman\u2019s blues intensity and Dickey Betts\u2019 lyrical ardor — and climaxes with some intoxicatingly woozy chords. It\u2019s a performance that clearly gasses Clapton himself and emcee Bill Murray, among others, from the side stage.<\/p>\n

I played this video for my cultural journalism class at Edgewood College and my students loved it. A couple of them came up to me afterwards and told me how much they enjoyed it, a rare occurrence.<\/p>\n

Then came the band\u2019s first album Revelator<\/em> and, among other accolades, a Grammy award — which is not always an indication of the best recording in a given category. But in this case TTB\u2019s 2012 Grammy for Best Blues Album indicates something that expands the blues category to its outer limits. And yet virtually nothing this group plays sounds outr\u00e9 or pretentious, unlike some of today\u2019s big rock-pop acts, whose ambition can sometimes waterlog their artistry.<\/p>\n

Okay let’s start with the core of the talent. How many would argue that this group doesn’t have the best combination of lead singer and lead instrumentalist of any group on the circuit today?<\/p>\n

SUSAN TEDESCHI<\/strong> — The ravaged emotive textures that crawl out of her throat prompt the apt comparisons to Janis Joplin and Bonnie Raitt. But another predecessor dwells deeply in her style — Tracy Nelson, a still underappreciated contemporary of Raitt and Joplin. This is most evident in the bright, clarion alto that seems the real vortex of Tedeschi\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n

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Nelson has long melded gospel, blues, rock and country, often with\u00a0almost religious fervor, by contrast to the more secular sensibilities of Joplin and Raitt. Tedeschi often conveys a powerful sense of testifying, a pursuit of grace and redemption that feels authentic, especially in a song like the funky roof-raiser \u201cBound for Glory.\u201d But also hear \u201cThese Walls,\u201d about an impoverished woman who\u2019s scuffling mightily since her man left. She prays \u201cOh Lord, don\u2019t let these walls fall down.\u201d Raised as a Catholic, Tedeschi found little inspiration in the church choir, so she attended predominantly African-American Baptist churches, feeling the music was “less repressed and more like a celebration of God.”
\nAt the Berklee School of Music she sang in a gospel choir.<\/p>\n

Yet the auburn-tressed Tedeschi hardly comes across as a church mouse. Onstage she\u2019s open-hearted, tough, sensual and earthy — thus heightening the proverbial Saturday night\/Sunday morning dichotomy of the classic gospel experience.<\/p>\n

Yet as a mother of two, she shows no traces of, say, Joplin\u2019s self-destructively desperate sexuality. And as an accomplished singer-songwriter-guitarist and bandleader of men in her own right, Tedeschi\u2019s her own definition of a 21st-century liberated woman. If only Joplin could\u2019ve lived to learn from her musical progeny\u2019s apparently self-possessed wisdom. Being a Yankee from Boston (like fellow singer Mike Mattison, a Minneapolis-born black man) Tedeschi defies the estimable Muddy Waters dictum that \u201cwhite kids\u2026cannot vocal like the black man.\u201d We know it ain\u2019t a province of gender and today at least a few white Northern kids seem able to genuinely vocal the blues, perhaps because they did grow up in the culture, even if it was a conscious yet instinctive choice, as Susan\u2019s was.<\/p>\n

DEREK TRUCKS<\/strong> \u2013 He played with the Allman Brothers band as a young guitar slinger, and learned virtually all his primary bottleneck slide technique from the short-lived Duane Allman, mostly by poring over recordings and videos of the group. He was eight when Allman died in 1979 but Trucks had the virtuosic blues-jazz style down by 1993 (see you tube video). http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-Iq1xw8-PtA<\/a><\/p>\n

He retains a strong musical relationship with guitarist Warren Haynes who replaced Allman in the legendary band from Macon, Georgia that redefined Southern rock music virtually single-handedly. He was among the youngest ever to receive a Lifetime Achievement Grammy award this year, along with ten other members of the Allman Brothers Band.<\/p>\n

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Derek Trucks displaying his fingerstyle picking and bottleneck slide technique. http:\/\/www.relix.com\/blogs\/exposed\/2012\/09\/06\/tedeschi-trucks-band-at-red-rocks-a-gallery<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Trucks is ranked 16 in Rolling Stone<\/em> magazine\u2019s 2001 list of 100 Greatest Guitarists. At 32, he\u2019s also easily the youngest among the top 20, suggesting the potential he has shown on Revelator and the groups long current tour. 2
\nConsider also that Trucks, Gary Clark Jr. and Trombone Shorty represented a new generation of blues musicians when the guitarist and Tedeschi (who\u2019s nine years his elder) played for President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama and guests on for the PBS TV \u201cIn Performance at the White House\u201d series on February 21. Showcasing the importance of the blues in American culture, the event also featured B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Shemekia Copeland, Keb Mo, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and other major blues musicians.<\/p>\n

As an implicit seal of approval, King, surely the greatest living blues musician, has been performing on some dates of the Tedeschi Trucks current tour.<\/p>\n

SONGWRITING<\/strong> \u2013 Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Revelator<\/em> was that all 13 titles were originals written by this band. This was as crucial to the new partnership as their performing prowess. On Trucks\u2019 previous band\u2019s albums \u201cSonglines,\u201d and \u201cAlready Free,\u201d (which earned him his first Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album) Trucks says he \u201cwas interested in making more song-driven records, and Revelator <\/em>is another step in that direction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have great players in this band, and everyone gets a chance to shine on this recording without straying from the focus of the album. It\u2019s all about serving the song, supporting what Susan\u2019s doing and building the whole sound up into something bigger than our own individual input.\u201d 1<\/p>\n

The band\u2019s dynamics and songwriting skills are exemplified by \u201cMidnight in Harlem,\u201d a swaying, moon-lit melody and vividly rendered lyric: I went down to the river\/and I took a look around\/There were old man’s shoes\/There were needles on the ground\u2026<\/em> which also reveals Tedeschi\u2019s Bonnie Raitt-esque sensitivity and Trucks\u2019 mastery of the Allman brothers\u2019 lyrical strain in a jazzy groove. http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=OOE0QmC49IE&feature=related<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the\u00a0first of two postings.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Tedeschi Trucks Band. Photo courtesy http:\/\/www.relix.com\/blogs\/exposed\/2012\/09\/06\/tedeschi-trucks-band-at-red-rocks-a-gallery When Susan Tedeschi joined forces with Derek Trucks their combined surnames hardly made for a mellifluous moniker. But this crew is doing some of the heaviest lifting in contemporary music today, and delivering … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-dQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=858"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":886,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions\/886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}